Qualla: Minden, West Virginia

Minden, West Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Minden, West Virginia: A Coal Village on Arbuckle Creek

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Minden, West Virginia: The PCBs

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Minden, West Virginia: Counting the Cancers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 si...

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Minden, West Virginia: Impossible Town

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 c...

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