Qualla: Coketon, West Virginia

Coketon, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1892, the all-white Tucker County Board of Education told Carrie Williams, a Black schoolteacher at the Coketon Colored School, to shorten her school year by four months. The white schools in the county would still run a full nine months. The Black school would run five. The board's reasoning was simple: state-mandated equal funding could not be evaded directly, but a shortened year for Black students would let the county pay the Black teacher less. Carrie Williams said no. She kept teaching for the full nine months and demanded full pay. Her lawyer, J.R. Clifford - the first African-American attorney in West Virginia - took her case to the Tucker County Courthouse in Parsons, and then to the West Virginia Supreme Court. They won in 1898. Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District was one of the first court cases in the history of the United States to find racial discrimination in school services illegal. The school is gone. The coal town that surrounded it is gone. The decision is part of American constitutional law.

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Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coketon, West Virginia: Henry Davis's Coal Empire

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. Coketon was a company town from the beginning. The settlement was founded in the 1880s by the Davis Coal and Coke Company, led by Henry Gassaway Davis - the former US Senator who would become a major industrial force in eastern West Virginia. Large coal reserves were discovered i...

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Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Coketon, West Virginia: The Beehive Ovens

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit "Tichnor Quality Views," Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Made Only by Tichnor Bros., Inc., Boston, Mass., Public domain. The Davis Coal and Coke Company pioneered the beehive coke oven in the area: large sealed brick chambers that heated coal at high temperatures to burn off impurities and convert it into coke - the hot, almost pure carbon fuel needed by steel mills. The company experimented with t...

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Image: "Tichnor Quality Views," Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Made Only by Tichnor Bros., Inc., Boston, Mass. | Public domain

Coketon, West Virginia: The Williams Decision

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Valerius Tygart, CC BY-SA 4.0. The case Carrie Williams brought turned on whether the county's instructions to shorten her school year constituted illegal racial discrimination. Williams herself was the plaintiff in fact - she was the teacher who refused the shortened schedule and sued for her full salary. Cli...

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Image: Valerius Tygart | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coketon, West Virginia: The Long Decline

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Forest Wander from Cross Lanes, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Coal output around Coketon stayed massive for another decade after the coke ovens shut down. From 1915 to 1921, the 15 mines near Coketon shipped over a million tons of coal each year, making them the sixth most productive operation in West Virginia. But the underground reserves ...

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Image: Forest Wander from Cross Lanes, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Coketon, West Virginia: What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the Coketon site sits along the Blackwater Canyon, accessible from the rail-trail that follows the former West Virginia Central line through the gorge. The ruined foundations of the coke ovens and mine buildings are still visible in places - brick rectangles in the woods, m...

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Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0