The Traveling 219 Project presents Richard Hefner and the story of the Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys–the local Pocahontas County, West Virginia born and bred music staple. Richard grew up in Mill Point with his family, where his mother Elsie ran the post office and served as the matriarch to a family of humorists and talented musicians. Elsie’s brother, known as Uncle Dude, taught Richard his brother Bill to play music. The three of them formed the band–with friends Harley Carpenter and Dwight Diller–and wrote many of their songs in the family home at Mill Point. Today, over forty years after the band was founded, Richard continues to live and perform close to Route 219 with the Black Mountain Bluegrass Boys.

The Tygart Valley Homestead was built in the 1930s as part of a New Deal project to re-locate and re-settle impoverished families to new cooperative communities during the Great Depression. Many of the New Deal subsistence communities around the country did not take off, but the Tygart Valley Homestead is seen as one of the success stories of the little-known resettlement project.