Greenbrier River

About

Greenbrier River, West Virginia — 1774 Battle of Point Pleasant. The Greenbrier is a Class I–II river, wide and lucid, best run between 300 and 1,500 CFS. The USGS gauge 03184000 records a long-term average near 840 CFS, a moderate historical flow around 780 CFS. It is a mountain stream and a flatwater float at once — intimate and forested on its upper reaches from Durbin to Marlinton, a trail corridor through the middle from Marlinton to Alderson, and wider and slower on the lower run from Alderson to Hinton.

Long before survey crews or railroads, the valley belonged to the Shawnee, who prized it as hunting territory. The rich bottomlands and abundant wildlife made the Greenbrier country among the most productive landscapes in the Appalachians. The first European settlers arrived in the 1750s, and in 1774 the river figured in the wider conflict of Lord Dunmore's War: the Battle of Point Pleasant, fought October 10, 1774, at the confluence of the Greenbrier with the New River, pitted Virginia militia under Colonel Andrew Lewis against Shawnee warriors led by Chief Cornstalk. It was the only major action of that war. Settlement of the valley followed in force between 1780 and 1830, beginning with the 1780 founding of Lewisburg — named for Andrew Lewis — the first major town in the region.

The river's modern character was shaped by timber. The C&O Railroad reached the upper Greenbrier in the 1890s, opening the last great red spruce forests to the saw. The narrow-gauge Greenbrier Division logged hundreds of thousands of acres of white pine, hemlock, and hardwood through the early twentieth century, an industry that ran hard from the 1880s into the 1920s. When the timber gave out, the railroad bed remained — and it became the spine of what is now the Greenbrier River Trail, a 78-mile rail-trail running alongside the water. Through the mid-twentieth century, from roughly 1920 to 1970, the river served as the principal water source for the Greenbrier Valley.

Hydrologists came early and stayed. The first comprehensive studies ran from the 1870s USGS surveys through the establishment of gauging stations and, later, state geological survey streamflow assessments in the early twentieth century. State water pollution control studies in the mid-century and Clean Water Act assessments after 1972 addressed more than a hundred years of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts. River cleanup and restoration became a defining effort of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the Greenbrier River Restoration project has stood among the largest river-restoration efforts in West Virginia history.

Nature has not always been gentle here. The June 2016 floods were among the deadliest in West Virginia history; at Caldwell the Greenbrier crested at 34 feet — more than 20 feet above flood stage — destroying bridges and riverside communities. Today the river endures as a premier trout and smallmouth bass fishery, its farms and towns still gathered along the seam of stone and water that has defined the valley from the beginning.