Droop Mountain rises 3,597 feet above sea level on the border of Greenbrier and Pocahontas counties in southeastern West Virginia. The ridge runs roughly north-south, paralleling the Greenbrier River, which curves along its eastern base. US Route 219 - the old turnpike from Lewisburg to Marlinton and on into Pennsylvania - climbs over the summit. From the top, on a clear day, you can see the next ridge of the Alleghenies stepping eastward toward Virginia, and the next, and the next, in long parallel waves that the geologists call the ridge-and-valley province. This is the eastern edge of the Allegheny Plateau bumping up against the folded Appalachians, and Droop is the local exemplar.

In November 1863, this otherwise unremarkable ridge briefly became one of the most important pieces of terrain in the Confederacy. The road over Droop was the only practical north-south route along the west bank of the Greenbrier. Confederate forces dug in on the summit to block a Union advance from the north. The Union won the battle that followed - the largest fought entirely within West Virginia - and effectively ended Confederate efforts to retake the state that had been created only five months earlier. The mountain stopped being a barrier and started being a memorial almost immediately.

An unincorporated community called Droop sits near the summit, on the highway. The 1928 dedication ceremony for the state park drew crowds to Droop on the Fourth of July; otherwise the place is quiet. Like many small mountain settlements in this part of West Virginia, Droop never grew large enough to incorporate. It is a few houses, a church, a fading sign, and the kind of post office that closes on Saturday afternoon. The town shares the mountain's name and, by extension, its joke - you can't really live in a place called Droop without learning to find it funny.

Most of the summit and the eastern flank of the mountain now belong to Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, dedicated in 1928 as the first state park in West Virginia. The park preserves the breastworks, the cannon positions, the small museum, and a CCC-era lookout tower that gives you the same view William W. Averell had when he was trying to figure out how to attack uphill against entrenched defenders. The trail system is short - this is not a hiking destination so much as a contemplation destination. You walk a little, you read the markers, you stand at the tower and look east toward the Greenbrier and the long line of mountains beyond.

Droop Mountain is the kind of small geographic feature that gets historically important by accident. The road went over it. The road had to. And so in 1863 a battle was fought here, and in 1928 a park was created, and ever after the mountain has been on the maps for reasons that have nothing to do with its drooping outline. There is a lesson in this, somewhere, about how landscapes acquire meaning - not from their inherent grandeur, but from what happens on them. The Alleghenies are full of higher peaks, more dramatic ridges, more spectacular views. None of them have Droop Mountain's footnote in the standard histories of the Civil War.