West Virginia historical timeline

Long considered part of Virginia (called Trans-Allegheny Virginia) from 1776, the mountainous western counties that became West Virginia were geographically and economically isolated from the rest of the state, with fewer large farms and less support for slavery. When Virginia seceded from the United States in 1861, these counties refused to follow; residents set up a separate "Restored Government" under Francis Pierpont, and a majority voted to form a new state, admitted into the United States on 20 June 1863 as a slave state and a key Civil War border state, the only state ever formed by splitting from a Confederate one. Two years earlier, in 1859, the abolitionist John Brown had led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in a failed attempt to spark a slave rebellion; during the war itself, the town became the northernmost point of Confederate-held territory and changed hands repeatedly.

Railroad expansion after the war opened West Virginia's southern and northern coalfields to large-scale development, and by the early 20th century the state was among the nation's leading coal producers, a boom that built towns but also fueled deep labor conflict. That conflict peaked in the Battle of Blair Mountain in Logan County, fought over five days in late August and early September 1921: some 10,000 armed coal miners, seeking to unionize the southern coalfields, confronted around 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers backed by mine operators, in what remains the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War itself, ending only when federal troops intervened by presidential order.