The community sits in a hollow along Arbuckle Creek, where a coal-mining official from Minden in Germany once thought the landscape resembled his hometown enough to borrow the name. He could not have imagined what would happen to it. By the mid-1980s, after the last mine closed, soil samples from the old Shaffer Mine site turned up polychlorinated biphenyls - PCBs - at concentrations of 250,000 parts per million. That is not a typo. Cleanup actions followed, in the 1980s and again in the early 2000s. The PCBs did not go away. It would take until 2019 for the EPA to finally add the site to its National Priorities List - the formal Superfund designation that makes federal cleanup funding available. By 2017, residents had begun to count their cancers, and Minden, West Virginia became the subject of a national documentary, a Mother Jones investigation, and an ongoing question about who has to live with the worst of America's industrial inheritance.
Minden was platted around 1905 as a coal camp near Oak Hill in southern Fayette County, named for the German hometown of an early mining executive. Arbuckle Creek runs through the village. The mines worked the New River coalfield, like dozens of other operations in the gorge. By the time the 2010 census counted the population at 250, the active mining was decades in the past. The Berwind Land Company - successor to the original operators - retained ownership of much of the former industrial property. What had been left behind on that property would become the central fact of the town's modern existence. Most residents had stayed because their families had always lived here, because moving costs money, and because the place is beautiful in the way only an Appalachian hollow can be.
In 1984, the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources reported the existence of PCB-containing transformers at the old Shaffer Mine site to the EPA. Polychlorinated biphenyls are industrial chemicals once used widely as electrical insulators and coolants; they had been banned in the United States in 1979 after their links to cancer and developmental harm became clear. The soil at Shaffer was tested, and the readings came back at 250,000 ppm - many thousands of times above the level the EPA considers safe. Cleanup work was done in the 1980s and early 2000s. Parts of the mine site were sealed. But OSHA did not consistently monitor worker exposure during the cleanups, and residue remained in the surrounding soil, in Arbuckle Creek, and in the alluvial sediment downstream.
Local physicians began noticing patterns in the 1980s. Dr. Hassan Amjad, who practiced in nearby Beckley, told the EPA that cancer rates among Minden residents looked unusually high. The EPA did not act decisively. Through the 1990s and 2000s, residents and family members fell sick with cancers of various kinds - bladder, brain, breast, kidney, lung - and with multiple myeloma, an aggressive blood cancer that has clustered in the village at rates that statisticians find difficult to dismiss as chance. In June 2017, the EPA finally began sampling the soils of properties along Arbuckle Creek. A 2020 article in Men's Health reported that 80 percent of Minden residents who participated in a door-to-door survey had been diagnosed with cancer or had cancer in their immediate family. More than 100 residents formally reported family members as cancer patients in EPA documentation.
The story of Minden has become better known in recent years through reporting by Mother Jones and through the 2023 documentary Impossible Town, which followed the efforts of a young doctor and town residents to find a way out - including the possibility of relocating the entire community. Some residents want the village abandoned and absorbed into the surrounding wilderness; others refuse to leave the homes their families built. A West Virginia Supreme Court case ruled on questions of municipal annexation that could have affected Minden's legal status. The EPA continues to study and study again. Meanwhile, the people who live in this small hollow along Arbuckle Creek carry on - growing gardens that they sometimes test for chemicals, raising children, attending funerals more often than statistics say a community of 250 should have to. Their patience and their anger both deserve to be heard.
Minden sits at 37.98 N, 81.12 W, on Arbuckle Creek in southern Fayette County, West Virginia, about a mile north of Oak Hill. Recommended viewing altitude is 2,500 to 4,000 feet AGL. The hollow that holds the village is identifiable from the air by the creek's wooded valley running south to the New River and by the abandoned mine workings still visible upstream. Nearest airport is Raleigh County Memorial (KBKW) about 12 miles south. Approach from the south offers the clearest view down the Arbuckle Creek drainage.