If you’re making a visit to The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs or the famous Pumpkin House in Kenova, then you’ll be using highways that actually started as a part of an elaborate plan to use canals to connect the Ohio River to the Atlantic Ocean. The James River and Kanawha Canal was hoped to be on par with the successful Erie Canal in New York, but it never quite came to fruition. But the turnpike built to accommodate the canal system turned into two of West Virginia’s primary highways.