Hurricane, West Virginia

The name has nothing to do with Atlantic storms. In the colonial era, a party of surveyors working for George Washington came upon a grove of trees along a creek in Putnam County, all bent in the same direction. Concluding a powerful wind event had twisted them, they called the spot the place of the hurricane.

The creek took the name Hurricane Creek, and by eighteen eleven it appeared on Virginia maps as Hurricane Bridge. Settlement crept in around eighteen fifteen along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike. When the railroad arrived in eighteen seventy-three, it shifted the town slightly and renamed it Hurricane Station, drawing hotels and stores.

The community was incorporated in eighteen eighty-eight. It remained a small Putnam County town until the nineteen seventies, when its population crossed three thousand and it qualified as a city.