The Greenbrier: Resort, Hospital, Bunker

The Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs has been hosting Americans since the late seventeen hundreds, when settlers first began traveling to these West Virginia mountains to drink from sulphur springs they believed could cure almost anything. By the early eighteen hundreds the site had become the premier social retreat for wealthy Southerners, and by the antebellum era no fewer than five sitting presidents had visited. Martin Van Buren rode mountain trails on horseback; Franklin Pierce drank bourbon on cottage porches; and others came drawn by the combination of clean mountain air and conspicuous leisure.

The Civil War interrupted all of that. The resort's grand hotel, known as The Old White, became a military hospital, first for Confederate forces and then for Union troops when control changed hands. The ballroom doubled as a surgical ward. By the time the fighting ended, one hundred ninety-two Confederate soldiers had died within its walls. After the war, wealthy Americans returned, and the resort rebuilt itself through the Gilded Age and into the twentieth century. Twenty-eight presidents have visited the property in total.

The resort's most extraordinary chapter, though, was one nobody talked about for three decades. In the late nineteen fifties, the Eisenhower administration approached the Greenbrier with a proposition: allow the federal government to build an emergency relocation center beneath the property, designed to shelter all five hundred thirty-five members of Congress in the event of nuclear attack. Eisenhower himself had recovered here during World War Two and knew the location well. Construction ran from nineteen fifty-nine to nineteen sixty-two, hidden behind the construction of a new West Virginia Wing added to the resort. The bunker sat seven hundred twenty feet underground, encompassed more than one hundred twelve thousand square feet, roughly two football fields stacked vertically, and was stocked with food, medical supplies, decontamination chambers, and communications equipment. It was code-named Project Greek Island.

For thirty years it sat ready and secret, with a permanent caretaker staff on site under a cover identity. Then in May of nineteen ninety-two, Washington Post reporter Ted Gup published an exposé based on months of investigation. The government decommissioned the bunker within days. Today it is a museum open to the public, its existence finally acknowledged, a relic of an era when American survival planning was quite literally hiding beneath a luxury hotel.