File:Allegheny Mountains, Fort Seybert, West Virginia (14518306603).jpg

The Allegheny Mountain Range—also spelled Alleghany, Allegany and, informally, the Alleghenies—is part of the vast Appalachian Mountain Range of the eastern United States and Canada where it posed a significant barrier to land travel in less technologically advanced historical eras. It is a barrier range that has a northeast-southwest orientation and runs for about 400 miles (640 km) from north-central Pennsylvania, through western Maryland and eastern West Virginia, to southwestern Virginia.

The Alleghenies comprise the rugged western-central portion of the Appalachians. They rise to approximately 4,862 feet (1,483 m) in northeastern West Virginia. In the east, they are dominated by a high, steep escarpment known as the Allegheny Front. In the west, they grade down into the closely associated Allegheny Plateau which extends into Ohio and Kentucky. The principal settlements of the Alleghenies are Johnstown, Pennsylvania and Cumberland, Maryland.

The name derives from the Allegheny River, which drains only a small portion of the Alleghenies in west-central Pennsylvania. The meaning of the word, which comes from the Lenape (Delaware) Indians, is not definitively known but is usually translated as "fine river".

With the spread of the railroad networks in the 1890s and early 1900s, many new towns developed and thrived in the Alleghenies. The lumbering and coal industries that boomed in the wake of the railroads brought a measure of prosperity to the region, but most of the revenues flowed out of the mountains to the cities of the eastern seaboard where the captains of industry were headquartered. This inequity created a bitter legacy that would last for generations and form the foundation of the mountaineers' poverty and the area's immense environmental degradation.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_Mountains