WVWest Virginia Fun Facts

West Virginia is the only state in the country created by breaking away from another state, and the only one that lies entirely inside the Appalachian Mountains. Its mean elevation of roughly 1,500 feet is the highest of any state east of the Mississippi River, which is why there is almost no flat ground to build on and why the towns run in ribbons along creek bottoms.

Facts most people get wrong

• "Take Me Home, Country Roads" was barely about West Virginia. Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert began the song thinking of a back road in Maryland. John Denver reworked it and recorded it in 1971. The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River in the lyrics only clip the state's eastern edge near Harpers Ferry. The legislature adopted it as an official state song in 2014 regardless.
• The state did not secede. It was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863 as the 35th state, on the northern side, after western counties refused to follow Virginia out. Lincoln signed the bill.
• West Virginia is not south of Virginia. The northern panhandle runs up between Ohio and Pennsylvania and ends farther north than Pittsburgh.
• The capital is tiny. Charleston is both the seat of government and the largest city, with fewer than 50,000 residents. The capital moved between Wheeling and Charleston three separate times before a statewide vote in 1877 settled it for good.
• Coal is not the largest employer. It defines the state's identity and its politics, but health care, retail and government each employ far more West Virginians than mining does today.
• The state is not stripped bare. Roughly three quarters of West Virginia is forested, one of the highest shares in the country.

Records and firsts

• The New River Gorge Bridge, completed in 1977, runs 3,030 feet with a steel arch spanning about 1,700 feet. It was the longest single span arch bridge in the world for 26 years and remains the longest in the Western Hemisphere.
• Bridge Day, held on the third Saturday of October, is the one day a year that jumping from the bridge deck is legal, and it draws crowds in the tens of thousands.
• New River Gorge became the 63rd national park in the United States in December 2020.
• The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Pocahontas County is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on Earth, with a dish measuring roughly 100 by 110 meters.
• Mother's Day began at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton on May 10, 1908. Anna Jarvis organized it in memory of her mother, then spent much of the rest of her life fighting the holiday's commercialization.
• Rural free mail delivery in the United States started on October 1, 1896, on routes out of Charles Town, Halltown and Uvilla.
• The Greenbrier resort at White Sulphur Springs concealed a congressional fallout shelter built between 1958 and 1962 under a wing of the hotel. It stayed secret until a Washington Post story exposed it in 1992.
• The Golden Delicious apple came from a chance seedling on a Clay County farm around 1905 and is now the official state fruit.

Geography that surprises

• The National Radio Quiet Zone covers roughly 13,000 square miles around Green Bank. Near the telescope, cell towers and wireless routers are restricted, and observatory staff drive the valley hunting down stray signals from microwave ovens and car electronics.
• The state has two panhandles. Harpers Ferry, at the tip of the eastern one, sits about 60 miles from Washington DC and roughly 300 miles from its own capital in Charleston.
• Spruce Knob rises to 4,863 feet, the highest point in the state and one of the highest in the Appalachians north of the Carolinas.
• West Virginia borders five states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky, despite ranking 41st in area.
• Part of the northern boundary follows the Mason and Dixon Line, the same 1760s survey that separated Pennsylvania from Maryland.

Where the name comes from

The name is inherited rather than chosen. Virginia honored Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, when Sir Walter Raleigh applied it to the English claim in 1584, and the breakaway counties simply kept it with a direction attached.

It was not the first choice. The 1861 convention at Wheeling initially named the proposed state Kanawha, after the river and the people who gave the river its name. Delegates argued that the name was unfamiliar outside the region and voted 30 to 14 in November 1861 to use West Virginia instead. The state motto, adopted at statehood in 1863, is Montani Semper Liberi, mountaineers are always free.

State basics

Bordering states

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