West Virginia

Mother's Day started in West Virginia. In 1908, Anna Jarvis held the first official celebration at a church in Grafton to honor her own mother, who had died three years earlier.

She campaigned until President Wilson made it a national holiday in 1914. Then she watched florists, candy companies, and card makers turn it into a money-making machine.

Jarvis called them "bandits and racketeers," and spent the rest of her life trying to get the holiday canceled.

West Virginia is the only state in America created by breaking away from another state. When Virginia voted to leave the Union in 1861, the western mountain counties refused to go. On June 20, 1863, President Lincoln signed West Virginia into existence as the 35th state.

Cherokee, Shawnee, and other Native peoples lived in these mountains for thousands of years. The ancient Adena people built burial mounds here as far back as 500 BC, and you can still see them near Moundsville.

Two years before the Civil War started, John Brown, who wanted to end slavery, raided the government weapons warehouse at Harpers Ferry in 1859. The raid failed, and Brown was hanged. But the event helped push the country toward war.

Coal built West Virginia's economy and broke its people. By the late 1800s, miners worked dangerous underground shifts while living in company-owned towns where the mining company controlled the housing, the store, and the paycheck.

Workers fought back, and the state became a battleground for some of the biggest fights between workers and mine owners in American history.

Raft the whitewater rapids at New River Gorge National Park and walk across the New River Gorge Bridge, the longest steel arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere. Tour the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in a real underground railcar, and try a pepperoni roll, the state's signature snack invented by Italian immigrant coal miners.