Profile: Tim McKinney

By Mannix Porterfield
Register-Herald Reporter

OAK HILL November 29, 2008 11:38 pm

— A small envelope stuffed with reproductions of Confederate currency is all it took to light a fire inside a 9-year-old youngster.
Inside the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, the lad plunked down $1 for the money, his curiosity ablaze over the currency and the historical significance behind it.
Already, his mind had been bent toward the divisive conflict by a grandmother, Eula Taylor, and her tales of the war.
“She told me about some of our ancestors who were Civil War veterans,” he recalled.
“That kind of piqued my interest at a very early age.”
From her home on Mulberry Branch at Robson, up on Loup Creek, the grandmother had spun some intriguing tales that just naturally found a fertile ground in her grandson’s mind.
Born in 1912, just a few decades from Reconstruction, the grandmother passed on some valuable information to McKinney, including her assertion that Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson occupied a branch of the family tree.
“I’m not saying we were descended from Jackson,” the author emphasized.
“I’ve been so busy writing books over the years and doing things to help myself and other people with research, I haven’t actually looked into the genealogy of that aspect.”
Grandmother’s accounts, coupled with the little packet of Confederate dollars at the Indianapolis museum, provided the ammo for a prolific avocation as a writer.
“Here I sit now, at age 52, having written seven books and contributed to three others,” he mused.
“It’s been a long journey.”
Indeed, the odyssey took a fateful turn when his father, a coal miner swept up in the boom-and-bust cycle of the mining industry, pulled up stakes and left his native West Virginia for Indiana in search of work — a common event among coal workers of that era.
“The mines kept blowing out, as the old-timers used to say,” McKinney said. “In other words, they kept getting laid off.”
McKinney found the pull of native soil overwhelming and returned to West Virginia, where he enlisted in the Army, joining the Military Police.
“I wanted to be a police officer and couldn’t find anybody to hire me,” he said.
“I didn’t have any experience. The Army always said, ‘Get your life experience here.’ So I became an MP. It was good training. I became a road MP, a standard duty patrolman, if you will, for a year. Then I volunteered for what they called the drug suppression unit, which was a covert narcotics investigation unit. It was attached to what the military calls their criminal investigation division.”
For some time, he was active in a unit that pursued illegal drug trafficking by military personnel.
McKinney ended his military career with the 101st Airborne, but wasn’t jump-qualified.
“If they weren’t going to force me to jump out of a plane, that was all right with me,” he reflected.
His heart still fixed on a law enforcement career, McKinney fulfilled that dream by joining the city of Glasgow as a municipal officer, then starting a three-decade stint as a member of the security team at WVU Tech in Montgomery.
“I thought it would be a good way to help people and maybe benefit the community some,” he said of his desire to be an officer.
“So that appealed to me at the time, and almost 30 years later, it still does. I don’t regret getting into it. I’ve just got a few years left to retire. I’ll be glad to see it go. You get at a certain age and you’re not as able to do it as you were 10, 15, 25 years ago.
“Nevertheless, it’s a good profession. It’s not for everybody. But I’ve been privileged to do it.”
There have been some sticky moments, but all things considered, McKinney says he wouldn’t have traded the career for another.
“We try to maintain law and order on campus, answer questions, help people out,” he says of his longest-running job on the Tech campus.
“Whatever the social activities are scheduled on campus, we’re usually the first that people see. We’re sort of ambassadors for the school. We’re used to dealing with people up front and answering questions.”
Security officers wear uniforms and carry sidearms, just like any other police agencies, and must pass muster at the same training municipal, county and state police undergo.
All the while he helped maintain law and order on campus, McKinney found his after-hours fascination with the War Between the States hadn’t faded.
“Into the 1980s, I was heavily involved in Civil War research, concerning West Virginia in the Civil War specifically,” he said.
“Being a West Virginia native and having West Virginia ancestry, both Confederate and northern sympathizers from West Virginia, I started making trips all over the place, researching the Civil War.”
McKinney’s exhaustive journeys and painstaking research didn’t go unnoticed.
“You’re into that so much,” a friend suggested, “you ought to write a book.”
Initially, he begged off, but when Terry Lowry, military specialist for the West Virginia Division of Culture and History and the author of the “Battle of Scary Creek” in Putnam County in 1861 and other books, advised McKinney to get cracking on a book of his own, he began to listen.
“That carried a little weight,” he said. “Being a published author himself, for him to tell me that gave me some confidence, I thought maybe I could do it,” he said.
“Seven books later, I’m still churning along. Once in a while, I still do some research. I’ll probably put another book out in a few years.”
Hundreds of printed pages bound in seven books have failed to diminish his enthusiasm for his subject.
“I haven’t lost the fascination,” he said. “I have lost some youth and the ability to tolerate the hours and the travel. I used go to go many different states, believe it or not, just researching the Civil War in West Virginia because soldiers came here from a lot of different states, North and South.”
In the first year of the conflict, McKinney learned, combatants hailed from such diverse quarters as New York and Louisiana.
“All of my books have focused on the Civil War in West Virginia,” he said.
“So you end up having to travel to these places to look at soldiers’ letters, diaries, maps they drew, the things they had to say.”
McKinney’s travels often wound into the dusty corridors of libraries and state archives, or county historical entities.
“You find them all over,” he said. “Some are in private hands. Some things you find on eBay. There are eyewitness accounts of what happened. That’s what I like. I don’t like second- or third-hand information. I like the eyewitness accounts, especially if you can corroborate what somebody said with two or three other eyewitnesses, people who were actually there. To me, that’s real history.”
Oftentimes, soldiers were known to pad a personal story from their time in battle.
“If it makes them look better, from the private on up to the general, they were not above embellishing the facts,” McKinney said.
“If you can corroborate things with two or three, four different sources, or however many more, along with official records of combat and maneuvers, then you can get a pretty accurate picture of how things went, through the letters, diaries, official records and things like that. You begin to put this mosaic together and you can see for yourself what their life was like and what the tide of war was.”
McKinney’s literary icebreaker, “The Civil War in Fayette County, W.Va.,” was published in 1988 and has been reprinted five times.
“It has been my most successful book,” he said. “It’s out of print again. Has been for several years now.”
Two years later, he penned “Robert E. Lee at Sewell Mountain, The West Virginia Campaign,” chronicling a skirmish on the Fayette-Greenbrier county line toward Rainelle.
“At that time, 1990, and even to this day, it was the first and only book on the Sewell Mountain campaign,” he said.
“Which came as a surprise to me when I grew up and came to realize no one had written a book about Lee’s campaign here. Everything about Robert E. Lee’s life has been meticulously examined over and over and over. Here was this six-week campaign when he was in Fayette and Greenbrier counties in the early days of the war. No one had bothered to write a book about it. That just fascinated me. So I jumped in and did one.”
McKinney found all he needed in the official records and diaries, and was motivated, in part, by other historians’ decisions to largely ignore his time in West Virginia.
Perhaps, he suggested, the Sewell Mountain campaign paled alongside larger and more deadly battles, involving 100,000 or more troops, as compared with a 10th as many in the rugged and challenging slopes of West Virginia.
“They would sort of gloss it over and go on to bigger and better things,” he said.
“But that’s not right, I thought. People who lived through that and died there and suffered there and fought there, their story deserved to be told the same as people who fought in campaigns such as Gettysburg.”
This account was been reprinted more than once.
West Virginia was a divided region, with Confederate sentiment strong in the southern counties and Union loyalty running fierce in the panhandles. Since West Virginia was the gateway to Dixie and, more importantly, the Confederate capital in Richmond, much activity flared in the early part of the war, he pointed out.
For instance, Rebel forces flushed Yankee troops out of Fayetteville in an 1862 skirmish, shoving the Northern fighters all the way into Point Pleasant.
His third offering, “Robert E. Lee and the 35th Star,” is an overview of the campaign for West Virginia in the initial year of the conflict.
Sandwiched in there was a chronicle of the Elkem Metals plant in Alloy, a book he was asked to write by the manager, although McKinney at first was reluctant since, by his own admission, “I didn’t know squat about industrial history.”
But in 1992, his book on Elkem’s history was published, a 2,000-copy production, and he still gets inquiries to this day from folks seeking the book.
“It was fascinating history,” McKinney said. “I especially enjoyed writing about plant’s contributions to America’s victory in World War II. When I take people on these little historic journeys, so to speak, I’m the first person being educated along the way. It’s a great, great story.”
Ten years ago, McKinney published the ambitious “West Virginia Civil War Almanac, Volume One.”
The 600-page production is a research aid for anyone performing genealogical research, with surnames included.
“Basically, it is not a story that you would read,” he said. “It is a reference book intended to guide people to information they would not find otherwise. It’s sort of a clearinghouse of a lot of things brought together, almost like a bibliography, to help people in their research.”
McKinney followed that effort with Volume Two of the almanac, another 600 pages packed with data, including a roster of all Union soldiers from West Virginia, who numbered around 28,000.
“That benefits people quite a bit who wondered over the years, ‘Did my ancestors serve from West Virginia? Was he with the North? Was he with the South?’ And they would maybe have had to travel to archives in Charleston or ordered microfilm from national archives in Washington, D.C., to find these things.”
In his Herculean undertaking, McKinney transcribed thousands upon thousands of names from microfilm in a task that stretched over months and months.
“I pursued this so people have a one-stop shop, so to speak, to help them find their ancestors,” he said.
“It’s been popular with people involved with genealogy.”
One year after the second volume of the Almanac, a publisher called on McKinney to see if he had anything in the offing, and it was then he suggested republishing the “History of the First West Virginia Infantry,” first put in print back in 1887.
Published in a limited quantity, the book hadn’t been published since. McKinney answered the call to annotate and update the book, the handwork of a member of that Union unit, and so author C.J. Rawling was given a second ride through Civil War literary works.
Another McKinney innovation came in 2004 with his “History of the Civil War in Greenbrier County.”
“There have been brochures and pamphlets and newspaper articles galore, but mine is the first book on the Civil War in Greenbrier County,” he said.
“It’s about a 450-page book and was well received. It was a real joy to do, not unlike the ‘Civil War in Fayette County,’ because I educated myself along the way. That’s the great fun in it. I met a lot of interesting people. I did a lot of travel. I learned a great deal about the war in southern West Virginia, and, of course, in Greenbrier County.”
Along his journey, the West Virginia Humanities Council asked him 1999 to contribute to a state encyclopedia, and thus his name joined some 500 others with space in the undertaking.
Just last spring, McKinney was back at his desk, reviving a booklet written by Union Gen. George McClellan about his Virginia campaign. Midway through the war, the Congressional Publishing Office put out some 250 copies and it was never reprinted.
McKinney assembled a 10-page afterward on McClellan’s report and the 74-page booklet was back in print, detailing the general’s account of his campaign that spilled from the Ohio River into what then was known as “the West Virginia frontier.”
There are such noteworthy encounters as Philippi, Rich Mountain and Tygarts Valley.
“It’s a great little read,” the author said.
McKinney’s publisher is found at www.wvbookco.com, and with a slight hint from the author himself, his days of writing may not have ended.
In mind with his publisher is a children’s history of the Civil War in West Virginia, but McKinney hasn’t committed himself to the mission yet.
“It’s a different thing,” he said. “If someone told me they wanted an adult read, an adult history on the Civil War in West Virginia, some aspect of it as I have done in previous works, I’d probably be on it fairly quick. But for someone to approach me and say, ‘Write me a children’s history of the Civil War in West Virginia,’ believe me, that’s a harder task than writing an adult history.”
McKinney hasn’t dismissed the idea outright, but concedes, “I would have to cycle my brain in that direction. I don’t want to over-complicate it. I don’t know how to write for a sixth-grader or a seventh-grader. I may get around to that some of these days.”
McKinney has been deluged with flattering kudos over his writing style and prolific output, but he takes such compliments in humble stride.
“People say to me, ‘You’re a good writer,’” he said.
“And I say, ‘Don’t insult the writers of the universe.’ I consider myself a reporter. I report the facts. My office has got over 800 books on the Civil War. There are some writers in that group. I’m a reporter. I report on the war.”
—E-mail mannix@register-herald.com

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