Reporter Focuses Lens On The Spirit Of Moundsville, West Virginia

Pittsburgh-based journalist John W. Miller overlooks one of the three rivers near his hometown. Photo courtesy of Miller.

Fielding questions about his documentary film at a contemporary screening room on the 11th floor of a midtown Manhattan office building, journalist John W. Miller had to also coach some New Yorkers ⁠— including several of his former colleagues from The Wall Street Journal ⁠— on regional pronunciation.

Someone in the audience at the offices of America magazine, a Jesuit publication that covers faith and culture, asked a question about Trump voters in the Appalachian region and pronounced it “app a lay cha.”

Locals call it “Apple atcha,” Miller quipped. “An old bluegrass singer told me once, ‘If you pronounce it wrong, I will throw an apple at you.’”

Miller’s film with David Bernabo titled “Moundsville” is a biography of a small town along the Ohio River — from its beginnings with a 2,200-year-old Native American burial mound, its economic boom and bust times as dozens of factories arrived and disappeared, to the current age of Walmart, shale gas and new generations hoping to figure out a future for the small town.

Miller grew up in the U.S. and in Europe. He was a reporter at the Journal, first based in Brussels covering the European Union and later moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to cover the metals and mining industry (a beat I had covered some years earlier and which Miller and I often discussed). His sojourn into western Pennsylvania included honing his banjo skills, visiting steel mills and taking road trips to small towns in the region.

Miller first took a trip to Moundsville in 2013 to report a Page One story at the Journal about a man who ran a paranormal hot dog stand. The opening of the story went like this:

Stephen Hummel wanted to sell sausage, but the money in this old river town is in ghosts.

Tourists and enthusiasts of the paranormal flock to his hot dog place because of its "Archive of the Afterlife: A Paranormal Museum," a room full of haunted pictures, creepy dolls and prison weapons.

Where some readers may have just seen small-town goofiness of the sort one finds in a Christopher Guest movie, Miller looked for meaning. He quoted someone talking about how people in depressed Rust Belt areas want to escape reality and enjoy haunted houses. He noted how the local prison — once the West Virginia State Penitentiary — became a small mecca for 12,000 tourists per year who fancy the paranormal, and it rakes in about $1 million per year in revenue.  

As the story moved along, Miller captured the spirit of the place and also the way people talked about the spirits in the place. They talked about Charles Manson’s mom serving time in the prison and how Charles Manson, who grew up near Moundsville, once wanted to transfer there.

“We’re all better off with his spirit roaming California when he dies,” prison facilities manager Tom Stiles told Miller.

Later in 2018, after leaving the WSJ, Miller wrote a second piece for America magazine about Moundsville and its quest for a new start in the Trump era. He also made his film and started writing the blog Moundsville.org. Why did he become so enamored with one town, particularly one where he doesn’t even live?

“It is a theater of America for me,” he told the New York audience. “I have built relationships there.” 

In the America magazine piece, Miller takes us to campsites where clusters of camper vans house “pipeliners” — workers who travel around the U.S. for temporary work in the gas industry. He meets some of these workers who find community at St. Francis Church in Moundsville and find a spiritual mentor in Father That Son Ngoc Nguyen. The priest grew up in Vietnam and was sponsored by a West Virginian family to come to the U.S., where he sees similarities between the two countries.

“Companies moved out, and there was no infrastructure,” he told Miller. It was “up to the churches to offer community.” 

Miller explores how technology has not filled the void left by a wounded economy. He explores how people in the region distrust institutions except for the military. He notes churches, gardening clubs and other social clubs face declines as residents became less community-oriented.

Miller and Bernabo received a small grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council to film a documentary. They shot the film in an unusual verité style, letting the local people talk and sampling the sites without an opinionated directorial thesis, without a predetermined angle. 

While that might seem slow or pointless to some viewers, it will strike others as profound and refreshing. Over lunch nearly a year after I saw the film, I asked another former WSJ reporter named Barry Newman, a legendary feature writer, what he thought of “Moundsville.”

“I never felt it was condescending,” Newman said, noting he appreciated that our old colleague Miller wasn’t making fun of the people he was filming. “He let the people speak. He showed this place in a way that was sympathetic and showed their lives without judging them.”

It was an apt description. And, interestingly, the people in Moundsville seemed to appreciate that kind of approach. They hosted the premiere in their hometown before it was shown in Pittsburgh and New York City. They welcomed Miller back and stayed in touch with him for his many updates on his Moundsville.org blog.

Now, the film is airing on public television in West Virginia and can air on up to 338 PBS stations over the next three years. It’s also available on the PBS app on Apple iOS and Android devices, where more Americans can learn about the small town with a quirky past and a simple present. 

Early on, when I was asking Miller what this film was about, he wrote: “It’s been guided by my midlife pilgrimage to find deeper humanity, meaning, acceptance and love in the world.”

This comment and the film itself sort of hit me. As WSJ reporters, we learned to analyze the world in economic terms and by following the numbers in the spreadsheets. We learned to tell stories and talk to people, but often placed the people and places as set pieces in larger economic stories.

Miller seemed to be flipping the model — exploring one place, and people in that place, very thoroughly and aiming to view larger contexts of politics, economics and history through their lens. In our recent Zoom conversation, he expounded on that a bit more.

We see a tour of the economic, social and political forces playing out over time in Moundsville, and we learn about it from the voices of local people. And often they make very insightful and profound statements. They talk about how the community once had an overload of high-paying industrial jobs at chemical plants, coal mines, steel mills and a glass factory along the Ohio River. We learn about the local pride in a Marx toy plant that made mechanical toys such as Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em robots and the Big Wheel.

We hear about local race relations from Eugene Saunders, a former mayor of Moundsville who proves to be an insightful tour guide to Miller and Bernabo as they drive around the town, past a Walmart, through the downtown area and past ice cream stores. “I’m going to tell you gentlemen where you can get the best doughnuts in the country!” Saunders exclaims as he gives a soliloquy to a local doughnut shop they drive past.

We learn about the sadness and rationality with which the local people approach the facts of their declining population and meager economic prospects. A poet laureate of West Virginia, Marc Harshman, praises local young people who are looking forward and moving back to the region. We meet some of those young people. But we also hear blunt statements from longtime residents. “Anyone with a college degree should leave, I think,” said one older local resident. “And they do… for lack of opportunity.”

As Miller and Bernabo roam around Moundsville with their cameras and notepads, we don’t see an overpowering focus on faith and religion. We see flashes of faith lived in people’s lives. We learn about the local fascination with Native American history and burials. We learn about Moundsville’s use of the paranormal for tourism. We learn about a massive Hari Krishna temple near the town. We learn about the spirit of violence and bloodshed in the local penitentiary turned spooky tourism site. We see a shot of a lonely chapel in the prison yard. We see a cross dangling from the rearview mirror of a local politician. We see a picture of Jesus in the office of vice mayor Phil Remke.

We learn from the America magazine article about Remke, who brings optimism to his job and wears a hat that says FBI Jesus, an acronym for “Firm Believer in Jesus.” Remke grew up as a Catholic but now attends two churches on Sundays. He attends the Catholic mass at a local church and a second service at an evangelical church called the Vineyard in nearby Wheeling, West Virginia. He told Miller he likes the video screens and “updated” music of the Vineyard, in contrast to the Catholic church that he says “just isn’t moving with the times; it’s an older generation.”

Miller and Bernabo also keep their cameras trained on glimpses of hope. We meet a local couple who are using Wendell Berry-style sustainable farming methods. We meet successful entrepreneurs at a local kitchen cabinet maker. We hear some ideas, from legalizing weed to expanding tourism. “We have a lot of raw, untapped resources here,” said one woman who works in prison tourism.

Paul Glader is executive editor at ReligionUnplugged.com and an associate professor at The King’s College in NYC. He spent a decade as a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal and has written for many outlets including The Washington Post, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He is on Twitter @PaulGlader.