The post office closed in 1955. The mine sealed in 1958. By the time the last residents left, most of the houses had already been pulled down for their lumber, and the hollow that had held more than a thousand workers at its peak was returning to forest. But the structures the coal industry needed - the headhouse on the bench above the river, the long conveyor descending the cliff face, the coke ovens along the bottom - were too massive to dismantle and too costly to salvage. They stayed. For four decades after the last shift ended, Nuttallburg sat undisturbed in the New River Gorge, slowly being absorbed by the surrounding hardwood forest, occasionally visited by hunters and the curious. Then in 1998, the National Park Service took the property over, and the town began a second life as one of America's most intact industrial-archaeology landscapes.
John Nuttall was an English-born coal man who came west in the late 1860s with capital, technical knowledge, and a willingness to bet on what the railroad would do next. In 1870 he bought the rights to a stretch of the New River Gorge in what would become Fayette County, West Virginia. The Sewell Seam exposed at the gorge wall held excellent coking coal - low sulfur, low ash, the kind iron furnaces paid premium for. Nuttall sank his shaft, built his first houses, and waited. When the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway pushed its mainline through the gorge in 1873, his town was ready. He named it Nuttallburg. The post office that opened soon after carried his family name. The community is also referred to locally as Brown, though Nuttallburg remains its formal name.
The most dramatic engineering feature at Nuttallburg arrived in 1920, when Henry Ford acquired the mine as part of his River Rouge vertical integration strategy. Ford needed his own reliable coal source for his Michigan steel mills, and the Nuttallburg operation, with its high-grade Sewell coal, became a Ford captive mine. Through his Fordson Coal Company subsidiary, Ford invested in modernization, including a remarkable mechanical conveyor system. The conveyor descended the steep cliff face from the mine portal on the bench to the tipple at river level - one of the longest conveyors of its kind in Appalachia. It allowed coal to drop continuously into rail cars at the C&O siding, rather than being hauled out in mine cars. Ford sold the operation in 1928, but the conveyor he built continued operating for another three decades. Its concrete bents still ladder up the gorge wall.
The post-Ford operators kept Nuttallburg running through the Depression and World War II. The mine produced steadily, the coke ovens burned, the trains rolled. But the postwar coal market shifted hard. Diesel locomotives replaced coal-fired ones on the C&O itself, eating into demand. The steel industry consolidated and stopped buying small-batch coke. The mine sealed in 1958. The remaining workers found jobs elsewhere or left the gorge entirely. Most of the wooden buildings that had housed families - and the racially segregated town had housed many - were dismantled for their lumber over the next several years. By the 1970s, Nuttallburg was a ghost town in the literal sense: no residents, no school, no church services, no post office, only the silent machines left behind.
In 1998 the National Park Service acquired the property from the Nuttall Estate and incorporated it into what was then New River Gorge National River. Stabilization work over the next decade made the site safe for visitors. The Park Service rebuilt portions of the access road and trails, interpreted the standing structures, and opened Nuttallburg as a public destination. Today visitors can drive down to a parking area, walk among the coke ovens, descend a path to the river, and look up at the conveyor still rising the cliff face above. After the 2020 redesignation, the entire complex sits within New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. The town that John Nuttall built for the railroad, that Henry Ford modernized for his auto plant, and that the gorge has slowly reabsorbed - all of it now belongs to the public.
Nuttallburg sits at 38.05 N, 81.04 W, on the north bank of the New River in Fayette County, West Virginia, just outside the small community of Winona. Recommended viewing altitude is 3,000 to 5,000 feet AGL. The long line of the historic conveyor descending from the bench to the river is visible from the air; the coke ovens along the river bank appear as a distinctive arc. Across the river is the related Kay Moor complex. Nearest airports are Raleigh County Memorial (KBKW) in Beckley about 20 miles southwest and Yeager (KCRW) in Charleston about 40 miles northwest. Aerial visibility best when leaves are off (November through April).