Christmas Lighting Installation in Morgantown, WV

The elevation numbers are stark for a city of this size. Morgantown is hilly, with several sections rising over 1,200 feet, a high point of 1,398 feet at Sky Rock in Dorsey Knob Park and a low point of 800 feet on the banks of the Monongahela River.

That is nearly 600 feet of range inside one city, and South Hills, North Hills, Wiles Hill and Suncrest all announce their terrain in their names. Ladder footing, vehicle access and where a display is viewed from all change street by street.

January here averages a daily mean of exactly 32.0 degrees, with annual snowfall around 27.6 inches and only 1.3 nights a year below zero. Sitting right on the freeze line is worse for outdoor hardware than sitting well below it. A steady deep freeze keeps snow dry and keeps fixings stable.

A daily mean at the freezing point means melt through the afternoon and refreeze overnight, over and over, and that cycle drives water into every joint and gap before expanding it. Ice, not snow, is the enemy of a display in Morgantown.

Slope compounds it. On a steeply pitched driveway or a hillside approach, the same afternoon melt runs downhill and refreezes as a sheet at the bottom, which is generally where the ladder, the vehicle and the equipment are.

Morgantown's annual Christmas parade fills downtown on a December evening with bands, decorated cars, floats and local organizations.

Zackquill Morgan built Fort Morgan in 1772 near what is now downtown, and the Virginia General Assembly set aside 50 acres for Morgan's Town in 1785. The Old Stone House, built in 1795 on what was once Long Alley and is now Chestnut Street, still stands. The Morgantown Wharf and Warehouse Historic District follows the Monongahela River and the old railroad line, with a depot from 1885 and a wharf site from about 1847.

Several Morgantown neighborhoods began as separate places. Woodburn was farmland east of downtown until Welsh tinsmiths came to work at a tinplate mill in Sabraton, which was first the coal town of Sturgiss City. A trolley line ran the length of Richwood Avenue between downtown and Sabraton, and Woodburn's Welsh community held picnics in Whitmore Park.

Kern's Fort, a log house of 1772 stockaded in 1774, stands in Greenmont, where most of the homes were built between 1901 and 1925 as frame houses with gable fronts. The Greenmont, South Park and Chancery Hill neighborhoods are each National Register districts, as is downtown. The Core Arboretum, along Monongahela Boulevard, holds old-growth forest on a steep hillside and the river floodplain.