Hawk's Nest sits on Gauley Mountain just outside the village of Ansted, on what is now US Route 60. The road itself has changed names many times. In Martineau's day it was the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, the chartered roadway that extended the canal system from tidewater Virginia across the mountains to the Ohio. Stagecoaches stopped at Hawk's Nest as a matter of course. Travelers got out, walked to the cliff edge, and looked down at the river. Local legend, repeated by Martineau, held that the future Chief Justice John Marshall was the first white person to see the place, during his youthful surveying days. The James River and Kanawha Turnpike became the Midland Trail, and the Midland Trail eventually became US Route 60. The view did not change.

The fish hawks - probably ospreys, possibly other raptors - that gave the cliff its name occupied the rock faces for as long as anyone could remember. Then between 1869 and 1873, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway pushed its main line through the New River Gorge, blasting away rock and changing the soundscape of the entire canyon. The hawks abandoned their nests and never returned. The C&O completed its line through Hawk's Nest on January 29, 1873, and the company held a small ceremony at the station that bore the cliff's name. A whole era of industrial penetration of the gorge began with that whistle stop - the coal towns of Nuttallburg and Kay Moor and Thurmond would follow.

Beginning in 1930, the New Kanawha Power Company - a subsidiary of Union Carbide that had been incorporated in 1927 to plan the project - began boring a three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain to divert the New River to a hydroelectric station downstream. The rock they were drilling through turned out to be unusually pure silica, valuable enough that Union Carbide sold what was extracted. The workers, most of them poor and African American men hired during the early years of the Depression, drilled the tunnel dry, without respirators. Management wore masks on inspection visits. The workers did not. Many died of acute silicosis within months. Historical estimates of the death toll range from the company's official figure of 109 to scholarly counts of more than 700, and some recent estimates that exceed 1,000. The Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster sits in the running for the worst industrial calamity in American history.

The Hawks Nest overlook in the modern state park is also called Lover's Leap, drawing the kind of legend that almost any cliff above moving water in American folklore eventually attracts - young couples kept apart by their families, jumping rather than living separately. The stories are part of the place but are not, so far as historians can confirm, rooted in any specific historical event. They live alongside the harder, documented history of the cliff. The state park offers a nature museum, a nine-hole golf course, a 31-room lodge, jetboat rides on the New River, and miles of hiking trails. The Mystery Hole roadside attraction is a few miles east. Visitors who come for the view should stay long enough to understand it: the geology, the railroad, the tunnel, the people who paid for the lights downriver, and the river itself, still bending around the cliff the way it always has.