Qualla: West Virginia

West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is the only state that lies completely within a mountain range. No part of West Virginia is truly flat - the small ribbons of flat land along the Ohio River and in the eastern panhandle's stretch of the Shenandoah Valley are the closest the state gets. Everything else folds, climbs, and falls back. The highest mean elevation of any state east of the Mississippi belongs to West Virginia; so does the deepest canyon in eastern North America, at New River Gorge. The Mountain State motto - Mountaineers are always free - is engraved on the state seal in 1863, the year West Virginia became the only state ever admitted to the Union by seceding from another state. Statehood was Civil War politics. Everything since has been a working-out of what to do with this particular geography.

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West Virginia: Born of the Civil War

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Virginia voted to secede from the Union in April 1861, the western counties refused to follow. The mountainous, small-farm western counties had different economic interests than the slave-holding Tidewater - slavery had taken less deep root in the hills, and Richmond had lon...

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West Virginia: Mountains, Rivers, and Coal

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The state's geography divides into three rough zones. The eastern panhandle and the high Alleghenies are true folded mountains, with the highest point - Spruce Knob at 4,863 feet - and the most dramatic ridges. The central interior is a deeply dissected plateau, where rivers have...

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West Virginia: What There Is to See

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The headline scenery is concentrated in a few signature places. New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, established as the country's newest national park in 2020, protects the deepest canyon in the eastern United States and the steel-arch bridge that crosses it - the longest ...

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West Virginia: The Food

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

West Virginia cooking is Appalachian: subsistence-rooted, plain-spoken, and surprisingly distinctive. The pepperoni roll was invented in Fairmont in 1927 - a soft bread roll baked with pepperoni inside, originally a miner's lunch designed to keep without refrigeration and to prov...

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West Virginia: Cities Built into Hills

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

West Virginia has no truly large cities. Charleston, the capital, and Huntington to the southwest form one urban cluster of about 350,000 people; Morgantown, Fairmont, and Clarksburg form another in the north-central region. Wheeling and Parkersburg sit on the Ohio River; Martins...

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West Virginia: An Honest Welcome

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

West Virginia is one of the poorer states by income, with persistent poverty in many of the rural counties where coal and timber economies have declined faster than replacements have arrived. From a traveler's standpoint, this rural character translates differently. People in the...

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