Preston County, West Virginia Map
Explore Preston County, West Virginia with this interactive street and satellite map. Browse all 12 cities and towns in Preston County below.
Interactive Map of Preston County, West Virginia
| County | Preston |
| State | West Virginia (WV) |
| County Seat | Kingwood |
| Country | United States of America |
| Latitude | 39.478909 |
| Longitude | -79.697695 |
| Cities & Towns | 12 |
| Area Codes | 304 |
About Preston County, West Virginia
Preston County rises as a high, fractured plateau where the Allegheny Front breaks into a complex architecture of deep hollows and steep, hardwood-covered ridges. The Cheat River cuts a jagged, serpentine path through this landscape, carving gorges that hold a persistent, cool mist long after the sun has climbed above the eastern summits. To the north, the land slopes toward the Mason-Dixon line, while the southern reaches push into the dense, shadowed forests that define the rugged spine of the Appalachian range. Here, the air is thin and sharp, carrying a metallic scent of damp shale and decaying leaves, a quality of atmosphere that makes the late afternoon light turn a bruised, heavy purple as it catches the tops of the oaks.
Preston County emerged from the wilderness in the early nineteenth century, fashioned from lands previously held by larger, distant jurisdictions. Settlers moved into these high valleys seeking independence, clearing timber and establishing small, hardy farms in a place that offered little in the way of easy passage. The seat of government was eventually established at a central elevation, chosen not for its proximity to wealth but for its accessibility to the people who scraped a living from the stubborn, acid soil. Those early years were defined by a self-reliance that bordered on the ascetic, as families built their lives in the silence of the woods, far from the influence of the coastal cities, leaving a legacy of guarded autonomy that still colors the way neighbors speak to one another in the post office or the hardware store.
Work in this region has always been a negotiation with the earth, shifting from the labor of timber and small-scale agriculture to the intense, communal demands of coal extraction. This history of industry left behind a particular landscape of weathered tipples and quieted rails, where the silence is now broken only by the wind or the occasional rumble of a truck moving through the mist. The people retain a certain reserve, a quiet gravity earned through generations of living in a place that does not yield its resources without a fight. On autumn evenings, when the woodsmoke begins to drift low through the hollows, there is a profound sense of endurance here, a feeling that the land and the people have reached a long-standing, unspoken agreement to keep their own counsel in the high, cold quiet of the mountains.
Cities and Towns in Preston County
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About This Preston County Map Page
This page provides an interactive map of Preston County, West Virginia alongside links to detailed street maps for 12 cities and towns. The county seat is Kingwood. Each city and town map page includes live weather, local news and precise GPS coordinates.
The Search Maps button below the county map opens USGS topographic maps and aerial imagery as base layers, with a labelled U.S. National Grid (USNG) overlay, a distance and bearing tool, and a single-fix GPS readout giving your USNG grid reference and latitude and longitude.
Location data is sourced from the USGS GNIS database and verified by coordinates, not name matching alone.
| Page generated | September 2026 |
| Location data | USGS GNIS database; coordinates matched to 2020 US Census records |
