Qualla: Greenbrier County, West Virginia

Greenbrier County, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Greenbrier County, West Virginia: The Hunting Ground They Called Can-tuc-kee

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 custom...

Greenbrier County, West Virginia: Dick Pointer at Fort Donnally

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 en...

Greenbrier County, West Virginia: Civil War Comes to the Greenbrier

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 o...

Greenbrier County, West Virginia: The Ghost Who Helped Convict

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 appea...

Greenbrier County, West Virginia: A Resort, a Hospital, a Secret

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...