Shepherdstown, WVA

It’s West Virginia for Yuppies.


And if you know West Virginia, where the state flower is a satellite dish and the state vitamin is oxycontin, you’ll take that as a high compliment.

The emotional center of the town is Sheperd University, formerly a women’s college. Downtown is actually a real downtown with narrow brick sidewalks, houses that date back to the 1780s, and Odd Fellows, Mason Halls, and old bank buildings that are quickly finding new uses as theaters, galleries and white-table-clothed restaurants. It’s possible to get handmade bakery goods, local wines (caveat empty), and decent coffee served to you by baroquely tattooed art majors. You can walk through downtown in less than an hour.


Shepherdstown is built high on a hill overlooking the Potomac River, about an hour and a half drive north of DC. Culturally, the town boasts the American Theater Festival, the Goose Route Dance Festival, and first run art-house movies. The college brings in events that West Virginian’s wouldn’t otherwise encounter. You are short car rides away from Harper’s Ferry, and civil war battlefields Antietam and Gettysburg. Walk across the Potomac on highway 230 and drop down to the C&O canal towpath. A flat, level dirt trail leads through lush forests along a canal that once hauled goods by barge to Cumberland, MD. Today it serves for hiking and easy biking. If you are up for it, you could even ride your bike from Washington to Shepherdstown – it’s a doable 75 miles.

The river offers great small mouth bass fishing. Use spinners or bass bugs on a fly rod in the summer and wade in the shallows near the old train trestles. Tubing, kayaking, canoeing are easy here where the river runs clean and lazy. A perfect place to spend a hot summer day.

Directions:
Take I-70 West from DC. In Frederick, pick up 340 West, cross the Potomac, pass Harpers Ferry and turn right on HWY 230. Follow 230 into Shepherdstown.

--sm