![]() George Washington wasn’t the only member of the family to have a town named in his honor. George Washington’s brothers built estates that still stand in West Virginia. After the Washington Post revealed the secret in 1992, the bunker was decommissioned and is now open for public tours. The bunker opened in 1961 and remained on constant alert as a nuclear fallout shelter and emergency relocation facility for the U.S. For 30 years, West Virginia was home to a top-secret bunker for Congress to use in case of a nuclear war.ĭuring the height of the Cold War in 1958, a top-secret project began to construct a bunker 720 feet beneath The Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs. The first five RFD carriers began service on October 1, 1896, out of post offices in Charles Town, Halltown and Uvilla. When RFD service began in 1896, Postmaster General William Wilson introduced it first to his home state. Farm families needed to travel to distant post offices to retrieve their mail or hire private companies to deliver. While city dwellers began to receive free mail delivery in 1863, the same was not true for the majority of Americans who lived in rural areas. Rural Free Delivery (RFD) was inaugurated in West Virginia. (In 1769, land speculators attempted to establish a colony called Vandalia on much of the same footprint as Westsylvania.) 5. The Continental Congress ignored the petition along with another plea in 1783 to make Westsylvania the 14th state. In 1775, a group of 2,000 residents signed a petition asking the Continental Congress to create a 14th colony called Westsylvania, which would have encompassed all of today’s West Virginia along with portions of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Sectional differences brewed inside Virginia for decades before the Civil War. Western Virginians had attempted to form the state of Westsylvania after the American Revolution. Voters selected Charleston over Martinsburg and Clarksburg, and the capital finally moved to its permanent home in 1885. The capital’s location was ultimately put to a statewide vote in 1877, but Wheeling was not among the choices. In 1870, the capital shifted to Charleston, but it returned to Wheeling in 1875. After West Virginia achieved statehood, the capital remained in the city. The delegates from the western counties seeking statehood gathered in Wheeling to begin the process of joining the Union. Wheeling was West Virginia’s original capital. When the constitution for the proposed state was finalized in 1862, however, the name had changed to the more generic West Virginia. The name honored a Native American tribe and a major state river of the same name. ![]() In the wake of Virginia’s secession, a convention of delegates from western Virginia met in Wheeling in 1861 for the purpose of forming the “State of Kanawha,” which incorporated 39 counties. Kanawha was originally proposed as the state’s name. ![]() Although Virginia joined the Confederacy in April 1861, the western part of the state remained loyal to the Union and began the process of separation. From the state’s earliest days, slave-holding plantation owners in the eastern part of Virginia dominated the state’s economy and politics, leaving the self-sufficient farmers who lived in the rugged western counties, where slavery was far less prevalent, feeling ignored. The schism that split the United States in two during the Civil War did the same to Virginia. West Virginia was born out of sectional differences during the Civil War.
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