Qualla: White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia: The Water That Started Everything

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia: Dorothy Draper's Roses

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Railw...

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia: Project Greek Island

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wa...

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia: The Town Above the Bunker

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Co...

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia: Twenty-Eight Presidents and a Springhouse

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 h...