West Virginia State Museum

State history and culture, on the Capitol grounds

The West Virginia State Museum, in the Culture Center next to the Capitol, walks visitors through the state's prehistory, frontier, coal era, and twentieth century in a chronological loop of rooms. The displays are unusually well done for a small state museum: reconstructed homestead interiors, a coal mine entrance, audio of striker testimony from the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the original signed instrument of West Virginia's statehood.

Admission is free. Allow ninety minutes for the full circuit. Also in the building are the State Theater (which hosts free Sunday concerts), the State Library, and a small museum shop with a good range of Appalachian books.

things to do museum
A story
The museum's centrepiece is the original transit instrument used by the Mason–Dixon survey in 1763–1767 — the same telescope that drew the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland and, by extension, established the symbolic line between North and South.