When a community gets the chance to connect to one of America’s great national forests, how does it decide what to build, and who decides?
Durbin and Franklin are two of the twelve gateway communities that border the Monongahela National Forest, and each carries its own history into that shared landscape. Durbin is a railroad town in Pocahontas County, built where the tracks once hauled timber out of the high country alongside the headwaters of the Greenbrier, the longest untamed river in West Virginia. Franklin, meanwhile, is older than the state itself, a chartered frontier outpost tucked into the Potomac highlands and now nestled between two national forests. Different geographies, different histories, and different needs, but the same forest at their doorsteps. When a community gets the chance to connect to one of America’s great national forests, how does it decide what to build, and who decides? These two towns chose to ask that question before answering it.
A Grant Built for the Gaps
In 2025, the Mon Forest Towns Partnership received an Appalachian Regional Commission POWER grant to fund downtown connectivity projects across all twelve of its gateway communities.
What made the grant unusual was what it didn’t do. Rather than prescribing a single kind of project and asking towns to fit themselves to it, the grant gave each community agency over how to use the funding. Planning, design work, community engagement: all of it could be a valid use, depending on what a town needed. That flexibility was intentional; the forest is shared, but the gateway to it should belong to the towns themselves.
It echoes how the Partnership began. Mon Forest Towns was built on communities choosing to work together before asking anyone for anything, and the grant carries the same logic forward: define the vision first, then chase the funding to match it.
Small Towns, Stronger Together
Building on Community Self Assessments, both Durbin and Franklin elected to leverage their POWER funds to participate in community coaching sessions, structured conversations facilitated by Dialogue & Design that brought residents together in a room to name what they wanted their town to become.
In Franklin, residents gathered in an old elementary school, repurposed as a one-stop shop for civil resources from emergency management to forestry operations. In Durbin, roughly forty people turned out, about a quarter of the town’s population. These community members weren’t asked to rubber-stamp a plan. They were asked what they valued, what they were missing, and where they wanted to go. In both towns, each session drew new faces, from families who have lived here for generations to transplants new to the forest.
A recreation asset that doesn’t fit a community’s long-term vision becomes a burden, not a benefit.
The same insight surfaced in both towns: you can’t build for visitors until you’ve built for yourselves. A recreation asset that doesn’t fit a community’s long-term vision becomes a burden, not a benefit. The visions that emerged extended well beyond trails: revitalizing downtown, weaving art into public spaces, growing local leadership, creating gathering places, supporting existing businesses, and expanding outdoor access.
Something as simple as spelling out an acronym can take community planning from an overwhelming technical discussion to a shared, grounded conversation among neighbors.
Those conversations didn’t happen in isolation. The action plans that came out of the coaching process spoke directly to needs the towns had already surfaced through their community self-assessments, giving each plan a foundation in evidence rather than assumption.
There was a cross-pollination moment, too. Residents from each town showed up at the other’s sessions, not as observers but as neighbors with a stake in the broader landscape. It’s a small thing that points to something larger: a model for how twelve towns can learn from one another without waiting for a centralized playbook to tell them how.
“The first thing I realized after stepping in on the Franklin meeting was that Durbin needed to be prepared for more people than we expected,” noted Durbin MFTP Representative Nicolle Flood-Sawczyszyn. “The second was the importance of emphasizing that our community sessions are a safe, neutral, welcoming space from the very beginning. Something as simple as spelling out an acronym takes community planning from an overwhelming technical discussion to a shared, grounded conversation among neighbors.”
Durbin: The Missing Connection
Durbin already had the flagship assets. The West Fork Rail Trail runs twenty-two miles along the West Fork of the Greenbrier through some of the most remote country in the Monongahela, following the same railroad grade that once pulled timber out of these mountains and intersects with the state’s longest hiking route, the 316-mile Allegheny Trail. Already popular with bikepackers, horseback riders, and anglers, the infrastructure built to extract from the land now serves as the engine of a tourism economy that gives back to it.
The gap was a connection. The trail exists, but downtown Durbin doesn’t yet have a clear, welcoming, functional link to it. Despite being less than a minute’s drive from Main Street, without that link, the trail’s economic potential can pass the town by, with riders arriving and leaving without the town’s charming coffee shop, restaurants, and art gallery ever entering the picture. Coaching helped Durbin name the problem precisely: this was never about building something new. It was about closing the distance between a community and an asset it already had.
The community coaching initiative has been transformative in revitalizing Durbin, restoring a deep sense of pride and respect among local residents.
Durbin resident Carolyn Bosley added, “the community coaching initiative has been transformative in revitalizing Durbin, restoring a deep sense of pride and respect among local residents. This powerful momentum is bringing locals and outside partners together to generate fresh ideas, with active work already underway on several key projects within the town. By upgrading these unique assets, Durbin aims to finally share the hidden gem of its community and beautiful surrounding area with the rest of the world.”
The lesson in Durbin’s approach is a quiet one. Sometimes the most powerful thing a community can do is remove the friction between itself and what’s already there.
Franklin: Anchoring the Outdoors
Franklin’s challenge ran the other way. Despite being surrounded by destination trails like the 24-mile North Fork Mountain Trail and Seneca Creek Backcountry to the west and the soaring High Knob Lookout Tower and Brandywine Recreation Area to the east, there was no existing asset in the downtown area to anchor to. The community had to imagine something from scratch and then build the case for it.
What Franklin does have is terrain unlike anywhere else in the forest. Peters Mountain and the dry ridges above town sit in the rain shadow of Spruce Knob, capped with hard quartzite and shaped by the Valley and Ridge country that reaches toward the Shenandoah. The result is a dry, rocky character, with cliffside trail experiences and endemic cacti you simply cannot replicate anywhere else in the Monongahela.
Building a trail system that slots into the Mon’s broader recreation identity while delivering something only Franklin can.
Coaching helped Franklin articulate not just what it wanted but why the offering was its own to make: a trail system that slots into the Mon’s broader recreation identity while delivering something only Franklin can. The conversation gave shape to an idea that had no precedent on the ground.
Michelle Connor, MFTP’s Franklin representative, remarked, “More than 50 residents took part in the community coaching process, and the resounding theme was the same: Franklin is surrounded by natural abundance, but limited trail access made it hard for people to actually reach the forest and the river. As a collective, we chose Peters Mountain for a new trail system because it’s easy to reach right off the main highway into town.“
The lesson in Franklin’s approach is the harder one. Envisioning something new takes a community confident enough in its own identity to say, “This is what we want the forest to do for us.”
From Coaching to Construction
Durbin needed to connect to an existing asset. Franklin needed to create one that didn’t. But both arrived through the same collaborative, repeatable process: community coaching, shared visioning, cross-town dialogue, phased planning.
And in July, 2026, that process began to gain real ground. With assistance from long-time partner The Conservation Fund, the Partnership was selected for the Expedia Trails Fund’s first round of grants. The $402,000 award provided the capital to realize two new trails that, less than a year ago, seemed like distant plans. Aided by POWER funds, Durbin began contracting for design work to connect the West Fork, through downtown, to the existing Widney Park Rail Trail. At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service approved a three-mile mixed-use trail system on Peters Mountain just 10 minutes from Franklin, with community volunteer trail-training events in June to lay the groundwork for construction.
The pathway doesn’t depend on already having a trail or on having the right rock under your feet. It depends on having the conversation.
Two towns, two very different starting points, and the same process carrying both from conversation to commitment. That process is the point. It isn’t just a precondition for the trail; it is itself the product. And that’s what makes it scalable across all twelve towns. The pathway doesn’t depend on already having a trail, or on having the right rock under your feet. It depends on having the conversation.
It’s tempting to assume that planning meetings aren’t “real” progress, that nothing counts until a shovel hits the dirt. That assumption is worth pushing back on. Community coaching sessions don’t make headlines, but they reach the people who make construction possible: the funders, the agency partners, the Forest Service district rangers, the grant reviewers. Gaining approval at Peters Mountain and the West Fork, not to mention securing funding for the projects, didn’t happen despite the process – they happened because of it. The pipeline from conversation to construction is longer than most people expect, but shorter than communities fear.
The pipeline from conversation to construction is longer than most people expect, but shorter than communities fear.
Communities FIrst, Tourism Second
More visitors, more trail traffic, more tourism revenue: these are real outcomes, and they matter. But they are byproducts of something more fundamental. The goal is healthy communities with shared visions and genuine agency over their own development. The economic activity that follows is evidence the work is succeeding, not the reason to do it in the first place.
None of this is the end of Durbin’s or Franklin’s work. Both towns are part of something larger, and across the partnership each community is somewhere different along the same path: connectivity projects completed in Marlinton, under construction in Elkins and White Sulphur, in design in Richwood, Davis, and Thomas. What they share is a goal: giving every community the resources to decide for itself how it wants to connect to the forest, and to one another.
That work continues, and there are ways to be part of it: supporting the North Zone Trail Crew, contributing to ongoing project funding, volunteering at trail workdays, or simply showing up to the next community session. The forest belongs to all of us. How each town meets it is still being decided, one conversation at a time.
