The Ones Who Stay: What We’re Losing in West Virginia’s Great Escape

By Risa Starr

Since 1955, West Virginia has carried a heartbreaking distinction: the only state in the nation to lose population every single year.

Ask any high school senior in a small Appalachian town what they want most, and odds are you’ll hear it—to get out. Go anywhere else. See the world. Make a life somewhere with more opportunity, more future, more hope.

Who can blame them?

Coal left. Manufacturing shrank. Drugs moved in. The old folks hang on. The kids count down the days. And the ones who stay behind are often seen as having no other choice.

But what happens when everyone goes? What are we losing when the brightest minds and the most capable hands flee the hollers, hills, and highways we call home?

It’s more than just numbers. It’s culture. Community. Identity. It’s the quiet tragedy of disappearing towns and schools that close their doors. Of main streets that fade to ghosts.

In my novel The Ville, this reality is woven through the voice of Jay—a quiet, loyal man who loves his small West Virginia town not because it’s perfect, but because it’s his. Jay stays. Not because he can’t go, but because he chooses not to leave. He holds on to the belief that there’s still something worth saving here, even if others don’t see it.

Jay isn’t blind to the problems—he sees the addiction, the poverty, the wreckage of what once was. But he also sees beauty: in the river at dawn, in the rhythm of the seasons, in the weight of belonging. He sees home.

West Virginia has long been a place people leave behind, but that doesn’t mean it’s a place without worth. What would it look like if more people stayed and invested, rebuilt, dreamed in the place that raised them? What if we stopped defining success by how far someone can get away—and started honoring those who stay and try to make it better?

The ones who leave may chase opportunity. But the ones who stay carry the soul of this place.

We need both. But we can’t keep bleeding talent and spirit and expect to survive.

If we want to save towns like The Ville, we need to tell stories that remind people why they matter. Why they’re worth fighting for.

And maybe, just maybe, we need to believe that staying isn’t failure—it’s courage.