Eleven counties. Tens of thousands of miners, most of them now buried. Thousands of company houses, most of them now collapsed or removed. Hundreds of mines, most of them now sealed. The National Coal Heritage Area covers the southern West Virginia counties that produced the smokeless bituminous coal that powered American steam locomotives, fueled American steel mills, and heated American cities through most of the twentieth century. Congressman Nick Rahall proposed the heritage designation in the early 1990s, and Congress approved it in the Omnibus Parks and Public Lands Management Act of November 12, 1996. The designation does not protect the land or restrict mining. It exists to acknowledge that what happened here - the labor, the wealth extracted, the communities built and abandoned - matters enough to remember as American history.
The heritage area centers on three distinct bituminous coal fields - the New River, Winding Gulf, and Flat Top-Pocahontas fields - each defined by its geology, its railroad, and the corporations that worked it. The Pocahontas No. 3 seam was the most valuable: a thick, low-sulfur, low-ash coal that burned cleanly enough that the U.S. Navy specified it for steam-powered warships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The label 'smokeless' was both a literal description and a marketing slogan. The New River Coalfield, in the gorge country around Fayette County, produced enormous tonnages from the 1870s onward. The Winding Gulf field, slightly south, came online a few decades later as railroads pushed deeper into the mountains.
Three rail systems shaped the coal economy. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, building west from Virginia in the 1870s, opened the New River Coalfield and built the river bridges and tunnels that made transport possible. The Norfolk and Western Railway, formed in 1881, opened the Pocahontas field and built the famous Pocahontas Branch line through Coal Heritage country. The Virginian Railway, completed in 1909 by Henry Huttleston Rogers as a more efficient rival to the N&W, opened the Winding Gulf field and ran lower grades from the mines to tidewater at Hampton Roads. The railroads were not separate from the coal industry - they were its arteries, and in many cases shared corporate ownership with mining companies.
Most of the men who worked these mines lived in towns owned by the mining company. The houses, the schools, the churches, the stores, the post office, the rail platform - all built by the company, all leased back to the workers at rents deducted from wages. Pay often came in scrip rather than U.S. currency, redeemable only at the company store. The system, which persisted in some communities until the 1940s, was meant to maximize the share of mining wages that returned to the company. It also produced one of the more legible American working-class landscapes: long rows of identical wooden houses on hillsides above railroad sidings, each town built around a single shaft or drift mine. Many of these towns are now empty or nearly so.
The coalfields produced more than coal. They produced some of the most consequential labor struggles in American history. The 1912-1913 Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike, the 1920 Matewan Massacre in Mingo County, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in Logan County - the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War, with ten to fifteen thousand armed miners marching against private guards and federal troops - all happened in the same region the National Coal Heritage Area now covers. These were not isolated events. They were the labor movement's attempt to win basic rights in an industry that was, well into the twentieth century, run on conditions closer to feudalism than to wage labor. The mines also produced more conventional disasters: explosions, roof collapses, fires. The Monongah disaster of 1907 killed at least 362 men in a single explosion - still the worst mining accident in American history.
From the air, the National Coal Heritage Area reads as one of the most geologically and industrially complex landscapes in the eastern United States. The terrain itself is rugged - sharp ridges and narrow hollows of the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau, with elevation differences of 1,000 to 1,500 feet between ridgetop and valley floor. Overlaid on the geology is a hundred fifty years of mining: active surface mines as flat tan plateaus where mountains used to stand; reclaimed mines as smoother grassland; abandoned underground operations as gob piles and tipple foundations; and the long parallel ribbons of rail lines running up almost every hollow. Small towns sit at the junctions where rail spurs met main lines. Some are still inhabited. Many are not.
The heritage area is centered roughly at 38.00°N, 81.50°W, spanning eleven southern West Virginia counties from Cabell and Wayne in the west to Mercer and Summers in the southeast. The dramatic terrain of the Allegheny Plateau, with the New River Gorge cutting through Fayette County, defines the visual landscape. Nearest airports: Yeager Airport (KCRW) at Charleston about 30 nm north of the area's center, Raleigh County Memorial (KBKW) at Beckley centrally located, Mercer County Airport (KBLF) at Bluefield in the south. Best surveyed at cruising altitudes of 6,000-10,000 feet, where mining footprints, rail corridors, and remnant company towns can all be picked out across the ridges.