Huntington in the southwest is close to Ohio and Kentucky, while Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry in the eastern panhandle region are considered part of the Washington metropolitan area, between Maryland and Virginia.

It is also known for its tourism[8] and a wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities, including skiing, whitewater rafting, fishing, hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, rock climbing, and hunting.

In the 1670s, during the Beaver Wars, the powerful Iroquois, five allied nations based in present-day New York and Pennsylvania, drove out other Native American tribes from the region to reserve the upper Ohio Valley as a hunting ground.

Conflicts with European settlers resulted in various displaced Native tribes settling in West Virginia, where they were known as Mingo, meaning "remote affiliates of the Iroquois Confederacy".

[full citation needed] Eventually, tribal villages began depending on corn to feed their turkey flocks, as Kanawha Fort Ancients practiced bird husbandry.

In 1671, General Abraham Wood, at the direction of Royal Governor William Berkeley of the Virginia Colony, sent a party from Fort Henry led by Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam to survey this territory.

The rugged terrain made slavery unprofitable, and time only increased the social, political, economic, and cultural differences (see Tuckahoes and Cohees) between Virginia's two sections.

This was made acceptable to the west by a provision that required the General Assembly to reapportion representation based on the white population in 1865, or else put the matter to a public referendum.

In addition to differences over slavery, he and allies felt the Virginia government ignored and refused to spend funds on needed internal improvements in the west, such as turnpikes and railroads.

The next day, convention delegates chose Francis H. Pierpont as governor of Virginia and elected other officers to a rival state government and two U.S. senators (Willey and Carlile) to replace secessionists before adjourning.

[47] One of the key figures was Gordon Battelle, who also represented Ohio County, and who proposed resolutions to establish public schools, as well as to limit the movement of slaves into the new state, and to gradually abolish slavery.

This lime was used for agricultural and construction purposes; for many years a specific portion of the C & O Railroad carried limestone rock to Clifton Forge, Virginia as an industrial flux.

As the anthracite mines of northwestern New Jersey and Pennsylvania began to play out during this same time period, investors and industrialists focused new interest in West Virginia.

They acquired large tracts of land in the area, and Page began the Deepwater Railway, a short-line railroad chartered to stretch between the C&O at its line along the Kanawha River and the N&W at Matoaka—a distance of about 80 miles (130 km).

One of the silent partner investors Page had enlisted was millionaire industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers, a principal in John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust and an old hand at developing natural resources and transportation.

Sea level rose and fell many times during the Carboniferous Period (Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Subperiods), yielding a variety of rock strata that dominate the bedrock today.

[64] The State Fossil of West Virginia is the giant ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii, which lived during the Pleistocene Epoch (the most recent "Ice Age").

In addition to persistent cloudy skies caused by the damming of moisture by the Alleghenies, West Virginia also experiences some of the most frequent precipitation in the nation, with Snowshoe averaging nearly 200 days a year with either rain or snow.

An average of 34 inches (860 mm) of snow falls annually in Charleston, although during the winter of 1995–1996 more than three times that amount fell as several cities in the state established new records for snowfall.

West Virginia is located in the heart of the Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Bed, which stretches from Tennessee north to New York in the middle of Appalachia.

West Virginia ranked last or next-to-last in critical indicators such as Workforce Education, Entrepreneurial Activity, High-Tech Jobs, and Scientists and Engineers.

[143] The state lost 5,600 jobs in its labor force in four critical economic sectors: construction (1,900), manufacturing (1,100), retail (1,800), and education (800), while gaining just 400 in mining and logging.

[151] Gallup-Healthways annual "State of American Well-Being" rankings reports that 1,261 concerned West Virginians rated themselves as "suffering" in categories such as Quality of Life, Physical Health, and Access to Basic Needs.

[154] The Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2013 KIDS COUNT Data Book also ranked West Virginia's education system 47th in the nation for the second straight year.

[165] American environmental attorney Robert Bilott exposed how DuPont had been knowingly polluting water with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in Parkersburg, West Virginia, since the 1980s.

Corridor L, carrying US 19, runs from the Turnpike at Beckley to I-79 near Sutton (and provides a short cut of about 40 miles (64 km) and bypasses Charleston's urban traffic for travelers heading to and from Florida).

Camp Washington-Carver, a Mountain Cultural Arts Center located at Clifftop in Fayette County, hosts an annual Appalachian String Band Festival.

[192] The Capitol Complex in Charleston hosts The Vandalia Gathering, where traditional Appalachian musicians compete in contests and play in impromptu jam sessions and evening concerts over the weekend.

The song mentions the Shenandoah River and the Blue Ridge Mountains, both features traversing the easternmost extremity of the state's "eastern panhandle", in Jefferson County.

It is a day full of music by community groups, food, and family fun, culminating in a free performance by the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra with a fireworks display following.