Clendenin, West Virginia

Clendenin sits where Big Sandy Creek meets the Elk River, and it carries the name of George Clendenin, an early local hero. In the nineteen twenties, Union Carbide Corporation opened its first plant here to produce ethylene and propylene, giving this small town a claim as a birthplace of the modern petrochemical industry.

But the Elk River has always defined Clendenin as much as industry. The town has flooded in eighteen eighty-eight, nineteen eighteen, nineteen thirty-two, and nineteen thirty-seven. Then, on June twenty-third, two thousand sixteen, came the worst flood in recorded memory, part of a statewide disaster that killed twenty-three people across West Virginia. The Elk rose five feet deep through downtown Clendenin. Clendenin Elementary School was destroyed and rebuilt on a mountaintop site, with the federal government approving twenty-seven million dollars for the project. The town is still recovering, a community that has learned to live, repeatedly, with the river at its door.