Summersville Lake is the largest lake in West Virginia, holding back 2,790 acres of water behind a dam completed in 1966. To create it, the Army Corps of Engineers drowned the village of Gad along with several farms and at least one cemetery. The dam controls flooding on the Gauley River downstream and provides the head of water that produces the famous Gauley Season whitewater for six weeks each fall when the lake is drawn down. The shoreline cliffs are pale Nuttall sandstone, popular with rock climbers, and the visibility underwater is among the best in the eastern United States, making the lake a destination for scuba divers as well as boaters. None of this existed before living memory. The grandparents of current residents remember crossing the Gauley by ferry where the lake now sits.

South of town, the Carnifex Ferry Battlefield State Park preserves the bluff where, on September 10, 1861, Union forces under William Rosecrans attacked a Confederate position dug in above the Gauley River. The battle was tactically inconclusive but strategically decisive: the Confederates withdrew that night, effectively ceding western Virginia to the Union and clearing the political ground for West Virginia to become a state two years later. Every September the park hosts Civil War Weekend, with reenactors firing reproduction muskets across earthworks that Confederate soldiers built in a hurry 165 years ago. You can still trace the line of those works through the grass.

Summersville plays host to two festivals that bracket its summer season. The Music in the Mountains bluegrass festival runs four days in June at Summersville Music Park, with banjos and dobros and the high lonesome harmony that this corner of West Virginia produces as a matter of course. The Summersville Lake Festival comes in late July, three days of boat parades, an Anything That Floats competition, water sports, fireworks, and the kind of small-town Americana that the rest of the country sometimes thinks has disappeared. It has not disappeared. It has simply moved to the places where US-19 is a main street.

Summersville was founded in 1820 and named for William Summers, an early settler. For most of its history it was a quiet courthouse town, the seat of Nicholas County, with a population that never broke 4,000. The four-lane US-19 came through in the 1970s and changed everything: the town became a stopping point for traffic between Charleston and Pittsburgh, and the strip of motels and restaurants along the highway grew while the original downtown stayed roughly the same size it had been. The result is a town with two faces. There is the old courthouse square, where the architecture is mostly nineteenth-century brick and the rhythm is slow. And there is the highway strip, where the La Quinta and the Super 8 and the chain restaurants serve drivers who are not stopping for long.

Most visitors are passing through on their way to the lake, to the rafting outfitters of the Gauley, or to the wilderness areas east of Richwood. Summersville is the kind of town that knows it is a base camp rather than a destination, and it has organized itself accordingly: gas, food, beds, breakfast, and then on to whatever you came for. There is no shame in this role. Some of the best small towns in America are the ones that figured out what they are good at and built around it. Summersville is good at being the last reliable services before the wilderness, and the first soft bed after a day on Class V water.