Qualla: Hawks Nest, West Virginia

Hawks Nest, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NKS22, Public domain. Harriet Martineau, the English social theorist and travel writer, came through these mountains in the 1830s on the long stagecoach run between the Atlantic and the Ohio Valley. She had recently seen Niagara Falls. She wrote that the view from a particular cliff above the New River in what is now West Virginia struck her almost as much. The cliff was called Hawk's Nest, named for the fish hawks that nested on its faces, and it rose 585 feet straight up out of the river bend. The hawks are gone now - blasted away by railroad construction in the 1870s and never returning - but the view that moved Martineau is still there, looking out over a piece of American landscape that has carried more than its share of beauty, history, and tragedy.

Image: NKS22 | Public domain

Hawks Nest, West Virginia: The First Travelers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NKS22, Public domain. 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 Vi...

Image: NKS22 | Public domain

Hawks Nest, West Virginia: When the Hawks Left

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NKS22, Public domain. 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 ...

Image: NKS22 | Public domain

Hawks Nest, West Virginia: The Tunnel Under the Mountain

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NKS22, Public domain. 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 dri...

Image: NKS22 | Public domain

Hawks Nest, West Virginia: Lover's Leap and What Endures

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gabor Eszes (UED77), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 stor...

Image: Gabor Eszes (UED77) | CC BY-SA 3.0