WEST VIRGINIA HOME
MORTGAGE LENDERS

Refinance West Virginia Home Mortgage Lenders - Save! Compare West Virginia lenders -- get home refinance mortgage quotes for bigger savings!

Consolidate Your Debt & Refinace - Lower Your Monthly Payments!

Lower your mortgage payments and save $1,000's. Bad Credit OK!

West Virginia Loans - Refinance, Home Equity, Debt Consolidation And Purchase
LowerMyBills.com customers can be matched with up to four lenders who will compete for their business helping them find the lowest rate available. Our ever-expanding national network includes over 300 companies. Refinance an existing loan and save hundreds, or even thousands of dollars!

Refinancing replaces your existing loan with another lower interest rate loan for the same amount. If you have equity in your home, a refinance home mortgage loan comparison can have significant benefits. You can reduce your interest rate, change the terms of your loan, or consolidate your debt. Rather than use your home as collateral, a home loan refinance online allows you to incorporate your debt into the amount owed. One monthly payment, one low interest rate!

Economic Geography
Coal has been one of the state's primary economic resources, although many mines have been closed. Higher prices for fuels may soon stimulate increased mining again. In past years the coal companies did mostly as they pleased, keeping miners in virtual servitude through credit at company stores. The effort of unions to organize miners is a violent chapter in the state's history; at one point the federal army had to be called in to quell a rebellion, dropping the only bombs ever dropped by the US Army against its own citizens. Nevertheles, labor organizing persisted under the leadership of John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers. Today health and safety regulations and miners pay are much improved, and mining is usually the best paying job in the coalfields.

West Virginia was one of the first states to engage in drilling for oil. Small to medium oil and natural gas fields still exist and are scattered mostly in the Allegheny/Cumberland Plateau in an arc throughout the western part of state.

Farming is practiced throughout West Virginia, but in a form different from large extensive cash-crop agriculture elsewhere in the USA. The modal average farm size was a smallish 140 to 179 acres (567,000 to 724,000 m²), most statistics in this section are taken from the 2002 US Census of Agriculture for West Virginia, which sold less than $2,500 of crops annually. Family and single-owner operation worked 92.7% of the farms, and an astounding 96.9% were totally or partly owned by the operator. On the other hand, only 50.5% of the state's farmers considered farming to be their primary occupation, with a significant number of hours worked elsewhere each year, in such areas as factory wage employment when available. Traditionally, informal means of supplementing farm income have also been practiced, such as small-scale logging and hunting for food, and to some extent they still are practiced. It should be noted that the rural poverty rate in West Virginia is 20.4% and that this figure is 5 points higher than the urban poverty rate.

This description of farming portrays an independent and self-sufficient base of small land owners, but also a significant amount of rural underemployment.

As can be expected in a rugged terrain, raising animals was far more important than growing vegetative crops. Income from animals exceeded income from plants by about 7 to 1, with much of the non-animal income derived from sales of fodder. The chief animals raised were cattle and chickens.

In the ridge and valley area along the eastern border near Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, subsidiary valleys are wide and there are some belts of rich soil which are extensively farmed. In 2002, all of the top five counties by agricultural dollar value were located near the eastern Virginia border.

In traditional frontier agriculture there was much gathering of wild "greens" and forest produce to supplement the diet. One area where this practice is still significant is the gathering of wild North American ginseng, often for the Asian market. Wild gathered ginseng contributed about $ 2 million in 2000 to the West Virginia economy, a figure larger than many conventional cultivated vegetable and fruit crops. Other wild greens, such as sour dock, lambs quarters, and wild leek (or "ramps") are also still gathered by many for table use, although today more on the basis of avocation or keeping up traditions than out of necessity.

Along the western edges of the state the large rivers of the mid-continent erode a distance into the hills and it is here, in the west, that some dense pockets of heavy industry appear. In the Kanawha River Valley near Charleston and along the southern Ohio River Valley near Huntington chemicals predominate, attracted by a readily available labor force and access by barge carriers. Metallurgy, especially steel, has been predominant in the Northern Panhandle due to a spill-over effect from the traditional center of the US steel industry in Pittsburgh. Also in the Northern Panhandle, Weirton has been the site of the only tin-processing industry in the USA. Given the unsettled present condition of the US steel industry, continuation of metal-working industries in the Northern Panhandle cannot be assured. In all aspects of heavy industry there is a perception that the electorate favors creation of factory jobs more than implementation of strict environmental controls; this is probably correct, but how much this outlook actually contributed to the choice of location in West Virginia is hard to determine.

State Capital: Charleston

Regions: Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area | Eastern Panhandle | Northern Panhandle | Allegheny Plateau | Cumberland Plateau | Ridge-and-valley Appalachians

Major Cities: Charleston | Huntington

Smaller Cities: Beckley | Bluefield | Clarksburg | Fairmont | Hurricane | Keyser | Morgantown | Oak Hill | Parkersburg | Point Pleasant | Weirton | Wheeling

Counties: Barbour | Berkeley | Boone | Braxton | Brooke | Cabell | Calhoun | Clay | Doddridge | Fayette | Gilmer | Grant | Greenbrier | Hampshire | Hancock | Hardy | Harrison | Jackson | Jefferson | Kanawha | Lewis | Lincoln | Logan | Marion | Marshall | Mason | McDowell | Mercer | Mineral | Mingo | Monongalia | Monroe | Morgan | Nicholas | Ohio | Pendleton | Pleasants | Pocahontas | Preston | Putnam | Raleigh | Randolph | Ritchie | Roane | Summers | Taylor | Tucker | Tyler | Upshur | Wayne | Webster | Wetzel | Wirt | Wood | Wyoming