What might have been...

In my (limited) travels, I was once fortunate enough to visit the region down south known as Florabama, the section where Florida meets Alabama. It certainly doesn't feel like the Disney Florida we all know and shun, and it's not quite Alabama, although there were signs every ten feet promoting Foley, Alabama, as the birthplace of Alabama Crimson Tide and NFL great quarterback Ken "The Snake" Stabler.

Did you think I was kidding?

The other big deal in Foley was a restaurant where, when the server comes out of the kitchen with your chow, he or she tosses a roll at you. Catch it and you keep it (good advice then as now) but if you drop it, they will heave another doughball at you. The restaurant is known as The House Of Throwed Rolls.

Try to picture that happening in Orlando. Would Pluto wing baked goods at paying Disney customers? Don't think so.  

And Florabama is not the only part of America that once thought of itself as "neither fish nor fowl," if you will. Back in the 1700s, there was thought given to creating a 14th colony that would have become a separate Appalachian-area state, out on the western frontier of American expansion.  We had only moved westward just so far, and people in Fort Pitt (later Pittsburgh) Pennsylvania did not feel so attached to people far away in Philadelphia. Eastern PA and Western PA are as different as Kevin Hart and Ben Roethlisberger, ya know?

“We tend to see the fault lines in American history along a north and south axis,” according to  W.  Thomas Mainwaring, who is a professor of history at Washington & Jefferson College.

That's now. But in the colonial days, the schism was east vs west, and the people on the western edge felt ill-served. To protest, they dressed their football team in black and gold, waved tear-mopping towels, and ate sandwiches which contain everything one needs for all three meals of the day at once, plus a slice of pie. Behold the Primanti Sandwich! >>>

Back to the old days, where Quakers, pacifists to the core, ran state politics. That meant that those who settled in Western PA (displacing Native Americans) were left to fight the Original Americans on their own.

So, after the French and Indian War was settled by a treaty (1763), some thought was devoted to taking some of the land the tribes had lost in the war and making a whole new future state. People in Southwestern PA favored calling it Pittsylvania, in honor of William Pitt, who gave his name to the city we now call Pittsburgh. That didn't fly, and the people of Western Virginia and Pennsylvania toyed with tne notion of the state you see here: Westsylvania.

 And then when the borders of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio and Indiana were finally settled, it was decided that no one needed a 14th colony, and Westsylvania was off the map before it was ever on it.

And then someone noticed that a vast area had been marked off and unclaimed for 30 days, so they called that West Virginia and figured no one would notice.

The dream of a separate Appalachian state still lives in some hearts, for whatever reason. Try Maryland! Come for the seafood, stay for the bitter internecine political infighting.