Some 14,000 years ago Indian hunters entered the Ohio and Kanawha valleys in pursuit of mammoths. Around 9000 BC the Archaic people, with a small-game hunting, fishing, and gathering culture, occupied the area. Their successors, the Adena, or Mound Builders ( c. 500 BC to c. AD 100), created numerous earthworks still visible in the Moundsville and Charleston areas. The Adena were absorbed by the Fort Ancient people, who dominated the territory until they were wiped out by the Iroquois Confederacy around 1650. Except for scattered villages the area that was to become West Virginia remained Indian hunting grounds and battlegrounds when Europeans arrived in the 1700s.

The second charter of Virginia in 1609 provided for settlement of that colony's west ern frontiers. Exploration and trade were further encouraged by Governor William Berkeley after 1660. The Blue Ridge was reached in 1670, and in 1671 another expedition encountered the first west ward-flowing stream, the New River, in southwestern Virginia . The expedition descended the river to Peter's Falls on the future Virginia - West Virginia border and claimed for England all the land drained by the New River and its tributaries. Subsequent Trans-Allegheny frontier settlement was handicapped by such factors as mountain barriers, Indian resistance, conflicting English and French claims in the Ohio valley, disputed land titles, and a royal proclamation of 1763 prohibiting occupancy.

Despite these obstacles, the population increased, and discontent with the government east of the mountains became endemic. The Vandalia colony , proposed in 1769, and the "14th State" movement for the establishment of a West sylvania in 1776, indicate an early interest in a separate government for the Trans-Allegheny country. Dissatisfaction among the pioneers in that region mounted in the cultural, social, economic, and political realms. The frontier residents, who came from many areas, were distinctly different from the aristocratic eastern settlers. Furthermore, topographic differences rendered slavery economically unsound, and cultural heritage made it undesirable. Voting representation and taxation, however, decidedly favoured eastern Virginia .

The advent of the American Civil War fueled new desires for a politically separate western area. At the Virginia secession convention of April 1861 a majority of the western delegates opposed secession. In subsequent meetings at Wheeling (May 1861), dominated by the western delegates, the ordinance of secession was declared an illegal attempt to overthrow the federal government. The second Wheeling convention (June) pronounced the Richmond government void, established a restored Government of Virginia , and provided for the election of new state officers. The restored governor, Francis H. Pierpont, secured federal recognition and maintained civil jurisdiction over the region until Congress consented to the admission of West Virginia to the Union on June 20, 1863. A condition of entry was the gradual emancipation of slaves in the region. The capital was permanently established at Charleston in 1885.

Civil War engagements were few in the state, although the war itself was in part precipitated by the seizure of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859 by a small band of men under the antislavery zeal of John Brown . Brown was captured by federal troops and subsequently was tried and hanged in Charles Town, but his exploits inflamed tensions between the nation's proslavery and antislavery factions. To the abolitionists of the North he became a martyr. During the Civil War nearly 32,000 soldiers enlisted in the Union army, and about 9,000 served the Confederacy, although some authorities maintain the latter figure to be low.

West Virginia 's industrial emergence, encouraged by railroad expansion, began in the 1870s. Its natural resources of timber, coal, salt, oil, and gas substantially contributed to the establishment of the modern industrial system of the United States. The labour troubles that flared in mining areas between 1912 and 1921 required the intervention of the National Guard (twice) and the U.S. Army (four times) to quell violence, but the right to organize labour unions, which was granted by national statutes in 1933 and 1935, brought a measure of peace to the state. West Virginia was one of the leading states in the percentage of its population serving in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The state received national political recognition in 1976 and 1980 by the election of a New York City native, John D. Rockefeller IV, to the governor's office. In 1984 he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Neither national political party has dominated the state for long periods, although the Democrats have tended to outnumber Republicans and usually had more than twice the number of registered voters.