Backroads and Backstories | Calhoun-a-Matata
Published: Jun. 3, 2026 at 9:34 PM EDT
CALHOUN COUNTY, W.Va. (WSAZ) – In this week’s edition of Backroads and Backstories, our random spinning region wheel landed on Calhoun County.
The Calhoun County Park was founded in the 1980s on land that used to be a cow pasture. It features a heritage village, a disc golf course, fishing ponds, as well as a star-gazing field that brings in visitors from all over West Virginia and other states to get a view of the final frontier that you can’t get just anywhere.
“It’s dark because we don’t have a lot of ambient light,” Donnie Pitts, the director of the park board, said. “I’ve been surprised at the number of people who come who’ve never seen the Milky Way. They come here, and the Milky Way on a dark night goes from horizon to horizon. It’s a spectacle everyone needs to see at least one time in their life.”
The park is celebrating the grand opening of the Waypoint Zero over-land campsite this Saturday.
“Calhoun County has been on the endangered list, but we are seeing a resurgence right now,” Pitts said.
People used to come out to see different kinds of stars at the Mount Zion Drive-In movie theater, which closed last decade after Pitts says they couldn’t come up with funding to transfer to digital projection.
Pitts worked there as a teen and is among those who’d love to see it make a comeback.
“My hope is it would be resurrected and put back into service,” he said.
“It was such a landmark,” Gilford Vanhoose said. “I remember other high schoolers from other counties coming. It would be nice to see it resurrected and brought back to its full glory.”
Vanhoose is a Calhoun native who’d been living in North Carolina. He got a wild hair to move his family back to Grantsville to start his own barbershop, American Hairlines, which opened a couple months ago.
“I have such fond memories going to the local barbershop,” he said. “I remember the old men telling wild tales. Young men need that in this community.”
The Calhoun County Wood Festival is underway this week. They’ll have adult and children’s mullet contests Friday evening.
