Twenty-eight United States presidents have walked the same lobby in this tiny West Virginia town. Most of them came to the Greenbrier resort, the great rose-and-green hotel that has been pulling visitors here since well before West Virginia was a state. One of those presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, came in and noticed something the others had missed: this was an excellent place to hide. In the late 1950s Eisenhower asked the Greenbrier to help build a secret bunker beneath its newest wing - a complete underground refuge for the entire United States Congress, sealed against nuclear fallout, stocked and staffed and held in trust for the worst day in American history. For thirty-some years the bunker waited. A 1992 Washington Post article tore the secret open. The bunker was decommissioned and turned into a tour. The hotel kept doing what it had always done. White Sulphur Springs, population around 2,300, is still in many ways an artifact of the world that bunker was built to survive.
People started coming to drink and bathe in the white sulphur spring as early as 1778. The water was said to have medicinal powers - a claim made about a great many mineral springs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but one that worked particularly well here, for reasons that had as much to do with the cool Allegheny summers as with the chemistry of the spring. A resort grew around the spring. It changed names and ownership many times. The version we now call the Greenbrier opened in 1913, built by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway whose station still stands across the road. The springhouse pavilion that sits on the lawn covers the original spring; you can still see the water emerging from the stone. The town that grew up around the springs took the spring's name. Everything else in White Sulphur Springs is, in some way, downstream of that small flow of water.
During the Second World War the United States Army turned the Greenbrier into a military hospital and also held Axis diplomats here under a wartime arrangement - a strange double duty in a single building. When the war ended, the hotel returned to private hands, and the C&O Railway hired designer Dorothy Draper to put it back together. Draper's restoration is the look that still defines the Greenbrier today: huge cabbage roses, jewel-toned colors, dramatic chandeliers, black-and-white checkerboard floors, the cheerful maximalism that became her signature. The lobby looks the way it does in 1948 photographs. Photographs from earlier years show a sturdier, more Victorian space. Draper added the theatricality. Walking through the Greenbrier today is largely an exercise in walking through her imagination.
Construction of the West Virginia Wing in the late 1950s included a feature the architects could not put on the public drawings. Underneath, hidden behind blast doors disguised as conference room walls, was a 112,000-square-foot facility designed to shelter 1,100 people. There was a decontamination corridor, a small power plant, sealed dormitories, food storage, and a chamber configured as a House of Representatives. The bunker was kept stocked and staffed by a small crew of Forsythe Associates technicians posing as hotel TV-repair workers for more than three decades. Members of Congress did not visit it; the briefcase carrying the activation codes lived in Washington. The facility waited. Then the Washington Post broke the story in May 1992. The federal government decommissioned the bunker; the Greenbrier opened it for tours. Today you can walk through what was, for thirty years, the most carefully kept secret about a building most people thought they understood.
White Sulphur Springs itself remained a small Appalachian town through all of this - 2,300 or so people, the kind of place where the train still stops three times a week on Amtrak's Cardinal route between Chicago and New York. The June 2016 floods hit the town hard; Greenbrier County had 16 fatalities, the most of any West Virginia county that summer. Townspeople rebuilt with help from the resort. The hotel's golf courses host the PGA Tour; the town's quieter streets run alongside the Greenbrier River. It is easy to underestimate White Sulphur Springs because the Greenbrier dominates every postcard. Underestimating it would miss the point. The springs that the resort was built on belong to the town. The bunker was built into a hillside the town has been farming for two centuries. The hotel needs the town more than the town needs the hotel.
The number is a Greenbrier marketing claim, but it is well documented - presidents from Martin Van Buren onward have come to the springs to take the waters, host conferences, or play golf. Sam Snead, the great Greenbrier golf professional for half a century, taught most of them how not to slice. The presidents came because the place was discreet, comfortable, accessible by train, and good for the kind of meetings that required somewhere off the calendar. Eisenhower came for the same reasons, then noticed that everything which made the resort attractive to presidents would also make it useful to a Congress trying to disappear. The wells were a happy coincidence. The Allegheny ridges were the real asset. White Sulphur Springs has been hiding people of importance since long before anyone thought about hiding them from a nuclear strike.
White Sulphur Springs sits at 37.794 north, 80.304 west, at about 2,000 feet elevation. Greenbrier Valley Airport (KLWB) is fifteen miles west near Lewisburg, with a 7,000-foot runway that handles the Greenbrier's jet traffic. The town is tucked into a notch in the Allegheny Mountains; the surrounding ridges climb above 4,000 feet within a few miles. From cruising altitude, look for the sprawling white facade of the Greenbrier resort and its golf courses south of I-64, with the Greenbrier River running just south of town.