MacArthur, West Virginia

This community near Beckley was known as Hollywood until nineteen forty-two. It sat in the southern Raleigh County coalfields through the Great Depression and into World War Two. Then, in nineteen forty-two, as Douglas MacArthur commanded Allied forces in the Pacific and his name was on every American front page, the community was renamed in his honor.

It was not a unique impulse. Across Appalachia and the Midwest, communities seized on wartime patriotism to shed old names and claim a general or a battle. Hollywood became MacArthur, and the new name stuck.

Today the community is a census-designated suburb of Beckley, its coal-camp origins still visible in the tight rows of frame houses along the hillsides.