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Coal has been known in Western Virginia since colonial times, used for home cooking and heating, but it wasn’t used for commercial business purposes until the early 1800s. The first coal mining started near Charleston on the Kanawha River and near Wheeling on the Ohio River, where people and industries were already settled.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, salt furnaces in Kanawha County were initially fueled by timber, but as the forests became depleted, operators started mining coal. By 1840, 90 furnaces used 200,000 tons of coal a year to make salt. Over 900 wor...
Cannel coal is a smoky, easily lit type of coal once used to make oil for lighting. It was popular in the 1850s because one bushel could produce about two gallons of crude oil. Many coal oil plants opened in West Virginia, especially near the Elk,...
In the 1840s, William Peyton and others began mining cannel coal along the Coal and Little Coal rivers . Cannel coal was used to make oil for lighting. To ship the coal, they built locks and dams to make the Coal River easier to travel. The projec...
The Civil War slowed coal industry growth, but key figures like Jedediah Hotchkiss and the Imboden brothers explored coal areas during and after the war, helping future development. Big growth came in southern West Virginia when the Chesapeake &am...
Northern West Virginia had its own coal pioneers, led by James Otis Watson, known as the father of the state’s coal industry. Born in 1815 near Fairmont, Watson started the Montana Mining Company in 1852 and was the first in West Virginia to ship ...
In the early 1900s, the Fleming-Watson family gained control of several major coal companies, including Fairmont Coal. In 1906, they bought most of the stock in three coal companies for $5 million. With support from U.S. Senator Johnson N. Camden ...
The Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O) didn’t buy land along its tracks, so independent companies and investors took over coal lands in the New and Kanawha valleys. These early coal operators, such as Joseph Beury and John Nutall, hired skill...
Big investments in West Virginia's coal industry changed the region's economy and way of life. Railroads helped move coal and connected the state to the rest of the country. Since there weren't enough local workers, companies brought in people fro...
Before 1880, West Virginia was mostly made up of farms and small settlements. But in the 1880s, the coal industry changed the landscape. Railroads brought mining companies, which built company towns around the mines. These towns had houses, a comp...
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, company stores (pictured here in Marion County) were common in coal mining, lumber, and textile towns. These stores, owned by the company, were often the only place to shop for residents. They were modeled after ...
Scrip was a form of private currency used in many West Virginia coal towns, issued by coal companies in the form of paper or metal tokens. It was used instead of cash for buying goods at company stores. Scrip helped companies keep money in their c...
The coal industry in West Virginia grew rapidly in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1867, only 490,000 tons of coal were produced, but by 1917, production soared to 89.4 million tons. The number of mine workers grew from 3,701 in 1880 to nearly ...
African Americans were crucial to the growth of West Virginia's coal industry. Black workers helped build railroads like the Chesapeake & Ohio, Norfolk & Western, and Virginian, and later worked in the coal mines. During World War I, more ...
Before the Great Depression, over 90% of miners in southern West Virginia lived in company-owned towns without public services. Miners faced poor working conditions and often clashed with coal companies, especially over forming unions like the Uni...
In early West Virginia coal mining, most mines were drift mines, built into hillsides, which were cheaper and easier to dig than deep vertical mines. Miners used a method called "room-and-pillar," where tunnels were dug in a grid pattern and block...
Mechanization in West Virginia coal mines happened gradually through the first half of the 1900s. Early mining was done mostly by hand, but machines were introduced over time to help with hauling, ventilation, and cutting coal. Electricity became ...
Surface mining, also called strip mining, removes coal from the surface instead of underground and poses more potential damage to the land. It started in West Virginia in 1916 and grew during the world wars with better machines and roads. By 1947,...
Mountaintop removal began in 1967 and expanded in the 1980s with large machines. By the 1990s, it had become more common due to demand for cleaner coal, but it caused serious environmental damage and forced some people to leave their homes. Mounta...
Since 1883, more than 21,000 miners have died in West Virginia coal mines. Many of these deaths were single accidents, but some were major disasters. A disaster is when three or more miners are killed. The first major one happened in 1886, killing...
Black lung disease, or coal miner’s pneumoconiosis, is caused by breathing in coal dust, which damages the lungs over time. Tiny dust particles reach deep into the lungs and cause scarring, breathing problems, and can lead to emphysema, chronic br...