Dear Editor:
Anyone associated with Pocahontas County tourism not supporting the National Monument campaign could perhaps be charged with  malfeasance.  
Do folks vacation in Pocahontas to personally experience extractive industries and logging trucks?
Not!
Ignorance can be excused, but willful ignorance has no place in a governing position. Implicit in the oath of office is a promise to learn about relevant issues.  Now is the time to drop old, perhaps unconscious, thought patterns that reinforce worn-out positions obstructing our way to a promising tomorrow for future generations of Pocahontasans. 
Just saying.
With best wishes to all.
Frank Gifford
Hillsboro

Dear Editor:
No, this isn’t another letter about the National Monument. Nor is it about fracking, nor any of the other issues that have been dividing our community lately,. It’s about an issue we all agree on: THE NEW PHONE BOOKS! The old phone book was user friendly –the type was fairly large, and all the Pocahontas County numbers were in one section, easy to find. If you wanted to call someone in Elkins, you looked in the Elkins section – or Richwood, or Mill Creek. The new phone book has tiny type and many, many communities are jammed in together – you have to squint your eyes and struggle through dozens of names from away from here to find the person you want. What’s the last time you called someone from Clintonville or Montrose or Mabie or Smoot? You have to plow through all these irrelevant listings to find the number you want in Arbovale. I know many people, like me, still use their ragged old phone books, because the new ones are so unhandy.
I realize Frontier has financial constraints operating in a rural state like West Virginia that doesn’t permit them to upgrade phone and internet service to a level people in more urban areas expect, but certainly they can afford to give us a phone book we like and can use! What do you think?
Gibbs Kinderman
Lake Reed Road

Dear Editor:
I want to make people aware of a situation that happened at the Mountain View Cemetery.
Recently a person or persons took three Christmas wreaths from the graves of my family members.
I don’t know if they took them home or if they put them on the graves of their loved ones.
But whatever was done with the wreaths, I think the person or persons may as well be known as grave robbers.
I don’t know who they are, but the Lord knows, and they will have to answer to him one day.
Ann W. Meeks
Ridgeway, Pennsylvania