CHARLESTON, W.Va. O English bulldog has never figured prominently in West Virginia history. Already happened.
Gov. Jim Justice’s 4-year-old purebred Babydog joined the ranks of Abraham Lincoln, Civil War soldiers and odes to Appalachian folk music in new murals beneath the state Capitol’s golden dome last week, alongside other cultural symbols of the state. Hidden in a mural about artistic traditions, the dog sits placidly between a banjo player and an artist painting Seneca Rocks, one of the state’s best-known natural landmarks, in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest.
Babydog made another memorable appearance at the Capitol in 2022, when the governor held her up during his State of the State address and pointed her behind at the camera. Days earlier, singer and actress Bette Midler, on what was then Twitter, called West Virginians “poor, illiterate and addicts” after U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., refused to support a bill bill promoted by President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress.
“Babydog says to Bette Midler and everyone out there: Kiss her,” Justice said, to a standing ovation from the crowd, which included state Supreme Court justices and members of the Legislature.
Justice, a Republican now running to succeed Manchin, made Babydog a minor celebrity in West Virginia during his two terms as governor.
The star of the governor’s “Do it for Babydog” COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the dog was a gift from Justice’s children in 2019. Affectionately referring to her as a “130-pound brown watermelon,” Justice took the dog in gubernatorial trips across the state since then. He extols Babydog’s ability to bring people joy and praises her taste for Wendy’s chicken nuggets. The dog, most of the time, sits panting and quietly next to him in his exclusive chair.
So far, Justice has played innocent about Babydog’s appearance in the murals, which were commissioned as part of an effort to finish work inside the Capitol that began and then stopped during the Great Depression.
“I was as surprised, in my own way, as anyone,” he said Wednesday during a news conference. “Really and truly, I wasn’t willing to… put Babydog on the wall.”
Justice said a committee led by Randall Reid-Smith, secretary of the Department of Arts, Culture and History, made the decision.
“They wanted to put in a dog and, well, they had to pick some kind of dog, you know, so they picked an English bulldog,” the governor said. “A long, long, long time ago and all before we actually became a country, the English were in charge, and everything seemed right, you know?”
Justice told reporters that Reid-Smith told him the dog in the mural was not necessarily Babydog, but his “20th grandmother.”
Owner of the elegant Greenbrier Resort and more than 100 other companies, the billionaire was first elected governor in 2016 as a Democrat. The following year, at a rally with then-president Donald Trump, Justice announced that he was switching parties.
In May, Justice easily defeated U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney in the Republican Senate primary. Justice’s campaign included selling merchandise emblazoned with his dog’s face, such as “Paw-litical Strategist” and “Re-Pup-Lican for Justice” beverage coolers.
His Democratic opponent in November, Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott, doesn’t think Babydog is that funny. Elliott said he saw Justice later the day the mural was unveiled, at another arts event to celebrate a new statue of the state’s first governor, Arthur Boreman, in Wheeling.
“In his comments, he spoke at length about his own dog and said nothing about Governor Boreman,” Elliott wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “This total lack of respect for anything other than himself is why he is completely incapable of representing West Virginia in the United States Senate.”
Asked about Elliott’s criticism, Justice had this to say: “Tell Glenn to get a life.”
West Virginia’s limestone State Capitol was designed by renowned Cass Gilbert, the architect behind the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington. Gilbert’s original design for the interior of the West Virginia Capitol, left incomplete due to limited funds, included murals that he said were “supposed to be historic and allegorical.”
The piece “Shiveree of Seneca Rock” with Babydog depicts Seneca Rocks, a majestic 900-foot Tuscarora quartzite formation, along with important aspects of West Virginia industry and culture, including glassblowing, crafts, music, dance, painting and life wild.
The tiny image of the dog was not included in the initial drawings released to the public, nor was it mentioned in the dedication. Babydog attended the June 20 event, where she sat in a camping chair after being hoisted up by court officials.
Only after that did people start to notice the bulldog in the photos of the murals shared on social media. And there wasn’t much debate about whose dog it was.
Reid-Smith said at a news conference last week that she has been working for years to get a governor to invest in completing Gilbert’s vision and that it was Justice who finally made it happen. So far, nearly $350,000 in state money has been paid to Connecticut-based installers John Canning & Co. for the first four murals, with four more scheduled to be installed this fall.
“The only involvement that Jim Justice had in these murals was that he gave us the money to pay for these murals that hadn’t been done in 92 years,” Reid-Smith said Wednesday.
Babydog’s ancestor wasn’t the only addition to the painting after the artists’ drawings were shared with the public.
The murals originally did not feature any African Americans, and Reid-Smith and the rest of the mural committee, mostly Justice administration employees, decided this needed to be corrected. They added a depiction of a black man talking to a Union soldier and adjusted the initial depictions to make more visible the Harper’s Ferry Armory, where abolitionist John Brown took refuge during his attack on the city in 1859 after inciting an anti-slavery riot.
Reid-Smith said a moose, a cardinal and other animals were also added to the murals.
