White Sulphur Springs

Town in Greenbrier County, southeast West Virginia; population (1990) 2,800. It is situated in the Allegheny Mountains, 13 km/8 mi east of Lewisburg, near the Virginia state line.

Named after the springs now on the grounds of the 1913 Greenbrier Hotel, the settlement developed as a spa in the 1770s. An earlier hotel served as a hospital and headquarters to both Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War, and Confederates won a skirmish nearby in August 1863. Presidents from Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson summered here, and the resort has been used by the government for various purposes, including the interning of enemy diplomats during World War II and the secret construction in the 1950s of a supposedly nuclear bomb-proof mountain bunker for Federal officials.