On a Saturday morning every September, the air in downtown Marlinton smells like nothing else in America. Smoke from cooking fires drifts up Main Street, and the dishes simmering on those fires include groundhog, opossum, rattlesnake, bear, and turtle. This is the Roadkill Cook-Off, started in 1991 as a tourism joke that nobody quite expected to keep working. It works. Cooks now come from across the country to compete, and the audience comes to taste. Marlinton is a town of about 960 people. For one weekend a year, it gets to be famous - or infamous - for an idea its tourism board threw at the wall and watched stick.
Marlinton is the county seat of Pocahontas County, which is known locally as the Birthplace of the Rivers. The local boast is geographically defensible: the Greenbrier, the Cherry, the Elk, the Cheat, the Gauley, the Tygart, the Williams, and the Cranberry all originate from springs and seeps in Pocahontas County. The Greenbrier runs right through Marlinton itself. The other rivers drain west across the Allegheny Plateau into the Ohio system or east into the Potomac. This is the high ground of West Virginia, a place where ridges fold and refold over one another and where a heavy rainfall in one drainage may eventually reach the Atlantic, while a similar rainfall on the next ridge over will end up in the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi.
The Roadkill Cook-Off is held in late September as part of the Autumn Harvest Festival. Cooking begins at 11 AM, judging at 3 PM. The competition allows dishes made from animals commonly found on the side of the road - turkey, opossum, squirrel, rabbit, groundhog, bear, deer, boar, elk, moose, rattlesnake, frog, and turtle. The dishes are not, in fact, scavenged road carcasses - they are legally sourced game prepared to demonstrate that an Appalachian kitchen can handle ingredients that suburban cooks would not touch. The names are deliberately gross. Past entries have included "Turkey Gobble Vomit over Maggots," "Squirrel Scrotum Stew," and "Blood, Rocks and Guts over Snails and Maggots." The shock value is part of the marketing. So is the unspoken point that Appalachian foodways have always made use of whatever the woods supplied, and that there is no real difference between using a squirrel and using a chicken except marketing.
The Cook-Off has drawn criticism for playing on a negative stereotype of Appalachian poverty - the kind of stereotype that treats hardscrabble traditions as a punchline rather than as adaptation. The criticism is fair. The defense is also fair: this is a town of fewer than a thousand people, sustained by the Greenbrier River Trail, by Watoga State Park and Snowshoe Mountain nearby, and by the few annual events that pull visitors off US-219 and into local stores. A festival that gets the town into the New York Times once a year is worth the cost. Visitors who come for the spectacle stay for the mountain music, the arts and crafts, the agricultural and homemaking show, and the regular food concessions - the parts of Pocahontas County culture that need no irony to defend themselves.
Marlinton sits on US-219, the long Appalachian north-south highway that runs through five states. Elkins is about an hour and 15 minutes north. Lewisburg is about 50 minutes south, where US-219 meets Interstate 64. Richwood is about 50 minutes west on WV-39, past Cranberry Glades. The Greenbrier River Trail, a converted rail-trail that follows the river for 77 miles, passes through town - the longest rail-trail in West Virginia and one of the longest in the eastern United States, and one of the flattest things in Pocahontas County. North up US-219, the Highland Scenic Highway climbs onto the Allegheny Plateau and offers some of the best fall color in the eastern United States. Marlinton itself is the kind of small American town where you stop for gas, pick up a sandwich at a local diner, and then realize you would like to come back and stay longer.
Located at 38.22 degrees north, 80.09 degrees west, in the Greenbrier River valley of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, on US-219. Best identified from VFR altitudes of 5,000 to 7,500 feet AGL where the river bends through forested ridges. The closest airport is Marlinton Municipal (W99) just south of town. Greenbrier Valley Airport (KLWB) is about 30 nautical miles south at Lewisburg. The Green Bank radio quiet zone is to the north and east - pilots transiting that airspace should be aware of restrictions. Watch for ridge turbulence and the morning valley fog that often holds in the Greenbrier drainage until mid-morning in fall and winter.