For most of its history West Virginia told hunters they could not hunt on Sunday. Then it told them they could, but only on private land, and only in counties that voted for it. The patchwork made a certain kind of sense to nobody.
Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida spent his first year as Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources trying to end it. “When I came here last year and sat down with folks at wildlife, one of the biggest things we wanted to do in the legislative session was to get Sunday hunting,” he said in March 2018.
The Argument Was Never About Sunday
It was about a two-day weekend versus a one-day weekend.
A hunter driving in from Ohio or Maryland has to decide whether the trip is worth it. If Saturday is the only legal day, the drive, the lodging, and the fuel all get charged against a single morning in the woods. Give him Sunday and the arithmetic flips.
McDaniel put it in those terms directly. “If hunters don’t have to miss a day of work or take any vacation time, they’re going to come to West Virginia.”
Who Actually Benefits
Follow the money past the license counter. A hunter who stays a second night buys a second night of lodging, two more meals, another tank of fuel, and usually something at a hardware store.
Those dollars do not land in Charleston. They land in whatever small county the hunter drove to, which tends to be a county with few other ways of attracting outside money.
Seventy Percent of the Country Is Eight Hours Away
That number is the one the agency kept returning to. West Virginia sits within an eight-hour drive of roughly 70 percent of the United States population.
Which means the state was watching people drive through it on their way to hunt somewhere else. “It’s part of an overall tourism plan we put together,” Stephen McDaniel said. “We want you to come here and hunt, not drive through to another state.”
You do not have to like that framing to notice it is a business argument, not a cultural one.
The Bill That Opened 1.5 Million Acres
The 2018 legislation extended Sunday hunting to public land. That meant more than a million acres of national forest, roughly 71,000 acres of state forest, and about 380,000 acres of wildlife management areas came into play on a day they had been closed.
McDaniel did not take credit for the win. He credited the people who did the unglamorous work. “The grassroots campaigns that went on around West Virginia, I don’t think we could have done it without all of the elements involved.”
The Patchwork Before
The 2018 bill was the second step, not the first. A year earlier the legislature had opened private land statewide, which sounds complete until you look at who it left out.
Anyone without private ground to hunt on. Which is most people, and disproportionately the people who cannot afford a lease.
Public land is where the license-buying public actually goes. Until 2018 the state was selling them a privilege they could not use on the ground they collectively owned.
Policy Is Slow and Then It Is Not
Anyone who has worked in a state agency knows the pattern. A proposal sits for years, gets reintroduced, dies in committee, comes back. Then one session it moves, and afterward everyone agrees it was inevitable.
It was not inevitable. Someone spent a year in rooms with legislators, sportsman groups, and county officials making the same case over and over until it stuck.
Stephen McDaniel came to that work from business, having run a home infusion and medical supply company from 1987 until he sold it in 2009. Selling things to skeptical buyers was not new territory.
He left the agency in January 2022. Sunday hunting is still law, and the hunters coming down from Pennsylvania still get two days.
The measure of a policy is not the vote. It is whether anyone would bother to reverse it.