John Nuttall had been at the coal-mine business for years when he turned his attention to the New River Gorge in 1870. The C&O had not yet been built, but its route was being surveyed, and Nuttall correctly read the map. He bought the coal rights in the bench above the river, sank his first shaft into the Sewell Seam, and began constructing a town. By the time the railroad arrived in 1873, he had built nearly 100 houses, 80 coke ovens, a variety of mining structures, and a tipple positioned at a siding off the main C&O line. The investment was paid back many times over. Coke from Nuttallburg ovens fed iron furnaces in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and the colliery became one of the early anchors of New River coal production.

The flat ground along the river was reserved for industry: the tipple, the rail siding, the coke ovens, the warehouses. Houses had to climb the hillsides above. The town was racially segregated, like nearly every Southern coal camp of its era. White workers lived on the west side of Short Creek; Black workers lived on the east side of the creek and on the flats between the railroad and the river. Because the town developed on both banks of the New River - the main settlement on the north side and an outpost called South Nuttall on the south - the operators needed a way to move people back and forth. In 1899, John A. Roebling's Sons Company - the bridge-building firm that had built the Brooklyn Bridge a few years earlier - constructed a pedestrian suspension bridge across the New River at Nuttallburg. It carried foot traffic for decades.

In 1920, Henry Ford bought the Nuttallburg mines as a captive coal supply for his River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. The Rouge was Ford's vision of vertical integration - iron ore in, finished cars out, every step in between done within the same complex. To do that, he needed reliable coal of his own. He acquired the Nuttallburg operation under the Fordson Coal Company name and invested in modern mining equipment, including a new headhouse, a long mechanical conveyor descending the hillside, and improved processing facilities. For a few years, coal from this hollow in West Virginia rolled north to forge the steel of Ford automobiles. By 1928, however, interstate rail regulations had made the transport too costly, and Ford sold the operation to the New River Coal Corporation. The Fordson era left behind upgraded infrastructure that operated for thirty more years.

The mine was sealed in 1958. The town emptied. Most of the frame houses succumbed to weather or were dismantled for their lumber. What remained - the headhouse, the long conveyor descending the cliff face, the coke ovens lining the bottom, a few stone foundations - sat undisturbed for decades. In 1998, the National Park Service acquired the entire complex from the Nuttall Estate and incorporated it into New River Gorge National River. After years of stabilization work, the Park Service opened Nuttallburg as one of the most important interpreted industrial-archaeology sites in Appalachia. Visitors today can hike down to the headhouse, walk among the coke ovens, and read the layered history of an industrial town that, for one brief moment, helped power the American automobile.