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West Virginia is a state in the Southern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. It is bordered by Pennsylvania to the north and east, Maryland to the east and northeast, Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, and Ohio to the northwest.
- Charleston
Charleston is the capital and most populous city of the U.S....
- Flag of West Virginia
This work has been released into the public domain by its...
- Thomas Lee
Colonel Thomas Lee (c. 1690 – November 14, 1750) was a...
- Parkersburg, West Virginia
Parkersburg is a city in and the county seat of Wood County,...
- Senate
The West Virginia Senate is the upper house of the West...
- Cities
West Virginia is a state located in the Southern United...
- Harpers Ferry
Harpers Ferry is a historic town in Jefferson County, West...
- Geography of West Virginia
The climate of West Virginia is generally a humid...
- Glen Ferris, West Virginia
Glen Ferris is a census-designated place (CDP) on the...
- Hurricane
Hurricane (/ ˈ h ɜːr ʌ k ɪ n / HUR-uh-kin) is a city in...
- Charleston
- Overview
- Relief
- Drainage and soils
West Virginia, constituent state of the United States of America. Admitted to the union as the 35th state in 1863, it is a relatively small state. It is bordered by Pennsylvania to the north, Maryland and Virginia to the east, Kentucky to the southwest, and Ohio to the northwest. The state capital is Charleston.
West Virginia justifies in every way its nickname, the Mountain State. With an average elevation of about 1,500 feet (460 metres) above sea level, it is the highest of any U.S. state east of the Mississippi River. It is a region tied economically and socially to the mountain spines that span its length and breadth and to the rivers that enclose it on many sides. Originally it constituted the northwestern portion of Virginia, but its inhabitants defied the state’s secession convention in 1861, choosing instead to remain within the union. Two years later the area formed a new state, its citizenry acting much in the tradition suggested by the motto of West Virginia, “Montani semper liberi” (“Mountaineers are always free”).
The maximum elevation in West Virginia is 4,863 feet (1,482 metres) at Spruce Knob, in the east. The lowest point is 247 feet (75 metres) at Harpers Ferry, located on a steep tongue of land rising above the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers. The land is rugged, ranging from hilly to mountainous, and there are no extensive expanses of level land. The state has two panhandles, one knifing northward between Pennsylvania and Ohio, the other eastward between Maryland and Virginia.
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All of West Virginia is a part of the Appalachian Mountain system. It is commonly subdivided into two major physiographic regions: the Appalachian Plateau Province and the Ridge and Valley Province. In general, these are separated by the Allegheny Front, dividing the waters that flow to the Atlantic Ocean from those flowing to the Gulf of Mexico. The Appalachian Plateau Province covers the western two-thirds of the state and coincides with the Ohio River drainage basin. It is a region severely dissected by streams into a maze of hills and valleys, and, in places, the original plateau surface shows as the uniform top levels of the remaining ranges. The eastern portion of the plateau, with the highest mountains of the state, is referred to as the Allegheny Mountain section. The Allegheny Mountains include more than 40 peaks over 4,000 feet (1,200 metres) in elevation, inducing heavy precipitation in the area and making it the wettest in the state and the source of many of its rivers. The eastern edge of the state and the eastern panhandle comprise the Ridge and Valley Province. This geologic province takes in most of the Potomac River basin and is famous for its northeast-southwest folded mountain alignment, part of the chain reaching from Canada to north-central Alabama. The northern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains forms a minor region in the easternmost end of the eastern panhandle.
The drainage east of the Allegheny Front features a trellised pattern flowing toward the northeast and ultimately draining into the Potomac. The western portions drain across an inclined plane by a longer, dendritic drainage pattern that flows generally northwest into the Ohio River. A very small area drains into the eastward-bound James River system of Virginia.
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Drainage over West Virginia’s rugged surface has created some of the state’s most productive and level alluvial soils on the larger river floodplains. The weathered limestone soils of the east are suited for pasture and orchards. Some of the clay soils along the Ohio River are bases for the ceramics industry. In general, however, the high relief and deciduous forest of the Appalachian Plateau Province produce a thin, rocky, acidic soil not conducive to large-scale commercial farming.
The U.S. state of West Virginia has 55 counties. Fifty of them existed at the time of the Wheeling Convention in 1861, during the American Civil War, when those counties seceded from the Commonwealth of Virginia to form the new state of West Virginia. [1]
History of West Virginia. The history of West Virginia stems from the 1861 Wheeling Convention, which was an assembly of northwestern Virginian Southern Unionists, who aimed to repeal the Ordinance of Secession that Virginia made during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
It is often abbreviated W. Va. or simply WV. About 1,800,000 people live in the state. West Virginia is bordered by Pennsylvania to the north, by Ohio to the north and west, by Kentucky to the west, by Maryland to the north and east, and by Virginia to the east and south.
- June 20, 1863 (35th)
- Part of Virginia
- United States
West Virginia. West Virginia is a state in the southeastern region of the United States of America. It's often called the "Mountain State", being the only state in the USA to lie completely within a mountain range (the Appalachians ), and having the highest mean elevation of any state in the east.
e-WV is a project of the West Virginia Humanities Council that offers thousands of articles on West Virginia’s people, places, history, arts, science and culture. Browse by category or view a random article to learn more about the Mountain State.
