Towns and Cities in West Virginia, USA

West Virginia

West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Mid-Atlantic regions of the Southern USA. It is bordered by Pennsylvania to the northeast, Maryland to the east and northeast, Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, and Ohio to the northwest. West Virginia is the 38th in population with 1,792,147 inhabitants in 2019. Its capital and largest city is Charleston. Its governor is Jim Justice.

West Virginia has generally a humid subtropical climate, with warm to hot, humid summers and chilly winters. Forests cover more than three-fourths of the state; it’s home to rabbits, squirrels, gray foxes, opossums, skunks, raccoons, and groundhogs.

After the British arrived in the 1600s, the area that now encompasses West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of North Carolina, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New York was altogether called Virginia. The British drove out the Natives in order to give their lands to the Europeans. At the beginning of the Civil War (1861-1865), West Virginia refused to secede from the Union along with the rest of the state. West Virginia separated from Virginia in 1861, and two years later, it became a state on its own.

West Virginia has an abundance and variety of natural resources, although bituminous coal is the most important. The state’s recoverable coal reserves are estimated varyingly at 2 to 50 billion tons; natural gas dominates the state’s west-central portion. Petroleum is extracted in the northern two-thirds of the gas-producing areas.