The genesis of Stewart’s finishing remarks came at a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Fairmont Opera House in the 1890s (exact year uncertain).

There, a famed Wetzel County character, William Olliver Gallagher, delivered an oratory known as “Glorious Old Wetzel,” after he was pushed onstage and asked to introduce himself.

Gallagher, known as “Oll” and “Ol’ Gallahue,” once was described as a “combination of Mark Twain and the typical mountaineer” in a Wheeling newspaper.

A man with a large handlebar mustache, he was a known defender of the honor of Wetzel County against what he considered the uppity folks in Wheeling, then the state capital.

When Tom Loehr heard fellow Wetzel County native Stewart’s conclusion to his press conference, he knew the words, their context and he had heard them — or similar ones — before.

Loehr, 59, is a former state senator and state treasurer who now is a Charleston business entrepreneur. He went to school with Stewart’s older brother, Ted, in Wetzel County.

Loehr said Tuesday that many New Martinsville natives know part of Gallagher’s colorful monologue about Wetzel by heart.

Count the WVU football coach among them.

The exact finishing words of “Oll” that night at the opera house went like this:

“Glorious old Wetzel! Whose sons are brave and daughters fair, and which today produces gas enough to light the world, oil enough to lubricate it, and brains enough to rule it.”

Stewart laughed when told of Loehr making the connection between “Oll” and “Billy.”

“Yes, I’ve known those words for a long time, since I was a little boy, and I know Tommy Loehr,” the WVU coach said. “The old boy, they made fun of him at Fairmont when he said it, and I guess they can make fun of me.

“Gallagher said it about Wetzel County. I said it about West Virginia, all of it. What irritates me is that sometimes I go places and hear people say stuff about West Virginia that’s so far off I want to fist-fight them. We need to be proud of what we have. Our football team is a good example.

RE comment #14: WE think you’ve forgotten about us.

Signed,
Wall St

Its a damn shame the brains here in WV have never figured out an economy not based on extractive industries. The coach shilling for them is just a symptom of the problem.
I am NOT a friend of coal.

Can we get a re-match while they brainiac is in charge at WFV?

I haven’t seen very much of WVU this year. I haven’t watched a single down of WVU football since they beat Auburn, and the only lasting impressions I have of WVU 2008 are the brain-sapping losses to ECU and Colorado.

I plead guilty to making broad generalizations about a football team after watching only a small sample of their work… it happens.

So they have alot of coal, oil, and brains (and here I thought there was 1 shared brain in the state). They also have a surplus of old couches. That could be something useful too!