My fictional town is very real*

* Winkler, West Virginia, the setting of the Mountain Women stories, has always been very real in my imagination, and hopefully also in the minds of those who follow the series. In the stories, the town has had three lives–first as a logging town (book 1), then a ghost town (books 2 and 3), and in the most recent stories (books 4-7), a booming coal town.

Here’s a map of the 1920 coal town by West Virginia artist Ken Kreider.

Coming soon: a map of Winkler in 1900, the logging town of the first book in the series, The Girl on the Mountain.