The federal alphabet agencies of the 1930s - the CCC, the WPA, and their cousins - left a deep imprint on the public landscape of the United States. At Holly River, the work was done primarily by the Works Progress Administration, which hired 250 local men to build what the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources still calls the New Deal Historic District. The architectural language was uniform across the era and across the country: peeled logs, hand-laid stone, steep shingled roofs, broad porches. The stone for the cabins came from the property itself. The timber was cut from the surrounding slopes. The result was a park that looks, almost a century later, exactly like a park is supposed to look - because Holly River and its cousins are where most Americans learned what parks should look like.

The nine cabins built in the 1930s sit along a tributary of the Laurel Fork of the Holly River, each with a stone fireplace and a name rather than a number among the families that come back year after year. They are not luxurious. They are heated by their fireplaces, furnished with the kind of solid wood furniture that survives generations of summer renters, and equipped with kitchens designed for cooking trout and corn on the cob. Cabin 6, the most photographed, has appeared in West Virginia tourism literature for decades. The cabins are booked out months in advance for the prime summer weeks - a small economic phenomenon that traces directly back to a 1936 WPA payroll.

Potato Knob rises 600 feet above the valley floor in a steep cone that the trail switchbacks up. The summit gives one of those Appalachian views where you can see five ridges, three forested hollows, and exactly one other building. Upper Falls drops in a single sheet on Fall Run, a tributary of the Left Fork, with an observation deck and a long flight of stairs that takes you to the pool at the base. The water is cold all year. In winter, when the leaves are down, you can also reach Tecumseh Falls along the Reverie Trail. The waterfall was named for the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, who - according to common attribution - predicted the solar eclipse of June 16, 1806, an event that helped unite Indigenous resistance to American expansion under his brother Tecumseh.

Windy Gap School is not original to the park. It is a one-room schoolhouse that was sitting on a remote tract owned by the Division of Natural Resources, gradually rotting back into the ground. The Holly River State Park Foundation organized a volunteer project in the mid-2010s to disassemble the building, move it to a site near the park headquarters, and reassemble it where visitors could actually find it. The schoolhouse now serves as a small interpretive site - desks, blackboard, woodstove, the smell of old paper. It is a quiet memorial to the kind of Appalachian education that took place in buildings like this until consolidation closed most of them in the 1950s and 1960s.

Every Labor Day weekend since 1992, the park has hosted the Holly River Festival - a small-town celebration that combines crafts, music, food, and a fundraising auction for the park itself. The festival draws several thousand visitors over the long weekend to a park that normally sees a few dozen campers at a time. The Hacker Valley road, which is the only way in, becomes briefly congested in the way that the rural roads of West Virginia occasionally become briefly congested. By Tuesday morning, the cabins are quiet again and the deer are back at the edge of the meadow at dusk. The park returns to what it has been since the WPA workers went home: a quiet wooded refuge in the middle of central Appalachia.