If West Virginia had much to offer those who ventured into her steep terrain and followed her coursing streams in her early days, she has so much more to offer today. In addition to her natural beauty, this lady state of the mountains offers the brawn, brain, and talents of her hardworking and thoroughly modern populace. In towns and cities dotted with institutions of higher learning, West Virginia produces the intellectual firepower to combine with the fabled brute strength of her coal miners of old. The transportation system -- including interstate highways and connectors, rail, air, and even river routes -- is increasingly interconnected and modern. West Virginia also offers an extensive fiberoptic telecommunications network that allows today's cyber workers to combine high technology jobs with an uncrowded pastoral setting, a low crime rate, and great family life.

Since the moment of her birth, West Virginia has undergone great change; yet, as I so often like to boast, she has never lost her grasp on those "old values" that continue to set her apart among the fifty states. Today, faith resides in her hills just as surely as it did when I was a youth living in her southern coal mining communities and in the hills of Mercer County. Faith is what has kept us going when hope has been in short supply. But it is hope that shapes our vision of the future, and drives us to achieve our dreams.

While she may adapt and modernize, and enjoy the fruits of economic prosperity, I hope that West Virginia will always be the sort of place that fills her native sons and daughters with a longing to be home. I see an energy and optimism throughout the state as new opportunities, new roads, and new buildings rise alongside the gentle reminders of the great and historic legacy of West Virginia's earlier settlers. I know that God's blessings have shone down on her people and her mountains, and that I have been blessed to be a part of securing for her a bright future.
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December 30, 1998