103 Fun Facts About West Virginia

Which city, where delegates met to break away from Virginia, served as West Virginia's first capital?

Wheeling hosted the conventions that broke with Virginia and was the new state's first capital; it lost the seat in 1870, won it back in 1875 and lost it for good in 1885.

Along with West Virginia, which other state was admitted to the Union during the Civil War?

Nevada was admitted on October 31, 1864, days after its governor telegraphed the entire state constitution to Washington, a message that took hours to send and cost more than $4,000.

What is West Virginia's state motto in English?

'Mountaineers are always free' renders the Latin Montani Semper Liberi; Joseph Diss Debar, the artist hired to draw the state seal, is credited with suggesting it, and it circles the seal's farmer and miner.

What is West Virginia's capital and most populous city?

Charleston won an 1877 statewide vote over Clarksburg and Martinsburg to become the permanent capital, and the state government moved in for good in 1885.

West Virginia is the only state that lies entirely within the area served by which body?

The Appalachian Regional Commission grew out of John F. Kennedy's 1960 primary campaign in West Virginia, where the poverty he saw led him to set up its forerunner in 1963; the commission itself followed in 1965.

West Virginia's odd outline includes two of which map feature?

Panhandles: the northern one is the leftover strip Virginia kept when it settled its border with Pennsylvania around 1780, a sliver the new state inherited when it broke away.

What is the highest point in West Virginia?

Spruce Knob, on Spruce Mountain in the Monongahela National Forest, is so wind-blasted that its red spruce grow stunted and lopsided, with limbs only on the sheltered side.

Which town is West Virginia's easternmost and its lowest point above sea level?

Harpers Ferry stands where two rivers and three states meet; Thomas Jefferson climbed the rocks above the town and wrote that the scene was worth a voyage across the Atlantic.

Which abolitionist seized a federal armory in what is now West Virginia in October 1859?

John Brown seized the armory on October 16, 1859, hoping to arm a slave revolt; Marines led by Robert E. Lee retook it two days later, and Brown was hanged that December.

What extreme sport is legal from the New River Gorge Bridge only on Bridge Day each October?

BASE jumping: on the third Saturday of October parachutists leap 876 feet from the deck into the gorge while crowds walk the closed lanes, the only day jumping is allowed.

Until 2003, the New River Gorge Bridge had the world's longest span of which type?

Steel arch: the bridge held the record for 26 years, and its special steel was made to rust to a tough skin so that it would never need repainting.

Which activity is banned in New River Gorge National Park but allowed in its preserve?

Hunting stays legal on the 65,000-odd acres of preserve; only about 7,000 acres at the heart of the gorge became national park when the national river was upgraded in December 2020.

The New River reaches West Virginia by way of Virginia after rising in the mountains of which state?

North Carolina's high mountains feed the New River, which runs north across Virginia; despite its name it is often said to be one of the oldest rivers in North America, a claim geologists dispute.

Which West Virginia river draws whitewater rafters each autumn, when Summersville Dam releases water for its famous 'season'?

The Gauley's September and October dam releases send thousands of rafters and kayakers through its gorge; downstream it joins the New to form the Kanawha.

What is West Virginia's official state rock?

Bituminous coal was named the official state rock in 2009; the state gem is the Mississippian-age fossil coral Lithostrotionella, found in the state's limestone.

The 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain pitted armed coal miners against whom?

Lawmen and strikebreakers backed by mine owners, Sheriff Don Chafin's 'Logan Defenders', held the ridge for days against thousands of union miners until federal troops arrived and the marchers went home.

Which Irish-born labour organiser was called 'the most dangerous woman in America' for rallying West Virginia's miners?

Mother Jones, born Mary Harris in Ireland, was given the label in 1902, the year she was arrested in West Virginia for defying a judge's injunction against strike meetings; she was then in her sixties.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud played out along which river on the West Virginia-Kentucky line?

The Big Sandy's Tug Fork separated 'Devil Anse' Hatfield's clan on the West Virginia bank from Randolph McCoy's in Kentucky; an 1878 court fight over a disputed hog was one of the feud's first flashpoints.

Which winged, red-eyed creature was reportedly seen around Point Pleasant in 1966–67?

Mothman sightings began in November 1966; John Keel's 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies tied them to the Silver Bridge collapse of December 1967, and a 2002 film starring Richard Gere retold the tale.

Which two songwriters wrote 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' with John Denver?

Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, later of Starland Vocal Band, began the song while driving Clopper Road in Maryland; recorded with Denver, it peaked at number two on the Hot 100 in 1971.

Which river is named beside the Blue Ridge Mountains in 'Take Me Home, Country Roads'?

The Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge barely touch West Virginia, crossing only its eastern tip for a few miles, yet the song became an official state song in 2014.

Green Bank, West Virginia hosts a 100-metre, fully steerable what?

Radio telescope: the Green Bank Telescope replaced a 300-foot dish that collapsed in 1988, and it sits in the National Radio Quiet Zone, where wireless signals are restricted to protect faint emissions from space.

The Greenbrier resort hid a Cold War bunker built for whom?

The US Congress: the bunker, code-named Project Greek Island, was dug beneath a new hotel wing as cover and kept ready for 30 years, until a 1992 Washington Post story exposed it and it was shut down.

Before 1913, West Virginia's Greenbrier resort went by what name?

White Sulphur Springs: the resort went by the name of its mineral spring until the C&O Railway bought it and in 1913 opened a year-round hotel named The Greenbrier after the county.

The pepperoni roll, a West Virginia lunchbox staple, was first sold at a bakery in which town?

Giuseppe Argiro, an Italian immigrant and former miner, sold the first pepperoni rolls at his Country Club Bakery in Fairmont in 1927 as a lunch coal miners could carry underground.

West Virginia's official state fruit is which apple variety, first found in Clay County?

Golden Delicious began as a chance seedling on the Mullins family farm in Clay County; Stark Brothers Nursery bought the tree, and it grew into a leading apple variety at home and abroad.

West Virginia University's main campus is in which city?

Morgantown's campuses sit so far apart that driverless Personal Rapid Transit cars, built in the 1970s as a federally funded experiment, still shuttle students between them.

WVU's Mountaineer mascot carries what alongside a buckskin suit and coonskin cap?

A muzzle-loading rifle, custom-built for the mascot, is fired at games to rally the crowd; the student who wins the annual cheer-off for the role earns a scholarship.

Which conference did the WVU Mountaineers join in 2012?

WVU joined the Big 12 on July 1, 2012, alongside TCU, filling the places left when Missouri and Texas A&M departed for the Southeastern Conference.

Marshall University is named after which number chief justice of the United States?

John Marshall was the fourth chief justice, after Jay, Rutledge and Ellsworth, serving from 1801 until his death in 1835; his friend John Laidley founded Marshall Academy in 1837.

Which university lost most of its football team in a 1970 plane crash?

Marshall University lost 37 players among the 75 dead when the team's chartered jet hit a hillside short of the airport on November 14, 1970; each year on that date the campus memorial fountain is turned off.

What is West Virginia's official state animal?

Black bear: students, teachers and sportsmen chose it in a 1954-55 poll, but the legislature took until 1973 to make the title official.

West Virginia's capitol dome stands a few feet taller than which other dome?

The US Capitol's dome stands a few feet lower than the 292-foot dome Cass Gilbert designed after fire destroyed the old statehouse in 1921; its temporary stand-in burned too, in 1927.

Blackwater Falls gets its dark amber colour from what?

Tannins from hemlock and spruce needles stain the water amber, which is how the Blackwater River and its state park got their names.

Cass Scenic Railroad State Park runs what kind of historic engines up Back Allegheny Mountain?

Geared Shay logging locomotives drive every wheel, which let them haul timber up steep, rough mountain track; when the mill closed in 1960 the state bought the line and turned it into a park.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a vast 19th-century hospital building, stands in which West Virginia town?

Weston's asylum was still unfinished when the Civil War began, and Union troops seized its building fund from a local bank to bankroll Virginia's loyal government; the first patients arrived in 1864.

The Gothic-style West Virginia Penitentiary, now open for tours, stands in which town?

Moundsville's prison, built opposite the town's prehistoric mound, closed in 1995 after the state Supreme Court ruled that confinement in its cramped cells was cruel and unusual punishment.

Point Pleasant celebrates its battle as the first of which war?

The Revolutionary War began months later; a 1908 federal act helped pay for a monument to the claim, but historians file the fight between Cornstalk's Shawnee and Virginia militia under Lord Dunmore's War.

Which West Virginia town hosted the first Mother's Day service, organised by Anna Jarvis in 1908?

Grafton's Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church held the service on May 10, 1908, three years after Jarvis's mother died; Jarvis later came to deplore the holiday's commercialisation and tried to have it rescinded.

Which West Virginia native was the first pilot to break the sound barrier, in October 1947?

Chuck Yeager, raised in Hamlin, had been shot down over France in 1944, escaped across the Pyrenees to Spain and talked General Eisenhower into letting him fly combat again, three years before he broke Mach 1.

Which Chelyan-born Lakers star's silhouette became the NBA logo?

Jerry West, 'Zeke from Cabin Creek' after the creek near his birthplace, led WVU to the 1959 NCAA final; designer Alan Siegel traced the 1969 NBA logo from a photo of his dribble.

Which West Virginia-born actor won five Emmys playing Deputy Barney Fife?

Don Knotts won three Emmys as Barney Fife in five seasons, left in 1965 believing The Andy Griffith Show was about to end, then won two more for guest returns after it carried on.

Which West Virginia-born gymnast was the first American woman to win Olympic all-around gold, in 1984?

Mary Lou Retton trailed Romania's Ecaterina Szabo late in the 1984 all-around, then stuck a perfect 10 on her final vault to snatch the gold.

Which West Virginia-born author was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro at her grandparents' home while her missionary parents were back from China, and was taken there as a baby; The Good Earth grew out of the decades she lived there.

Which West Virginia mathematician calculated trajectories for Shepard's and Glenn's spaceflights?

Katherine Johnson worked out Alan Shepard's 1961 trajectory; a year later John Glenn asked that she personally recheck the new electronic computer's figures before he would fly his orbit.

Which country singer and guitar virtuoso was born in Glen Dale, West Virginia?

Brad Paisley was playing guitar by the age of eight, urged on by his grandfather, and as a young teenager became the youngest regular on Jamboree USA, a long-running West Virginia radio show.

Which West Virginia ski resort's Cupp Run has the biggest vertical drop in the Southeast?

Snowshoe Mountain is built upside down, with its village on top of Cheat Mountain and the slopes falling away below; Cupp Run drops 1,500 vertical feet.

Which county, home to Matewan, is West Virginia's youngest?

Mingo County was carved from Logan County in 1895; in 1920 Matewan police chief Sid Hatfield confronted company detectives evicting miners' families, and the gunfight fed the unrest that led to Blair Mountain.

West Virginia's center of population lies in which small Braxton County town?

Gassaway, on the Elk River in Braxton County, is the point where the state's 2020 population of 1,793,716 would balance; that count was 3.2% below 2010.

Which state led US coal production in 2022, with West Virginia in second place?

Wyoming mined about two-fifths of all US coal that year, roughly three times West Virginia's share, because most of it comes from the huge mines of the Powder River Basin.

What is West Virginia's official state tree?

The sugar maple became West Virginia's state tree by a 1949 legislative resolution; its autumn foliage colours the Allegheny highlands each October.

After the 2020 census, how many seats did West Virginia hold in the US House of Representatives?

It lost one of its three seats, and its population is expected to decline by more than 19,000 residents by 2030.

Which West Virginia history contest for eighth graders is named for Governor Spotswood's 1716 expedition?

The Golden Horseshoe test ends with winners kneeling to be dubbed knights and ladies with a tap of a sword, echoing the small golden horseshoes Spotswood is said to have given the men of his expedition.

Which 2018 video game drops players into a post-nuclear West Virginia, 25 years after the bombs?

Fallout 76 copies real places such as the Greenbrier resort onto its map, and several of its monsters come straight from the state's folklore.

Which Family Feud host and comedian was born a coal miner's son in Welch, West Virginia?

Steve Harvey left the coalfields as a child for Cleveland, where the street his family lived on was renamed Steve Harvey Way in 2015.

Which soul singer drew on his Slab Fork, West Virginia, childhood to write the 1972 hit Lean on Me?

Bill Withers wrote the song after moving to Los Angeles, where he missed the way neighbours in his coal mining town looked out for one another.

What free drink does Bluefield, West Virginia, hand out whenever the temperature passes 90 degrees Fahrenheit?

Lemonade has been the chamber of commerce's hot-day giveaway since 1938, a boast about how rarely the town's cool mountain summers get that warm.

Which 1999 film follows Homer Hickam and fellow Coalwood, West Virginia, teenagers building rockets?

October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys, the title of the memoir the film adapts; seeing Sputnik cross the sky over his mining town set Hickam on his way.

Which brightly glazed dinnerware line has been made in Newell, West Virginia, since its 1936 launch?

Fiesta vanished from shops between 1973 and 1985, then came back so strongly that its maker, the old Homer Laughlin China Company, renamed itself after the line.

The battleship USS West Virginia, sunk in 1941 and rebuilt, saw Japan's formal surrender in which bay?

Tokyo Bay completed a long comeback: torpedoed at its moorings in December 1941, the ship was refloated and rebuilt, and it lent five bandsmen to play at the ceremony.

Which actress, raised in West Virginia's capital from age three, became a Save the Children ambassador in 2009?

Jennifer Garner was born in Houston, and years after leaving for Hollywood she had her own children baptised at a Methodist church back in her West Virginia hometown.

Which Nobel-winning mathematician from Bluefield, West Virginia, inspired the film A Beautiful Mind?

John Nash was taking advanced maths classes at a local college while still in high school, and his later work on game theory won the 1994 economics Nobel.

Which Catholic senator's 1960 primary win in heavily Protestant West Virginia opened his way to the presidency?

John F. Kennedy took more than 60% of the vote in a state with few Catholic voters, and his beaten rival withdrew from the race.

Which songbird, honoured by more states than any other species, is West Virginia's state bird?

Cardinal is the name seven states wrote into law for the northern cardinal, and the Amtrak train that crosses West Virginia on its way from Chicago carries it too.

Which shrub, shown wreathing the coat of arms on West Virginia's flag, is the state flower?

Rhododendron of the state's chosen kind is the most widespread in the eastern mountains, and Nepal claims the plant as its national flower too.

Which president approved West Virginia's statehood on condition that slavery there be gradually abolished?

Abraham Lincoln knew many thought the new state illegal, so he wrote out a formal opinion arguing that its admission was both constitutional and expedient.

Which Confederate general, born in Clarksburg in 1824, rose to fame at First Bull Run?

Stonewall Jackson won the name when another general likened his steady brigade to a stone wall; two years later he was accidentally shot by his own side's pickets.

Which future Tuskegee Institute founder worked salt furnaces as a boy in Malden, West Virginia?

Booker T. Washington lived in Malden from age nine to sixteen and returned to teach there before he was chosen, at 25, to lead the new school in Alabama.

Which 2017 heist comedy has West Virginia siblings robbing the Charlotte Motor Speedway?

Logan Lucky is credited to a first-time screenwriter said to hail from Logan, West Virginia, a name widely suspected of being a pseudonym.

Marshall University's teams, known for years as the Big Green, now use which nickname?

Thundering Herd stuck partly because a Zane Grey novel of that name was popular at the time; the bison mascot Marco is named for Marshall College.

West Virginia University meets which school in the football rivalry known as the Backyard Brawl?

Pittsburgh's campus is only 75 miles away along Interstate 79, and the two schools, which first met in 1895, both hold the trademark on the rivalry's name.

Besides chili sauce, chopped onions and yellow mustard, which topping completes a West Virginia-style hot dog?

Coleslaw goes on over a chili sauce made with finely ground meat, a pairing so standard there that the style carries the state's name.

Which garlicky wild plant is celebrated at an April feast in Richwood, West Virginia?

Ramps smell so strong that a Richwood newspaper editor once laced his printer's ink with their juice as a joke, which drew the anger of the Postmaster General.

Which religious movement built the marble-and-gold Palace of Gold in northern West Virginia?

Hare Krishna devotees, many untrained and learning on the job, began it as a residence for their founder and finished it as his memorial shrine after he died.

Which federal agency runs its fingerprint and background-check division from Clarksburg, West Virginia?

FBI staff on the 986-acre site also run the instant background checks behind gun sales, and the Clarksburg division is the largest in the whole bureau.

Which First Lady championed Arthurdale, a 1930s homestead town built for jobless West Virginia coal miners?

Eleanor Roosevelt used her influence to win government approval for the scheme, then took such a close interest that she chose the refrigerators for the homes herself.

Which historian, once a West Virginia coal miner, launched the week that became Black History Month?

Carter G. Woodson could not enter high school full-time until he was twenty, because mine work left little time to study, yet he went on to earn a Harvard doctorate.

Which West Virginia Democrat overtook Strom Thurmond in 2006 as the longest-serving US senator?

Robert Byrd kept the seat until he died in 2010, and as his party's most senior senator he served four times as the chamber's president pro tempore.

Which Hall of Fame wide receiver starred at Marshall University before the Minnesota Vikings drafted him?

Randy Moss could transfer to Marshall without sitting out a season because it then played in Division I-AA, and the campus was about an hour's drive from his home.

Which coach, who won six national titles at Alabama, grew up in the West Virginia mining town of Monongah?

Nick Saban quarterbacked Monongah High School to a state championship in 1968, his senior year, decades before he began collecting titles as a coach.

Which golf great, known for his straw hat, served for decades as the Greenbrier resort's golf professional?

Sam Snead won his first tournament on the resort's courses in 1936, and at the age of 85 he could still shoot a round of 78 there.

What did James Rumsey demonstrate at Shepherdstown in 1787, twenty years before Fulton's Clermont?

A steamboat of Rumsey's design had no paddle wheel: a steam-driven pump shot a stream of water out of the stern to push the boat forward.

Immigrants from which Alpine country settled a remote West Virginia village in 1869 that still celebrates Fasnacht?

Switzerland still shapes the village calendar: Helvetia holds a public Fasnacht every year that blends the customs of two separate Swiss festivals.

Which West Virginia crag did the 10th Mountain Division use to train assault climbers for Italy?

Seneca Rocks kept an estimated 75,000 soft iron pitons the soldiers left behind, enough to give one face the name the Face of a Thousand Pitons.

Which West Virginia plateau, a wartime artillery range, has plant life typical of Canada?

Dolly Sods may still hide live mortar and artillery shells from that training, because searching the ground away from the trails proved impossible.

Which West Virginia spa town, a retreat for colonial Virginia's elite, is still formally named Bath?

Berkeley Springs was the name of the town's post office, adopted in 1802 because Virginia already had another Bath, and the postal name simply took over.

Which West Virginia valley, its floor about 3,200 feet up, is the highest sizable valley east of the Mississippi?

Canaan is said the local way, kuh-NANE, which legend blames on the German settler who named the place mispronouncing the biblical land.

Which future president described giant sloth claws from a West Virginia cave, now the state fossil?

Thomas Jefferson at first took the claws for those of a great cat three times the size of a lion, and named the animal Megalonyx, meaning great claw.

Which former vice president allegedly plotted treason at Harman Blennerhassett's island home near Parkersburg?

Aaron Burr's scheme made the island notorious, though little of the setting survived: the house where the pair supposedly plotted burned down in 1811.

The Cheat Mountain species of which amphibian lives only in the high Allegheny forests of eastern West Virginia?

Salamander numbers there probably crashed when loggers cut most of the old mountaintop forest by 1920, and the survivors now hang on in about 60 isolated pockets.

Which country singer raised in Cross Lanes, West Virginia, became host of public radio's Mountain Stage in 2021?

Kathy Mattea came to the microphone with two Grammys, after twice being voted the Country Music Association's Female Vocalist of the Year.

Which Jeannette Walls memoir follows her family to her grandparents' home in Welch, West Virginia?

The Glass Castle is named for her father's grandest unkept promise: a dream house of glass he always said he would build for the family.

Kingwood, West Virginia, has held a harvest festival since 1938 serving pancakes made from which crop?

Buckwheat was planted across the county during the Great Depression to revive farm incomes, and the festival began as an end-of-harvest celebration.

Which Braxton County town gave its name to the spade-headed 'monster' that witnesses reported after a 1952 fireball?

Flatwoods witnesses probably saw a meteor that crossed three states that night, and a later investigator argued the creature itself was a startled barn owl.

Which ancient culture raised West Virginia's 62-foot Grave Creek Mound, one of America's largest burial mounds?

Adena builders moved more than 60,000 tons of earth to raise it over two thousand years ago, and it is the largest mound of theirs that survives.

Which West Virginia town has the only covered bridge on the US Numbered Highway System, built in 1852?

Philippi's bridge carried both Union and Confederate troops in June 1861, after a clash that some count as the first land battle of the Civil War.

Which family glassmaker in Milton, West Virginia, made Country Music Award trophies in the 1980s?

Blenko's best seller is humbler than a trophy: a roughly rectangular water bottle introduced in 1938 and still in production.

Which West Virginia state park is home to the much-photographed Glade Creek Grist Mill?

Babcock's mill is younger than it looks: it was completed in 1976 from the parts of three older grist mills elsewhere in the state.

Which Huntington-born actor first voiced the killer doll Chucky in the 1988 horror film Child's Play?

Brad Dourif began in community theatre while a student at Marshall University, and his role as Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest brought an Oscar nomination.

Which coach, born in Follansbee, West Virginia, led Notre Dame to the 1988 national championship?

Lou Holtz's Notre Dame team clinched that title by beating third-ranked West Virginia University, the team from his native state, in a bowl game.

Which two-time NBA Coach of the Year played high school ball in Mullens, West Virginia?

Mike D'Antoni won the award with Phoenix in 2005, after the Suns improved by 33 wins, and again with Houston in 2017; Marshall has retired his No. 10.

Which industrialist gave $20,000 toward the 1902 hall in Lewisburg, West Virginia, that still bears his name?

Andrew Carnegie's money replaced a girls' school that had burned down, and its auditorium is one of only eight Carnegie Halls still in continuous use as a venue.

Which Parkersburg-born director put himself on a 30-day McDonald's diet for Super Size Me?

Morgan Spurlock was raised in Beckley and studied film at New York University, and the documentary went on to earn an Academy Award nomination.