McDowell County tourism leaders push recruitment, promotion amid population loss

McDowell County’s tourism office is trying to answer a bigger question than whether more visitors will come to Welch or the county’s trailheads: can promotion, recruiting and school-to-work programs help keep young families here when the population keeps falling?

Jennifer Justice, executive director of McDowell County Tourism, said the county has had the sharpest population decline in West Virginia since 2020. Census figures show why the issue has become urgent. McDowell County had 19,111 residents in the 2020 Census. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the county at 17,147 on July 1, 2024, and 16,878 on July 1, 2025, a drop of 11.7% from the April 1, 2020 base. That decline comes on top of a much longer slide from nearly 100,000 residents in 1950.

Justice said the response has to be practical, not abstract. McDowell County Tourism has mailed more than 6,000 new visitor guides and is building out a blog and newsletter to push the county’s attractions, businesses and lodging. The office is also working with the West Virginia Department of Tourism on Destination Optimization, a project aimed at making sure local businesses show up when people use search tools and artificial intelligence to look for places to eat, stay and visit.

That matters because tourism is one of the few parts of the local economy with room to scale. The West Virginia Department of Tourism said in its 2026 annual report that tourism generated $6.6 billion in visitor spending statewide and supported 1 in 15 jobs. In McDowell County, the department listed tourism’s 2024 impact at $20.0 million and 158 jobs.

The county’s strategy also reaches beyond visitors and into classrooms. McDowell County Schools is working on a Grow Your Own effort designed to show students that careers in fields such as heating and air conditioning, service work and teaching can exist close to home. The West Virginia Department of Education says Grow Your Own programs are guided career pathways for high school students, and McDowell County has heavily invested in its Grow Your Own Teacher Preparation Program.

Taken together, the efforts point to the same challenge: if McDowell County wants to stabilize school enrollment, fill local jobs and keep recent graduates from leaving, tourism promotion alone will not be enough. Leaders are trying to use every available tool, from visitor guides to teacher preparation, to make the county look less like a place people leave and more like a place where they can build a future.