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West Virginia 
State
bird, cardinal. State flower, Big Laurel or Rhododendron
State
tree, sugar maple
They
wrote a song about West Virginia, it started:
West
Virginia almost Heaven.
West
Virginia is , in places, incredibly beautiful, and can boast the longest
white-water rivers and most 
vast
wilderness areas in the eastern US. The extreme wilderness, which has historically
isolated its inhabitants, now makes the state a popular destination for
hikers and outdoors enthusiasts, and the moonshiners of old have been replaced
by ski instructors and mountain-bike guides.
The state's most popular destination, the restored 1850s town of Harpers Ferry , standing just across the broad rivers which form its Maryland and Virginia borders. To the west, the Allegheny Mountains stretch for over 150 miles; more than a million acres of hardwood forest rival New England for brilliant autumnal color. West Virginia's oldest and most attractive town, Lewisburg.
Considering that it's the most extensive wilderness area near the east coast, within just a few hours' drive of a dozen big cities, surprisingly few people have heard about, much less bothered to visit, the backcountry reaches of the Allegheny Mountains , West Virginia's segment of the Appalachian chain. The entire 140-mile crest is protected as part of the Monongahela National Forest , within which numerous state parks highlight the most spectacular sights. There are no cities and few towns, public transportation is nonexistent, and not much goes on after dark - to give an idea of how rural it is, whole counties do without a single traffic light - but if you like to backpack, ski, cycle, climb, canoe or just wander around the great outdoors, the Alleghenies are well worth a visit. For maps and more detailed information, contact the state tourist office or the Monongahela National Forest Supervisor, 200 Sycamore St, Elkins, WV 26241 (Mon-Fri 8am-4.45pm; tel 304/636-1800
CHARLESTON , West Virginia's state capital and largest city. Charleston isn't a place many people set out to visit, mainly because there's not very much to see or do; the riverfront state capitol , designed by Lincoln Memorial architect Cass Gilbert and completed in 1932, is pleasant enough, with a small monument to black activist Booker T. Washington on its grounds, but nothing really grabs you. The West Virginia Cultural Center (Mon-Thurs 9am-8pm, Fri-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 12-6pm, ; free), in the same compound as the capitol, acts as the state museum with extensive displays in the basement on coalmining, forestry, wars and general social history. The main live showcase of traditional West Virginian culture takes place here during the annual Vandalia Festival , Appalachia's largest celebration of folk arts and crafts, held on Memorial Day weekend and featuring lively bluegrass music and tall-tale-telling contests. The annual Regatta on Labor Day weekend is one of the city's other big events.
There are three hundred rooms at the very central Travelodge , 2 Kanawha Blvd E (tel 304/343-4521 or 1-800/578-7878; $50-75), which also has a sauna and swimming pool; other motels abound along the interstates. General Seafood , 213 Broad St (Tues-Sat; tel 304/343-5671), is a restaurant attached to a fish market, and Capitol Street downtown boasts a string of eateries such as the Mykonos Café at no. 218 (tel 304/347-9220), which does good Greek lunch specials. On the western edge of downtown, almost alongside I-64 between Lee and Quarrier streets, the gleaming new Charleston Civic Center mall is the liveliest area to while away a couple of hours.
HARPERS FERRY , a ruggedly sited eighteenth-century town now restored as a national historic park, gives many visitors their first and only look at West Virginia. Clinging to steep hillsides above the rocky confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, many of the town's forty-odd brick and stone buildings date from the days when George Washington set up the country's first national munitions factory here to arm the young Republic. During the mid-1800s Harpers Ferry was a thriving industrial complex, home to some five thousand workers and linked to the capital by the B&O Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. After suffering the ravages of the Civil War and a series of torrential floods, however, it was all but abandoned, the empty shells of its homes and factories slowly becoming overgrown by the dense forest that covers the surrounding hills. Almost all of Harpers Ferry has since been reconstructed as an outdoor museum, combining historical importance and natural beauty.
However pretty Harpers Ferry may be - and in the fall, when the leaves blaze with color, it's hard to imagine a more picture-perfect setting - it's best known for its place in US history. The 1859 raid on its huge US arsenal by anti-slavery revolutionary John Brown , which rocked the already fragmenting nation, was the clearest foreshadowing of the Civil War, which broke out just sixteen months later. In the hope of fomenting a widespread slave revolt, Brown and twenty-one other abolitionist radicals, including two of his sons and five black men, seized the munitions factory and its large store of weapons on the night of October 16. They held out for two days before US troops, under the command of Robert E. Lee, stormed the buildings, killing many of the raiders and capturing Brown. He was taken to nearby Charles Town, put on trial just nine days later, and convicted of treason; by the time he was hanged on December 2, he was far from alone in regarding himself as a martyr to the abolitionist cause.
As one of only two places in the US with the capacity to manufacture munitions, Harpers Ferry was a major prize in the Civil War, and it never got back on its feet after the resultant devastation. The arsenal buildings were burned in 1861 to keep the weapons out of Confederate hands, while in 1862 Stonewall Jackson captured the town along with 12,500 Union soldiers. Enough of the original buildings and cobbled streets survive, however, to give a good sense of how things used to be, and the restoration project has so far managed to re-create the townscape without making it feel too much like a theme park
The
Town
Almost
everyone who comes to Harpers Ferry drives. Parking is virtually banned
in the old town area; shuttle buses run from the large visitor center on
US-340 (visitor center and attractions open daily 8am-5pm; buses run 8am
-5.45pm, 6.45pm
The New River Gorge lies just thirty miles west of Lewisburg along I-64. Stretching for over fifty miles, and now protected as a national park, the thousand-foot cleft was carved through the limestone mountains by the New River - despite its name, one of the oldest rivers in North America. Apart from one daily train, there's no easy access to most of the gorge - to see it, you have to get out on the water, with the help of any of over fifty professional rafting companies; visitor centers located near the most impressive spots give details of recreation opportunities. Just off US-19 northeast of Fayetteville , the Canyon Rim visitor center sits alongside the New River Gorge Bridge (daily: June-Aug 9am-8pm; Sept-Oct 9am-6pm; Nov-May 9am-5pm; tel 304/574-2115), the largest single-span steel arch in the country, which rises nine hundred feet above the river; the smaller Grandview visitor center is located at an elbow bend in the river, five miles north of I-64 near Beckley (same hours; tel 304/763-3715).
Fortunately for car-less travelers, Amtrak trains from Washington DC pass right through the gorge on one of the most stunning railway journeys in the East. Though the ride itself is memorable enough, for a close-up look you can get off at the southern end of the gorge at the c.1900 railroad town of HINTON . The train's only stop, it's a fascinating, if somewhat dilapidated remnant of the glory days of the railroads. An almost perfectly preserved purpose-built company town - the National Park Service intends someday to restore it as a living museum - it is beautifully sited, with brick-lined streets angling up from the water, lined by dozens of grand civic buildings as well as row after row of slowly decaying workers' houses. A walking tour map of Hinton is available from the Chamber of Commerce, 206 Temple St (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; tel 304/466-5420).
