West Virginia Wesleyan was founded in 1890 by the West Virginia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which wanted an institution to educate Methodist youth and to train Methodist clergy for service in the state. The first president, Bennett W. Hutchinson, was a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan and the Boston University School of Theology. The school opened in a new three-story brick building where the Lynch-Raine Administration Building now stands, and for its first ten years it operated primarily as a college preparatory academy - West Virginia in 1890 did not yet have a network of public high schools strong enough to feed students into a regular college program. College-level instruction began in 1900, the first baccalaureate degrees were awarded in 1905, and pre-college instruction continued until 1923 when the state's high school system had finally matured enough to retire it. The school was briefly named Wesleyan University of West Virginia before settling on its current name, in honor of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.

The campus is one of the more architecturally coherent in West Virginia. Twenty-three major Georgian-style brick buildings, mostly constructed between the 1910s and the 1950s, sit on a hundred acres of park-like grounds on the north side of Buckhannon. The signature building is Wesley Chapel, a 1,800-seat sanctuary that serves both the college and the West Virginia United Methodist Annual Conference, which gathers there each June. A statue of John Wesley stands in front of the chapel. The dorms, classroom buildings, library, and student center cluster around a central quadrangle in the residential-college pattern that nineteenth-century Methodists imported from the older institutions of New England and the upper Midwest. About 90 percent of students live on campus, which gives the place an unusually tight residential community for a modern liberal arts college.

About 1,055 students attend Wesleyan, drawn from 35 states and 26 countries. Roughly 80 percent of the faculty have doctorates or terminal degrees in their fields; the student-faculty ratio is 11.6 to 1; the average class has 15 students. The college offers more than 50 undergraduate majors and 33 minors, plus 3-2 engineering partnerships with Marshall University and West Virginia University - meaning a student can complete three years of liberal arts at Wesleyan and two years of engineering at one of the larger institutions, graduating with degrees from both. Graduate programs include nursing, business administration, athletic training, mental health counseling, and an MFA in Creative Writing whose alumni have published in serious literary venues. Pamela Jubin Balch, a 1971 graduate, became the college's first woman president in 2006 and led a substantial expansion of academic programs during her fifteen-year tenure.

Wesleyan competes as the Bobcats in NCAA Division II, fielding 21 varsity teams in the Mountain East Conference. The list runs through the standard college sports - basketball, baseball, soccer, track, swimming, tennis, volleyball, lacrosse - plus football, which has been the heart of the program since the early twentieth century. The school's football tradition produced one of the great early-century professional players: Cliff Battles, the Hall of Fame running back who led the Boston-then-Washington Redskins in the 1930s. It also produced Greasy Neale, who graduated in 1915 and later coached the Philadelphia Eagles to back-to-back NFL championships in 1948 and 1949 - Neale, like Battles, is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For a small Methodist college in central West Virginia to have produced two football Hall of Famers is one of the quieter remarkable facts about Wesleyan.

Beyond the football names and Ted Cassidy, Wesleyan has produced an unusual concentration of figures in literature, science, and public life. Denise Giardina, whose novels Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth dramatize the coal-country labor wars of the early twentieth century, graduated in 1973. Irene McKinney and Maggie Anderson, two of West Virginia's most respected poets, came through the program decades apart. Lewis C. Cantley, the cell biologist who discovered the PI 3-kinase signaling pathway and now conducts cancer research at Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is a 1971 graduate. Blanche Lazzell, the early-twentieth-century painter and printmaker who became central to the white-line woodblock movement in Provincetown, attended Wesleyan early in her career. Bishops, judges, novelists, baseball players, anthropologists, poker professionals, jurists, and a state Supreme Court justice round out a roster that, for a school of about a thousand students, runs unusually deep. Wesley, the namesake, would probably approve of the breadth - he believed in education as the foundation of a life lived seriously, and the alumni rolls suggest his Methodist college in central West Virginia has more or less kept that tradition.