“Jay” Rockefeller—the right place is West Virginia 5 West Virginia: “In These Hills and Hollows” Why would the heir to one of the largest private fortunes in the world choose—indeed eagerly elect—to make his home on the fringes of Appalachia? It is all a part of the new style and meaning of wealth in America, where the value of all the old trappings of money is rapidly disappearing, and where the wrong places are becoming the right places. It all began, oddly enough, with a rumor that a nudist colony for “Northern swingers” was about to be built in the heart of these bleak and profitless hills. It seemed hardly possible, but that was the talk. There had been a sudden and mysterious flurry of land-buying in the wild, green, mountainous, and—if one can overlook the periodic stains of poverty that streak the hillsides—extraordinarily beautiful vastness of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, a region so remote and silent that it was thought to be worthless for anything other than rabbit and quail shooting and, perhaps, the discreet manufacture of a bit of moonshine whisky.
