West Virginia. Otis K. Rice

Thomas S. Lees of Wheeling stressed the beauty of the Ohio River in Musings of Carol (Wheeling, 1831). Perhaps the best of antebellum West Virginia poetry was Froissart Ballads and Other Poems (New York, 1847) by Philip Pendleton Cooke, whose “Florence Vane” was one of the most popular love songs in the English language.

      The literary endeavors, the increasing diffusion of the press, the establishment of academies and colleges, and the acceleration of the free school movement during the early nineteenth century were evidences that the light of knowledge had begun to penetrate the mountain darknesses. They inspired hope that illiteracy and ignorance might be dispelled from those regions where they yet prevailed.