Richwood was incorporated in 1901, riding the wave of the central Appalachian timber rush. The Cherry River Boom and Lumber Company built what was, briefly, the largest band sawmill in the world here, slicing red spruce and hemlock that had stood for centuries into boards that became Pittsburgh tenements and Baltimore row houses. By the 1920s the population had crested above 6,000. By 1930 the old-growth forest was gone - cut, hauled out, and burned over - and the boom collapsed almost overnight. What is now the Cranberry Wilderness, just east of town, is the second-growth forest that grew back on the ashes of that first one. The trees you see along the trail today are the great-grandchildren of the trees the band saws ate.

Allium tricoccum grows in the cool damp leaf litter of eastern hardwood forests, and for two or three weeks each spring it pushes up broad green leaves and white bulbs that taste like a fight between garlic and onion. Indigenous Appalachians ate ramps as a spring tonic for centuries before European settlers learned to recognize them. The flavor is so intense that some school districts in the region historically excluded children who had eaten them. In Richwood, none of this is theoretical. The festival serves ramps fried with potatoes, ramps in cornbread, ramps with ham and beans, and ramps so plain they are simply ramps. There is, locally, no shame in any of this. The town has tied its identity to a vegetable that the rest of America largely fears.

Richwood sits on the western edge of the Monongahela National Forest, and most travelers come here as a base for the Cranberry Wilderness, the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, and the Falls of Hill Creek. The Cranberry Glades are a high-elevation peat bog system - the largest in West Virginia - where carnivorous sundews grow alongside cotton grass on a half-mile boardwalk that feels transported from northern Maine. The Falls of Hill Creek drop in three stages, the tallest at 63 feet, making it the second-tallest waterfall in West Virginia. The Cranberry Wilderness itself covers 47,815 acres with sixty miles of unmarked trail and is officially designated black bear habitat. Carry a map. Carry a compass. The trails do not have signs.

The Wikivoyage entry for Richwood includes a warning that visitors should not skim: the roads in this part of the state are not always cleared in winter and can become impassable even with four-wheel drive. This is the kind of country where snow drifts settle into the hollows and stay there until April, where a wrong turn down a logging road in February can become a survival story. Most tourist traffic happens from April through October. The town is quieter in winter, in the way a town built around a sawmill and surrounded by national forest is always going to be quieter when the saws are silent and the trails are buried.

The population today is roughly 1,900, less than a third of what it was at peak. The big mill is gone. The downtown carries the architecture of optimism - brick storefronts on a Main Street built for more people than now live here - and the Wikivoyage entry helpfully lists a single restaurant by name: Bright Spot, on Edgewood Avenue. There is a Mountain Color Festival in October, when the hardwoods turn and the apple butter pots come out. There is G and N Ramp Farm Specialties, which sells pickled ramps, dehydrated ramps, and ramp salt by mail order. Richwood is one of those small American towns that survived the loss of its industry by becoming the front door to something larger - in this case, a wilderness that grew back where an old wilderness used to be.