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The Town They Didn't Want You To Find

The huge Cold War fallout bunker, below, that just reopened for public tours is the Greenbrier resort's best-known secret. But just eight miles away, the little-known mountain town of Lewisburg, W.Va., above, may be a bigger discovery for tourists.
The huge Cold War fallout bunker, below, that just reopened for public tours is the Greenbrier resort's best-known secret. But just eight miles away, the little-known mountain town of Lewisburg, W.Va., above, may be a bigger discovery for tourists. (Greenbrier County Convention And Visitors Bureau)
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The inn and the town make a very appealing base for a weekend in the surrounding outdoors (Monongahela National Forest, Greenbrier State Forest, several limestone caverns) or enjoying the small-scale urban pleasures of Lewisburg itself (chamber concerts, plays, shopping and a darned good margarita at Del Sol Lounge). Oh, and the bunker.

The Greenbrier's new bunker tour is open to the general public every Wednesday and Sunday, the same 90-minute tour (for the same $30) that Greenbrier guests get.

You probably know the back story: In the jittery early days of the Cold War, President Eisenhower got the ancient and wonderful Greenbrier resort to build a secret 112,000-square-foot fallout shelter to house the entire Congress should Moscow drop the big one on Washington. They concealed the massive project beneath a new hotel convention hall and for 34 years a shadow staff (posing as the resort's TV repair crew) kept it stocked with food and all the documents needed to run a post-apocalypse government. It was a brilliantly executed ruse, though apparently an open secret among locals.

"I'm one of two people in the county who will admit I had no idea it was here," said bunker guide Terry Thompson, whose own neighbor turned out to be one of the secret maintenance crew.

The bunker was outed by an article in The Washington Post Magazine in 1992, after intercontinental missiles had rendered obsolete all those plans for a pre-strike evacuation of Capitol Hill. Overnight, it went from top secret to tourist attraction. In 2004, CSX Corp. (the railroad that owns the Greenbrier) closed the bunker and converted most of it into a high-tech document storage company.

But the coolest parts -- the 433-foot entry tunnel, the decontamination showers, the hidden entrance -- reopened to the public in July. Daily tour groups file through the 25-ton blast door that was once camouflaged by a wall of poison ivy. Would-be senatorial bunk beds are on display in the small museum, along with other artifacts of an operation meant to keep 1,100 congressional refugees alive for up to 60 days. A new film on the project by the Virginia Historical Society is a great primer on the bunker and the age that produced it.

In all, the bunker is well worth the money and the time.

But be careful. Once you settle into Lewisburg, you may not ever make it over to the Greenbrier.


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