Company Towns

Good posts, y'all.

My mother grew up in one of those tiny West Virginia coal camps (ie company towns), as well. Beckley is a fairly large city in southern WVa. A few miles south of Beckley is the town of Sophia, population 1,300. Just south of Sophia is a valley called Winding Gulf. In this steep-sided valley was a string of five company towns. The eastern-most of these was Hotcoal, and that is where my mother was born, in 1932. This is all not too far away from Coalwood - probably about thirty miles, as the crow flies. A lot longer on those serpentine mountain roads.

Anyway, business was booming in Winding Gulf in the '10's, '20's, and '30's. At one time, the total population of the valley was probably close to 2,500. Then, the mines started either tapping out, or closing due to the downturn in the mining industry. Hotcoal was the first to be abandoned. I had never ventured up to find Hotcoal while my mother was still with us, but my girlfriend and I set out to do so last October. It took us two trips. The results were somewhat sobering, and a bit eerie.

Of three out of the five towns in the valley, hardly a trace remains. There is no hardtop road to where the towns were, and no buildings remain whatsoever; if you take machetes, you can find a few foundations, steps, and patches of concrete hidden in the underbrush. Along the old Virginian (now N&S) railroad, you can see a few remains of coal tipple foundations. I had to take a guess as to where my mom's hometown was located. The two towns to the west have fared very slightly better. In McAlpin's heyday, it had over 1,000 inhabitants on its own. Today, there are perhaps four or five houses left, along with the ruins of the company store and P.O., which remained in operation until 1982. On the side of the mountain, one can still see the concrete exterior steps that are the only surviving remnant of the large school building that served the entire region for close to 60 years. Only Stotesbury, the western-most town, retains any kind of semblance of a community. Several company houses survive in decent condition, along with a church, and a few mining operations buildings.

As I said, the whole experience was somewhat eerie. Where once hundreds of structures stood and thousands of people lived, not even ghost towns now stand. People were born, lived, worked, played, worshipped, and died here; yet, nothing stands to even note the fact that they existed at all. And, this transformation has taken place in only sixty or seventy years, not over the course of centuries. I know West Virginia is even more cash-strapped than most states, but it seems to me that some sort of simple plaque or marker is called for, to at least let people know what went on in that valley for several decades.

At Christmas, I got together with my 85-year-old second cousin, who lived in Big Stick, the camp adjacent to Hotcoal. She told us alot about what it was like growing up in the coal camps. As you can imagine (or already know), life was pretty rough, especially for those whose fathers weren't supervisors or foremen. She said when men weren't in the mines, they usually carried firearms. Violence, especially interracial, was rampant, and the KKK made its presence known on a regular basis. This was in the '20's and '30's.

However, as you all have noted, the workers and their families - my cousin, my mother, and all the rest - carried on, and got through it. What else could they do? And as my aunt pointed out, as children, they had no idea how bad off they were. You can't miss central heat and indoor toilets when you don't know they exist.

If y'all are interested, here's a link to a great site about the Appalachian coalfields:
http://www.coalcampusa.com/
This is that site's page on Coalwood:
http://www.coalcampusa.com/sowv/flattop/coalwood/coalwood.htm
And this is the page on the Winding Gulf field, that has links to the towns I mentioned above:
http://www.coalcampusa.com/sowv/gulf/gulf.htm

blc2235 - If you don't mind my asking, what is your mother's hometown?