Lewisburg, WV
An 1834 house in the Lewisburg historic district that the Hock family grew into an inn in the late 1920s; it is on the National Register, and the rooms are furnished in antiques. The name honors Andrew Lewis, who mustered the Virginia militia at Lewisburg in 1774 and marched them 161 miles to the Battle of Point Pleasant; the stone springhouse three blocks below the inn marks the spring the town grew around. The Jefferson Dining Room runs a scratch, farm-to-table kitchen, buttermilk biscuits and local mountain trout included, with garden seating in warm weather and the Thistle Lounge for cocktails. Dinner is served Friday through Monday and brunch on Saturday and Sunday, so a midweek dinner run fails.
Greenbrier Valley Airport sits three miles north of Lewisburg in the West Virginia Alleghenies, opened 1968-69 with a 6,000-foot runway later extended to 7,003. The field exists primarily to serve The Greenbrier — the historic resort in adjacent White Sulphur Springs, founded around the sulphur springs in 1778. For 250 years the resort has hosted presidents, princes, and politicians; during WWII it served as an internment camp for German, Italian, and Japanese diplomats, then as a military hospital where Dwight Eisenhower was a patient. Between 1959 and 1962 the federal government secretly buried a 112,544-square-foot nuclear bunker 720 feet beneath the resort's new West Virginia Wing — Project Greek Island, a continuity-of-government facility built to house every member of Congress through a Cold War crisis. The 25-ton blast doors were made by the Mosler Safe Company of Hamilton, Ohio. The bunker was completed October 16, 1962, days before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and stayed on standby until Washington Post reporter Ted Gup exposed it on May 31, 1992. The decommissioned facility is open for 90-minute public tours. Field elevation is 2,302 feet.
The Greenbrier began as a sulphur springs spa in 1778 and grew over 250 years into one of America's grand resorts. The central wing, completed 1913 to a design by Frederick Julius Sterner, is six stories tall, 250 rooms, and topped by an iron-and-glass dome painted green. The 11,000-acre property includes three championship golf courses — the Old White (1913, by Charles B. Macdonald), the Greenbrier (1924, by Seth Raynor and George O'Neil), and the Meadows (1962). 26 U.S. presidents have stayed at the resort. During WWII the hotel served first as an internment facility for German, Italian, and Japanese diplomats, then as Ashford General Hospital. The East Wing — known as the West Virginia Wing — was built between 1959 and 1962 as cover for Project Greek Island, a secret Cold War congressional bunker buried 720 feet beneath it.
The New River Gorge Bridge carries US 19 across the New River Gorge in Fayette County, West Virginia. When it opened October 22, 1977 it was the longest steel arch span in the world at 1,700 feet — it is still the third-longest. The total length is 3,030 feet; the deck sits 876 feet above the river. The bridge replaced a 40-minute drive down switchbacks and back up the other side with a 60-second crossing. The river below was protected in 1978 as the New River Gorge National River; in December 2020 it was redesignated as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, the youngest unit in the National Park System. On the third Saturday in October every year, the bridge is closed to vehicles for "Bridge Day" — and BASE jumpers leap from the deck. It is the largest legal BASE-jumping event in the world.
A 215-foot limestone arch — twenty stories tall — spanning a gorge cut by little Cedar Creek, so massive that US Route 11 runs across the top and most drivers never realize they're crossing it. For two centuries it was as famous as Niagara, billed as one of the "Seven Natural Wonders of the World." Thomas Jefferson loved it so much he bought it from King George III in 1774 — 157 acres including the bridge — and built a cabin to host visitors; he called it "the most sublime of Nature's works." Legend (unproven but enduring) says a young George Washington surveyed it and carved his initials into the rock wall. It's now a Virginia state park in the Shenandoah Valley.
Deep in a remote Allegheny valley stands the Green Bank Telescope — the largest fully steerable radio telescope on Earth, a dish 100 by 110 meters (bigger than a football field) on a mount that can point anywhere in the sky, weighing 17 million pounds yet aiming with astonishing precision. It listens for the faintest radio whispers from the cosmos — pulsars, distant galaxies, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. To work, it needs radio silence, so the entire region is the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile federal zone where cell towers, WiFi, and even microwave ovens are restricted; the valley around the telescope is one of the only places in the modern US essentially free of human radio noise. People sensitive to electromagnetic fields have moved here for the quiet.