Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 5, 1990 TAG: 9006050053
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CUMBERLAND GAP LENGTH: Long
But to David Hartley and his band of secessionists, the drab conference room is the birthplace of the state of Cumberland, the 51st state of the United States of America.
Never heard of Cumberland, huh?
Hartley, 37, and his fellow Cumberlanders hope to change that.
You see, ever since the Cumberland Gap fell out of fashion as the main route to Kentucky and places west, the area where Virginia meets Kentucky and Tennessee has had trouble attracting visitors -and their dollars.
The area has also had trouble attracting attention - and tax dollars - from the statehouses of Virginia, Kentucky or Tennessee.
In Lee County, one of Virginia's poorest, residents like to point out that the capital in Richmond is farther away than the capitals of seven other states. The Cumberland Gap, the county's and state's western tip, is farther west than Detroit.
Three years ago, Hartley decided to act.
He proposed that several counties of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennesse secede and create a state. Hartley named it Cumberland after the mountain chain that dominates the area Daniel Boone explored two centuries ago.
The counties of Cumberland are Lee, Wise and Scott in Virginia; Bell, Harlan and Knox in Kentucky; and Claiborne, Hancock and Hawkins in Tennessee.
"We have more in common with each other than we do our states," Hartley says.
Hartley didn't really want to secede. All he wanted was a gimmick to attract attention and tourists. "The State of Cumberland - A state of mind," seemed perfect.
Hartley, vice president and general manager of Radio Station WSWV in Lee County's Pennington Gap, knows that successful advertisements require gimmicks.
He and his fellow Cumberlanders, 300 dues-paying members, even came up with a state flag. It has three stripes - Virginia blue, Tennessee orange and Kentucky blue - and nine stars - one for each county, in the shape of a "C".
The state bird is, of course, the mockingbird. The state flower? Ragweed.
Patrick McMahon, head of Virginia's Tourism Division, says the State of Cumberland is "a neat little gimmick."
Tourism officials in Tennessee and Kentucky agree.
The Cumberland area has plenty of natural and historic attractions that could lure tourists "if they could get there and knew about it," Sandra Fulton, Tennessee's commissioner of tourism, says. Major roads are finally being completed in the area and creation of the state of Cumberland has brought lots of attention.
Whether the attention has brought an increase in tourists no one knows for sure.
But, Virginia's McMahon says, publicity usually converts into tourists.
On a smaller scale, he says, the State of Cumberland might work as well as the "Virginia is for Lovers" promotion - one of the best-known tourism slogans in the country.
Since Cumberland's founding, McMahon says he's been called by people and groups seeking information on the area. And, he said, Cumberland was given news coverage in papers around the country, including USA Today.
That's pretty good for an area that rarely gets any attention except for stories about Appalachian poverty.
The shack-with-poor-dirty-kids-on-the-porch image is one of the things Hartley wanted to dispel when he came up with the State of Cumberland.
That attitude of hopelessness pervaded everything, Hartley said.
"I got tired of going to meetings where everyone would sit around with their heads in their hands and moan. We didn't plan," he said, "we just held `Gosh, what are we going to do' kinds of meetings."
"I wanted to have fun. I wanted people to think of the area as fun." And, he said, if the State of Cumberland is anything it's fun.
"The only reason the state has a governor is so we can have a Governor's Ball." It's in November and he's hoping the governors of his three neighboring states will show up for the black tie-optional affair this year.
Hartley first proposed his Cumberland idea during a meeting of Lee County promoters four years ago at the Ramada Inn in Duffield.
They liked it, and Hartley was invited to make his proposal to a similar meeting of business development planners from the neighboring counties in Tennessee and Kentucky.
Jackie Epperson, a Middlesboro, Ky., tourism promotor and owner of a Best Western motel, was at the meeting.
She later became the first governor, beating Hartley in an election. She bribed voters with fuzzy navel cocktails, Hartley says, adding, "Heck, I even voted for her."
Epperson says she loved the Cumberland idea from the start.
"Oh God, I got chill bumps on my arms. I got so excited. I said, `Let's do it.' "
With that, the State of Cumberland was born.
But the founding fathers and mothers didn't want the news out until they made a formal announcement on May 4, 1987.
They quickly got a lesson in modern government and politics: If there's a secret, there's a news leak.
A couple of weeks before the planned secession announcement, the Middlesboro Daily News broke the story. It seems that one of the founding members of Cumberland, an officer of the Middlesboro Chamber of Commerce, was a Benedict Arnold, and gave away the new state's one and only state secret.
Her indiscretion prompted the state's first and only scandal. A week after the news leak, she was fired as the chamber's office manager. Her leak reportedly was the last in a series of disagreements with other chamber officials.
Undaunted by the state's first crisis, Hartley held the state's first news conference on May 4.
He said the area's major attraction, its isolation, is also its major problem. It's hard to get to Cumberland.
That isolation will end soon when Tennessee and Kentucky finish four-laning U.S. 25E and dig a nearly mile-long, multimillion-dollar tunnel under the Cumberland Gap. In Virginia, highway officials say that in three years they will begin four-laning U.S. 58 from the Cumberland Gap across the state to Virginia Beach.
When all of the highways are completed, the only problem will be getting people to stop long enough to spend money while enjoying Cumberland's scenic beauty.
Charles Vial, Cumberland's ambassador and defense minister, says getting people to stay is a real problem. Vial also happens to be superintendent of Cumberland Gap National Park, Cumberland's main tourist attraction.
The park counts more than 1 million visitors a year, but most stop just long enough to gaze off the overlook, Vial says.
"We've got to find a way to keep them here long enough to use something other than the bathroom."
He says they don't take the time to hike the park's 53 miles of trails or tour Hensley - a reconstructed mountaintop settlement where people lived off the land until the community was abandoned after World War II.
The mountains are loaded with wildflowers - iris, trillium and columbine, often growing within inches of each other. Native trout still spawn in some of the streams. The park protects 59 species of rare or endangered species.
Vial says the park is like most of the other attractions in the State of Cumberland - free, educational and fun.
"We've got everything the Smokies have except the crowds," Vial says. "This isn't Dollywood, Opryland or Gatlinburg. This isn't a contrived experience, not that that's bad. This isn't any better than those. It's just a different experience."
Not everyone is excited by the State of Cumberland.
Bruce Robinette, director of LENOWISCO, the planning district of the Lee, Wise and Scott counties and the City of Norton, says the planning district is not actively supporting "the gimmick."
"The old myth that the state stops at Roanoke is no longer true," he says. The counties of the far southwestern tip of Virginia have been receiving a lot of economic, highway and educational development attention and money in recent years.
"The intent is fine," he says of the State of Cumberland. But he doesn't want the planning district involved in something that might send the wrong message to "the people we deal with in Richmond."
Hartley says he's simply trying to send the right message to the rest of the country.
None of the counties in Cumberland has the ability to effectively promote its own tourist attractions, he says. And Virginia rarely promotes anything west of the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The state's attention to attractions east of the Shenandoah is understandable. Virginia's tourist industry is the 11th largest in the country, taking in $7.1 billion a year. Lee, Scott and Wise counties and the city of Norton, by comparison, take in just $15 million a year.
"We don't really want to secede," Hartley says. "I'm afraid they might just let us . . . That would put us in a real bind."
by CNB