Qualla: Summersville, West Virginia

Summersville, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ken Thomas, Public domain. Locals offer a piece of unsolicited advice to anyone driving US-19 through Summersville: do not push the speed limit. The town is famous, in a particular regional way, for the precision with which its police enforce 50 miles per hour through the stretch where the four-lane highway narrows. The Wikivoyage entry for Summersville devotes its 'Get around' section almost entirely to this warning. It is the kind of municipal detail that tells you something true about a place - that the highway runs straight through the middle, that the town has not quite decided whether to embrace or resent the traffic, and that the budget is balanced partly with citations issued to West Virginians on their way somewhere else.

Image: Ken Thomas | Public domain

Summersville, West Virginia: The Lake

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Gaul...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Summersville, West Virginia: Carnifex Ferry

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Co...

Image: Brian M. Powell (user Bitmapped on en.wikipedia) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Summersville, West Virginia: Bluegrass and Boats

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. 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...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Summersville, West Virginia: What Was Here Before

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. 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: t...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Summersville, West Virginia: Why People Come

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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,...

Image: Youngamerican at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0