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Morgantown, WV

Morgantown was founded in 1785 by Zackquill Morgan and had 30,347 residents at the 2020 census. The average elevation is 1,161 feet and the city is hilly, with several sections rising over 1,200 feet and a high point of 1,398 feet at Sky Rock in Dorsey Knob Park.

It sits along the Monongahela River with Interstates 79 and 68, U.S. Routes 19 and 119 and West Virginia Routes 7 and 705 running through it. The terrain is the design problem here and it is not a small one.

On flat ground a roofline system is seen roughly straight on, and the fascia line does the work. On a hillside almost nothing is seen straight on. A house above the road shows its eave from below, so the underside of the overhang and the gable ends carry the display and the ridge is barely visible.

A house below the road shows its ridge and its upper roof plane, and a line set on the front fascia can disappear entirely behind the roof itself. Those are opposite specifications for the same product, and the only way to know which one applies is to stand where the house is actually viewed from.

Slope also affects how a line reads geometrically. A level run on a house set into a hill will look level, but the street it is seen from is not level, and the eye compares the two.

On a steeply pitched approach a technically perfect installation can read as slightly tilted from one direction and correct from another. Working out which view matters most, the approach from the bottom of the street or the one from the top, is a decision that gets made before anything is specified rather than after.

The weather argument is different in Morgantown than in the Ohio towns to the west. Average annual snowfall is 27.6 inches, less than half what Youngstown gets, but the January daily mean temperature is 32.0 degrees, which sits exactly on freezing.

A winter spent oscillating across the freeze point is harder on anything mounted outdoors than a winter spent below it, because the cycling is what works at seals and fasteners. It is also the practical reason people stop wanting to be on a roof in January in a town built on hills.

Morgantown has a substantial historic core, with the Downtown Morgantown Historic District and the Metropolitan Theatre, which opened in 1924, and a good deal of the older residential building sits on the slopes around it. Older construction generally brings deeper trim and more ornament, which gives a channel somewhere to sit out of the eye.

Newer construction tends toward plain fascia, where a line is cleaner and far less forgiving. Both are workable, and each wants a different placement decision.

Before a layout is drawn on any Morgantown property, do one thing: identifying the single view that matters. Parks like Core Arboretum, Dorsey Knob and Hazel Ruby McQuain Riverfront Park sit at wildly different elevations across the same city, and a house here is usually seen from one direction far more than from any other. The line should be planned for that view.