By Jim Bissett
For The Dominion Post
MANNINGTON – Brian Kolb has the perfect pepperoni roll recipe.
First, you stir in a 250-pound aluminum frame that you also cooked up.
Then, you garnish liberally with 1,000 LEDs.
Finally, you stuff in a lot of quilting material, for a just-right doughy depiction.
“Hey, what’s more ‘West Virginia’ than a pepperoni roll?” the industrial artist asked The Dominion Post last December with a grin.
Kolb is a machinist by training who operates his Nativibes and Hollered Ground studios in Mannington, a northern Marion County municipality that used to be known as a railroad town.
Now, Mannington is famous for its “Pepperoni Roll Drop,” which happens every New Year’s Eve in Wintergarten Park, courtesy of Kolb.
Forget “Auld Lang Syne.”
This roll … rolls in by way of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Mr. Denver’s opus to all things Appalachian, even if some of the name-checked Mountain State landmarks don’t always get it.
When Main Street Mannington asked the artist to “come up with something” eight years ago for the town’s holiday celebration, Kolb didn’t blink.
The artist promptly took himself back home – to his grandma’s kitchen.
“It had to be a pepperoni roll,” he said. “First thing I thought of.”
Heck, he said, they get blitzed with peppers and sauce for your football tailgates.
Pepperoni rolls have been to appear on school lunch menus and at wedding receptions, even.
“They’re a celebration of our Italian heritage and coal mining culture – and that’s probably the best thing.”
Those UT Martin fans making the trek from Tennessee to Morgantown for Saturday’s football matchup at Milan Puskar Stadium – kickoff is 1 p.m. for the nationally televised contest pitting Mountaineers against Skyhawks – will find out soon enough.
West Virginians, you see, just can’t help but naturally be pepperoni roll ambassadors to any and all newcomers.
And Kolb got the origin story, and the geography that goes with it, exactly correct.
Italian immigrant coal miners, it was said, would grab a stick of pepperoni and a few slices of bread for a quick breakfast on their way underground for their shift.
While the pairing was tasty, it was also a little unwieldy.
As it turned out, the pepperoni wouldn’t stay put, no matter how many times the bread was folded over.
Every company house in every coal camp had a kitchen, and several of the dwellings even had bricked, bread ovens in the postage stamp backyard.
Someone got the idea to actually bake the pepperoni into the bread, and that changed everything.
In 1927, and just down the road at Fairmont, Guiseppi “Joe” Argiro began cranking them out large-scale at his Country Club Bakery, which is still doing the same 99 years later.
At the same address.
While Argiro’s enterprise is believed to be the first to produce the rolls commercially, plenty of other bakeries across north-central West Virginia can offer claims just as credible.
They include Morgantown’s Chico Bakery, which puts its rolls together from a family recipe dating back to 1925.
A Skyhawk fan will be forgiven, should he compare one upon first meeting to a calzone or stromboli.
After all, the culinary markers are there.
But around here, a pepperoni roll is a pepperoni roll.
And they’re so brand-pervasive, in fact, that the Marion County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau linked up last year with its CVB counterparts in Clarksburg to launch the West Virginia Pepperoni Roll Trail.
It’s a digital celebration of all the regional bakeries that pull rolls from their ovens daily.
Both bureaus of both towns now share the Governor’s 2025 Regional Tourism Award for the project.
Visit Marion’s CVB at https://marioncvb.com/wv-pepperoni-roll-trail/ to learn more about the trail and how you earn points and prizes with a digital passport.
Chico Bakery, meanwhile, earned big first-impression points a few years back when “Good Morning America,” the network news show, called on Morgantown and the business for a feature celebrating West Virginia’s people, places and culture.
Free pepperoni rolls were part of the deal. Free, first-ever pepperoni rolls. None of the crew had ever had occasion to try one.
“These things are badass,” videographer Russ Marhull said, digging into his second.
Read more from The Dominion Post, here.
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