Beneath the manicured lawns of one of America's most acclaimed resorts, in this rolling pocket of southeastern West Virginia, the United States once hid a secret large enough to shelter Congress from a nuclear war. For thirty years, beginning in the late 1950s, a vast bunker waited under the Greenbrier hotel - stocked, staffed, and held in trust against the moment the Cold War turned hot. Then a 1992 newspaper article tore the secret open, and the bunker passed into history. That bunker is only the strangest entry in Greenbrier County's catalogue of strange entries. The Shawnee called this land Can-tuc-kee and bought silk and silver in its trading posts. A ghost's testimony helped convict a murderer here. The oldest golf course in America may have been built here in 1884. Greenbrier County, formed in 1778 and home today to roughly 33,000 people across more than a thousand square miles, keeps gathering improbable stories the way the Greenbrier River gathers tributaries.
Before settlers crossed the Alleghenies around 1740, the Shawnee and Cherokee used these forested hills as a hunting reserve. They called the land Can-tuc-kee. By 1771 European traders had set up shop, and the day books of Sampson and George Mathews record sales to Shawnee customers that included silk, hats, silver, and tailor-made suits - luxuries flowing into a place that, on paper, was wilderness. Shawnee leaders, among them Pucksinwah and his son Tecumseh, watched the trade with alarm. They knew where it led. In 1774 Lord Dunmore raised three thousand men against the Shawnee homeland in Ohio; half assembled at Fort Union, under General Andrew Lewis, in what is now Lewisburg - the town that still carries his name. Lewis marched his column to the Kanawha and fought the Battle of Point Pleasant against Cornstalk. The county that gathered around the fort kept Lewis's memory; the people who had named the land lost it.
In the spring of 1778 a band of warriors attacked Fort Donnally, where twenty-five men and sixty women and children were sheltering. An enslaved African American man named Dick Pointer - said to have stood nearly seven feet tall - held the log door alongside Philip Hamman long enough for the settlers inside to wake and arm themselves. He likely saved every life in the fort. Years later, in the decline of his life, Pointer addressed the Virginia General Assembly and asked to be freed in recognition of what he had done. Historic accounts disagree on whether the legislature granted his request. His grave lies beside Carnegie Hall in Lewisburg, and a historical marker stands in the Lewisburg Cemetery. The musket he carried that night is on permanent display at the John A. North House Museum. The county remembers him; what the law owed him is harder to settle.
When Virginia voted on secession in May 1861, Greenbrier County voted yes - a thousand to a hundred. About two thousand local men joined the Confederate Army. The county sent its delegate Samuel Price to Richmond, where he voted against secession on April 17 and then signed the ordinance anyway, a small portrait of how complicated those weeks were. War followed the vote. Union forces took Lewisburg in May 1862 and White Sulphur Springs in August 1863. When West Virginia split off to become the thirty-fifth state, Greenbrier County went with it, although it never took part in the Wheeling votes that authored the new state's existence. The county became West Virginian by geography, not by ballot - which says something about Appalachia that other parts of the country still haven't quite understood.
On January 23, 1897, Zona Heaster Shue was found dead in her home near Sam Black Church. The coroner first wrote everlasting faint, then changed it to childbirth. Her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, had a different theory. Heaster testified in court that her daughter's ghost had appeared to her on four separate nights and named her husband, Edward Shue, as her killer - claiming he had broken her neck in a fit of rage. The body was exhumed. The autopsy confirmed the ghost. Edward Shue was tried and convicted of murder, and a historical marker on U.S. Route 60 at Sam Black Church now calls it the only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer. The marker stands without apology. Believe what you like - the conviction held.
People came to White Sulphur Springs for the mineral waters as early as 1778. The Greenbrier resort, named for the river, opened in 1913 - built by the railroad whose station still sits across the street. During World War II the U.S. Army turned the hotel into a hospital and held Axis diplomats here as part of a wartime internment arrangement. Dorothy Draper restored the rose-and-green interiors after the war. Then, beginning in the late 1950s, the federal government hollowed out the mountain beneath the West Virginia Wing to build Project Greek Island - a bunker meant to shelter the entire Congress from nuclear attack. Decontamination chambers, a power plant, sealed dormitories, even a chamber configured as the House of Representatives waited under the spa. The Washington Post unmasked it in 1992. Today you can tour what was once unthinkable to mention out loud.
Greenbrier County centers near 37.95 degrees north, 80.45 degrees west. From a cruising altitude of 8,000-10,000 feet, look for the Greenbrier River winding through forested ridges south of the Monongahela National Forest. The Greenbrier Valley Airport (KLWB) sits just outside Lewisburg with a 7,000-foot runway. White Sulphur Springs and the sprawling Greenbrier resort grounds lie roughly fifteen miles to the east along I-64. The vast green ridges of the Monongahela National Forest fill the northern horizon.