15 Forgotten Appalachian Coal Towns That Died When the Coal Seam Ran Out

In 1874 a coal company cut a shelf into the wall of the New River Gorge, in a place no road reached, and built a town on it. Before long nearly 200 beehive coke ovens were burning on that shelf, turning the canyon wall orange every night. The ovens were the last ones working in southern West Virginia. They went cold in 1956. The last resident, a railroad man, did not move out until 1973 — seventeen years living in a town that had no reason to exist. A coal camp was not a town in the ordinary sense. It was a place where one company owned the houses, the store, the school, the church, the theatre and the ground under all of it, and paid in scrip that only its own store would take. These places did not grow. They were installed: the company picked a seam, surveyed a hollow, ran track up it and unloaded a finished civilization off flatcars. When the seam was finished, so was the town. We count down from fifteen to one across five states — West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and back again — and every camp on this list has a killer with a name and a date. Not "it declined." The seam worked out. The company sold. The mine was sealed. The steel corporation stopped needing coking coal. A camp on the rim of the gorge whose mine mouth opened 795 feet above the railway, tied to the tracks by an 1,800-foot incline and nothing else. A Kentucky camp whose founding year two records cannot agree on, which now survives more clearly in mine reports and coal scrip than on the ground. A West Virginia company store built like a courthouse, holding the post office, the doctor's office, the freight station and the payroll window under one roof — still standing, on the National Register, and listed for sale. A Virginia camp with no centre at all, just named hollows: Mayflower, Magazine, School House Hill, where the address told everyone what you did for a living. A Pennsylvania patch built by a steel company around what was said to be the largest coal mine in the United States in 1919. A Kentucky mine the company opened without ever core-drilling to find out how much coal was down there — and which played out on seams averaging 32 inches. A town that was three towns stacked on a cliff, joined by a 2,200-foot haulage that ran a car up and down once an hour until midnight. Three times along the way we stop to look at the machine itself. How a camp was installed rather than founded. The figure for the whole territory: more than 500 coal company towns in Appalachia by the 1920s, with 65 to 80 percent of all miners in southern Appalachia living inside them — 80 percent in West Virginia alone. And what the railroad actually was to a place with no road: the mail, the doctor, the hearse and the school bus, all on the same rails. Take the train off and the camp does not merely lose its freight. Where the sources disagree — on a founding year, on how many ovens were built, on whether anything is left at all — you will hear both versions instead of a tidy one. In one case the census still counts 151 people and a man born there says there is nothing left. Number one is the town this description opens with, and the video closes on it word for word. If a camp like this is in your family, put the name in the comments. That is how these lists get corrected.