The Shawnee leader the area is named for fought a battle 30 miles north of this forest in 1774 and was murdered by Virginia militiamen in a Point Pleasant stockade three years later. Naming an 11,772-acre West Virginia wildlife area after Cornstalk was a 20th-century gesture - one of the slow corrections by which place names try to make peace with the past they erased. The forest covers the rolling hills near Southside in Mason County, second growth that has come back since the timber operations of the early 1900s. Deer move through it now. Turkeys roost in the oaks. Whatever the chief would have thought of being commemorated by a hunting ground, the land at least carries his name in the part of the state where his people once hunted freely.
Most of West Virginia was timbered out at least once between 1880 and 1930. Loggers cut the old-growth hardwoods for railroad ties, mine timbers, and barrel staves, then moved on. What grew back was second-growth oak-hickory forest - the same mix of species, but younger and denser, taking decades to reach maturity. Chief Cornstalk WMA preserves a large patch of this recovered forest on rolling and moderately steep slopes in southern Mason County. Mixed hardwoods - tulip poplar, maple, beech, sycamore - fill in the wetter coves. The understory holds dogwood, redbud, and the kind of scrubby growth that game animals love. A century after the loggers left, the forest looks essentially natural to a visitor who does not know its history.
The wildlife management area is, in practical terms, a hunting and fishing ground managed by the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. White-tailed deer are the marquee species, with archery and rifle seasons drawing hunters from across the state and beyond. Gray squirrels are abundant in the oak crowns, providing small-game hunting throughout the fall. Wild turkey populations have rebounded enough to support spring gobbler and fall either-sex seasons. Ruffed grouse, harder to find than they once were, persist in the brushier corners. A 5-acre lake holds largemouth bass, bluegill, and channel catfish, with rainbow trout stocked seasonally. A separate trapping permit covers muskrat, raccoon, mink, and red fox along the streams.
Cornstalk was a Shawnee leader who led warriors against Andrew Lewis's Virginia militia at the 1774 Battle of Point Pleasant, on the Ohio River 30 miles north of this forest. After signing the treaty that ended Dunmore's War, Cornstalk visited Fort Randolph at Point Pleasant in 1777 to warn the garrison of impending Shawnee attacks. The Virginia militiamen there took him hostage and murdered him in his cell after one of their number was killed by an unrelated Native American party. The killing was widely condemned at the time but largely unpunished. Naming a wildlife area for him is the kind of place-name decision that acknowledges both the man and the wrongs done to him without making either too explicit. The forest sits in the country he tried to defend.
Chief Cornstalk WMA can be reached on Nine Mile Creek Road off US 35 near Southside, or by Crab Creek Road from State Route 2 south of Gallipolis Ferry. The roads through the area are gravel and unmaintained in winter. Primitive campsites scatter through the forest for hunters during open seasons. The lake parking area sees more pickup trucks during spring trout stocking than at any other time of year. Off-season, the forest is quiet - a place where you can walk a fire road for a couple of hours without hearing anything except wind and the occasional crow. Whatever the rest of the Ohio Valley has become, this 11,772-acre patch is still working hill country forest, named for a man whose people knew it before any of the current roads or names existed.
Located at 38.74 N, 82.04 W in Mason County, West Virginia, near the small community of Southside, about 15 miles southeast of Point Pleasant. Yeager Airport (KCRW) is about 50 miles southeast. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 feet on clear days, with the rolling forested hills of the lower Kanawha and Ohio Valley region clearly visible.