The chicory came first. When settlers arrived in the 1780s, the upland meadows here were already painted blue each summer by the cornflower-bright blossoms of a wild herb that thrived in thin mountain soil. Generations later, when the Norfolk and Western Railroad came looking for a place to base its locomotives and crews, the name was already waiting. Bluefield incorporated in 1889 as the Pocahontas Coalfield boomed, becoming the railroad's headquarters town for the coal trains hauling Appalachian fuel out to the cities of the East. For decades the streets carried the rumble of freight and the murmur of money.

The 1920s were Bluefield's peak. Architects gave it civic confidence in brick and stone, and the downtown filled with the kind of department stores and hotels you would expect of a railroad capital. Then coal slipped, the passenger trains stopped, and the storefronts emptied one by one. Walk Princeton Avenue today and the bones of the boom are still visible in cornices and terra-cotta, a faded-elegance feel that some residents have learned to love and others have set out to revive. Restored buildings, specialty shops, and the monthly First Fridays gatherings on Chicory Square mark a town betting on its own architecture as the foundation of a comeback.

Bluefield's most famous son almost never appears in its tourism brochures. John Forbes Nash, Jr., the mathematician whose game-theory work won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics and whose life inspired the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, grew up here on Country Club Drive. His parents were a teacher and an electrical engineer for Appalachian Power, and the brilliant, troubled boy who would one day rewrite economics rode his bicycle along these same hills. The Nash family home is undergoing renovation, and a historic-site designation is in the works. For now, the connection lives quietly in the local memory, the way most things do in Bluefield.

Route 598 climbs to the East River Mountain Overlook, where on a clear morning you can see Bluefield laid out 3,500 feet below, the two states stitched together by streets that cross the line without ceremony. The Coal Heritage Trail begins here, a 187-mile scenic drive that threads through mine-owners' mansions in Bramwell, miners' camp houses in McDowell County, and the surviving coal tipples that still rust above the New River tributaries. The mountains around Bluefield don't apologize for what they are. They are steep and unforgiving, particularly when Jefferson Street or South Mercer freezes over in winter, and they explain why the railroad needed all those locomotives in the first place.

The other nickname locals use is "Summit City," a nod to the altitude and to the way the trains had to crest the Eastern Continental Divide here before rolling down to the Tidewater. From a pilot's seat, that's still the shape of the place: a town wedged into the highest notch of the West Virginia map, with the Norfolk Southern still moving coal trains through a yard that once boomed at all hours. The lemonade promise is mostly a joke now. The summers really are cooler than the lowlands, the chicory still blooms in vacant lots, and a Nobel laureate's bicycle still rolls down Howard Street in the town's collective memory.