Crossroads around Martinsburg, West Virginia - Martinsburg WV Off the Beaten Path

Preview: Crossroads is the name we’ve given to the region that sits in the heart of the Eastern Panhandle and contains the historic railroad town of Martinsburg and all of Berkeley County west of U.S. Highway 11, sometimes still referred to as the Valley Pike. In the early eighteenth century, the region became home to the first settlers in what is now West Virginia and later evolved into a bustling center of wagon, coach, and rail travel to the West. The Valley Pike, now paralleled by Interstate 81, once served as the major north/ south artery linking Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley to the Valley of Virginia. The legacy of the earliest settlers lives on in Berkeley County’s more than 2,000 National Register historic sites, the highest concentration in the state. Crossroads' vast fruit orchards, cattle ranches, and truck farms, meanwhile, continue to find steady markets in the growing urban corridors of the East, and in recent years they have become the focus of open-space preservation efforts. The gigantic Mountain State Apple Harvest Festival, held every third weekend in October in Martinsburg, salutes one of the region’s most successful agribusinesses. With a population of 15,000—and growing—Martinsburg has long been the Eastern Panhandle’s principal city, an industrial, agricultural, and transportation center that’s just beginning to tap its tourism attributes. Because of its strategic importance as the western gateway to the neighboring Shenandoah Valley, Martinsburg was heavily impacted by the Civil War, once serving as a command center for Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a native West Virginian. Though badly bruised during the war, the city remarkably preserved many of its glorious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings. The above description is an excerpt from "West Virginia: Off the Beaten Path." Whether you're a visitor or a local looking for something different, this chapter from the Off the Beaten Path series will help you take the "road less traveled" and discover hidden attractions, unique finds, and unusual locales that most tourists miss.
© Copyright Su Clauson-Wicker published by Insiders' Guide all rights reserved.


This travel guide comes from:
West Virginia Off the Beaten Path Guide Book