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.
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.
This trestle at Deepwater, Fayette County, still says "Virginian," although the coal hauling railroad was absorbed into the N&W in 1959.
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.
These company-built homes at Mabscott, Raleigh County, are literally right up against the Beckley city limits. Call it a coal camp suburb.
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.
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.
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."
Not much remains of the Willis Branch coal camp. It's amazing that there's anything left of it considering all of the violence that occurred there between the UMWA and the Willis Branch Coal
Company. According to Lee's "Bloodletting in Appalachia" the strikers destroyed the tipple, powerhouse, and railroad trestles. Using a machine gun they rained bullets down on the coal camp. After this, according to Lee, the coal company sued the union for causing
so much destruction. The union settled out of court. Later operations under Mary Fraces Coal Co. were more peaceful. A good page about the Willis Branch mine war is here.
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.
This railroad trestle at Dothan, WV illustrates why the Virginian Railway was an engineering masterpiece.
