A 112,544-square-foot bunker sat provisioned in the hillside beneath a West Virginia resort for 30 years, built to hold every member of Congress. The town knew, and kept the secret.
A Pirep featured story · KLWB Greenbrier Valley, Lewisburg, WV
In the 1950s the Eisenhower administration planned for the destruction of Washington. Every branch of government got a relocation site; the executive branch got Mount Weather in Virginia, and Congress got White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a four-hour drive from the Capitol, directly on the C&O main line, at a resort official Washington already knew well.
The Greenbrier had hosted presidents since the 1830s, when Van Buren, Tyler, and Fillmore came so regularly the place was called the summer White House. During World War II it served first as an internment facility for Japanese, Italian, and German diplomats, then as Ashford General Hospital, which treated more than 24,000 soldiers; the patients included Omar Bradley and General Dwight Eisenhower himself.
Construction began in the late 1950s under the cover story of a new wing, the West Virginia Wing. The cover was thin. Truman Wright, the resort's manager from 1951 to 1974, remembered a contractor asking, "This is an exhibit hall? We've got 110 urinals we just installed." Construction worker Randy Wickline put it plainly: "Nobody came out and said it was a bomb shelter, but they weren't building it to keep the rain off them. I mean a fool would have known."
The bunker runs 720 feet into the hillside beneath the wing, its working floors about 65 feet down: 112,544 square feet on two levels, roughly two football fields stacked. Four blast doors came from the Mosler Safe Company of Hamilton, Ohio; the largest weighs 28 tons, is 19.5 inches thick, and is balanced so well it opens with 50 pounds of force. The Exhibit Hall where conventioneers held meetings was a disguised work area for Congress, its hidden doors in plain sight. Below sat 18 dormitories with metal bunks for 1,100 people, a 400-seat cafeteria with windows painted onto the walls, and decontamination showers. The communications gear was tended by men from Forsythe Associates, a Pentagon front whose cover job was maintaining the resort's 1,100 televisions.
The facility was completed on October 16, 1962. In Washington that same morning, President Kennedy was shown the U-2 photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Six days later he told the country.
The bunker stayed in a constant state of readiness for 30 years, filters running, food stocks rotated, every member of Congress on its rolls. The town understood and said nothing. "People wondered about it to their husband, their wife, their brother," a lifelong Greenbrier County resident later said, "but they weren't going to wonder about it to anyone else." The order to occupy never came.
In May 1992 The Washington Post Magazine ran Ted Gup's story, "The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway." The government stood the facility down; its lease ended in 1995, and the tours began almost immediately after.
Today the resort runs ninety-minute tours through the declassified bunker. The 28-ton door swings on its 50 pounds of force, the filtration system still pulls a wind through the doorways, the dormitory bunks are made, and the cafeteria keeps its painted-on views. Part of the space now stores private-sector data. KLWB sits ten road miles west, fifteen minutes by car; from the air, the resort is the great white complex on the edge of White Sulphur Springs with Kate's Mountain rising behind it to the south, and the bunker is in the hillside beneath the West Virginia Wing.