The "Winona Pool Room" in Winona, WV. This village at the end of the C&O Railroad's Keenys Creek Branch was the location of the Maryland New River Coal Company's Boone, Dubree, Rosedale, and Smokeless mines, all in Sewell coal.
Also the Nuri Smokeless Coal Co. owned the Morrow No. 1 mine there. Whether or not any of the houses at Winona were coal company houses or not is unknown to me. (March 2004 photo)
A coal miner and his family in front of their house somewhere in the New River Coalfield (from a private collection)
Early in the morning in the Prudence mining camp, opened nearly 100 years ago and later operated by the Prudence Coal Co., a subsidiary of the New River Company. In 1923 this mine employed 108 men. Some of them probably
worked on the Prudence coke ovens. (May 2002 photo)
This trestle at Deepwater, Fayette County, still says "Virginian," although the coal hauling railroad was absorbed into the N&W in 1959. (November 2001 photo)
These houses from the coal camp of Sprague, Raleigh County, are right in the middle of Beckley. Sprague was a New River
Company mine, named after company co-founder Phineas Sprague, that opened in 1907 and closed in 1952. Part of the deep mine workings are now the Beckley Exhibition Mine. (October 2001 photo)
More company coal camp houses at Sprague, along the well known Beckley shorcut Ewart Avenue. This same house design can also been seen at Sprague's sister coal camps Skelton and Cranberry, which not only were also owned by the New River Company, but serviced by the
C&O Railway's Piney River & Paint Creek subdivision, which didn't run along either Piney or Paint Creeks. (October 2001 photo)
Shown here is the "coal camp" exhibition of the Beckley Exhibtion Coal Mine, in New River Park in Beckley, WV. In the center of the photo is the Visitor's Center, museum, and gift shop, designed to look like a company store. To the right is a coal camp church, which was moved from its original location
in Pemberton, WV. Between the church and the Visitor's Center, is an authentic company house. To the left of the photo are a coal camp school, and also a superintendent's house from Skelton, WV.
The rails lead to the centerpiece of this tourist attraction: the coal mine, also out of site in this photograph. The mine was originally a drift mouth punch mine operated by a family named Phillips, and later (1905-06) upgraded by the Cranberry Coal Co. for the
commercial mining and shipping of coal. By 1962 the mine and surface property had been donated to the City of Beckley, and the mine opened to visitors on July 23 of that year. (September 2009 photo)
These company-built homes at Mabscott, Raleigh County, are literally right up against the Beckley city limits, behind Melton Mortuary. Call it a coal camp suburb. (October 2001 photo)
What's left of the coal camp of Ames, Fayette County. The residences, built by the Ames Mining Co., are on the plateau and the mine itself was down in the New River Gorge. (February 2002 photo)
These concrete piers were the foundations for the Garden Ground tipple, built in 1940 by the New River Company on property they acquired from the McKell Estate. A Sewell seam mine, Garden Ground closed in 1961. (December 2004 photo)
Thanks to Sandy for sending this picture of the Sugar Creek tipple. The rest of her email reads,
"My grandfather was Secretary-Treasurer of the New River Coal Company. My dad was born in MacDonald...There was another mine in Mt. Hope called Sugar Creek. I have a
picture of Sugar Creek. After they closed Sugar Creek, the City of Mt. Hope built the
first federally funded public housing in the US where the camp was. The
public housing is still use today. It is located in the middle of Mt. Hope at 211 and Pax Road.
I am very interested in this area, because my grandparents all moved to
Mt. Hope in the 1890's."
Part of the Weirwood coal camp near Pax, WV.
The rail depot in Oak Hill, built in 1903 and restored by the White Oak Chapter of the National Railroad Historical Society in the early 2000s. It was built by the White Oak Railroad, which was later owned by the Virginian Railway. Thus this is the last
Virginian depot in WV. (October 2006 photo)
This railroad trestle at Dothan, WV illustrates why the Virginian Railway was an engineering masterpiece. (July 2008 photo)
A few of the remaining coal camp houses from the New River Colliery Company's mining camp at Sun, WV.
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