Babcock State Park opened on July 1, 1937, built during the Great Depression as a project of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The land was deeded to the state in 1934. CCC crews built the original trails, shelters, and stone-and-timber structures that still anchor the park - work so durable that the New Deal-era resources were nominated as a historic district decades later. The park sits on 4,127 acres of forested ridge and stream valley in southern Fayette County, about 20 miles from the more famous New River Gorge Bridge. It was named for Edward V. Babcock, a Pittsburgh lumberman, former mayor of Pittsburgh, and conservationist who donated the original tract of land to the state. His ridge of pine and hardwood became, in CCC hands, one of West Virginia's most enduring public spaces.

The original Cooper's Mill, which ground grain for valley farms in the 1800s, was long gone by the time Babcock opened. The park rebuilt it - sort of - in 1976. The replacement is a composite. The basic structure came from Stoney Creek Grist Mill in Pocahontas County. Other parts came from Spring Run Grist Mill near Petersburg and Onego Grist Mill in Onego. The result is a working mill that the park describes as a living monument to the more than 500 grist mills that once dotted West Virginia. Visitors can watch the wheel turn, take photographs by the dozen, and buy bags of the corn meal and buckwheat flour that come out of the millstones.

Beyond the mill, Babcock runs as a full-service West Virginia state park: 28 rental cabins, 52 campsites, a swimming pool, a gift shop, picnic shelters, and more than 20 miles of hiking trails through hardwood forest. Boley Lake covers 19 acres - small enough to feel intimate, large enough to support paddleboats, rowboats, and canoes for rent. There is fishing in the lake and in Glade Creek itself. There are basketball, tennis, and volleyball courts, a horseshoe pit, and overlooks that, on a clear day, let you see south toward the gorge. The horseback-riding stable that long defined summers here has closed. Naturalist-led hikes still run regularly through the season.

Babcock was assessed for accessibility by West Virginia University in 2005, with the campground, picnic shelters, restrooms, and doorways of public buildings all found to be accessible. The park has accessible fishing access and two accessible cabins. Some concerns were noted at the time about parking lot signage and slippery stairways. The push to make the park usable by everyone reflects a broader commitment by the West Virginia park system: visitors with mobility limitations can roll down ramps to the lake, fish from accessible piers, and stay in cabins built to current standards. Babcock is not pristine wilderness. It is a designed landscape, intended from the start to be entered, photographed, and shared. The deliberate gentleness of it is part of what keeps people coming back.