About West Virginia

West Virginia takes its name from Virginia, from which it separated during the Civil War. When Virginia voted to secede from the Union in April 1861, the counties of the western part of the state, which had fewer enslaved people, weaker ties to the plantation economy, and stronger economic connections to the North, refused to go along. Delegates from the western counties met, declared Virginia's secession ordinance void, formed a loyal state government, and petitioned Congress for admission as a separate state. West Virginia was admitted to the union on June 20, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, making it the only state to have been formed by seceding from a Confederate state. The name West Virginia was chosen simply to reflect the region's geographical relationship to the original Virginia.

West Virginia is the only state born from the Civil War on the Union side, carved from Virginia by Unionist mountaineers who refused to follow a slaveholders' secession in which they had no stake and no interest. "Montani Semper Liberi", Mountaineers Are Always Free , is not merely a motto. It is the operating principle of a state that has spent 160 years asserting its independence against coal companies, federal regulators, and anyone else who presumed to tell it what to do.

The state's geography tells the story: there are no flat plains here, no coastal lowlands, no navigable rivers that made tobacco or cotton agriculture possible. West Virginia is mountain on mountain, gorge on gorge , a landscape that kept out the plantation economy, made small-farm subsistence the dominant culture, and made the state's working people uniquely suited to the hard work of extracting coal from narrow seams deep underground. When the coal companies came with their railroads and their scrip and their company stores, they found a population that had never been broken to servitude and that eventually fought back, literally, with rifles, at Blair Mountain in 1921.

The Mountain State today is grappling with the consequences of dependence on a single industry now in irreversible decline, the opioid epidemic that has killed tens of thousands of its people, and the challenge of finding a new economic identity without losing the landscape and culture that make West Virginia genuinely unlike anywhere else in America. New River Gorge National Park, the youngest major national park in the eastern United States, offers one path forward. The mountains have never been the problem. They have always been the point.