Appalachian Community Histories – St. Charles, Lee County: From Coal Boom Town to Black Lung Clinic Crossroads
St. Charles sits in northern Lee County, Virginia, in the narrow country where Straight Creek, coal seams, railroad grades, and mountain roads helped shape one of Southwest Virginia’s most recognizable coal towns. It was never the largest town in Lee County, and its streets today are much quieter than they were in the middle of the twentieth century. Still, the story of St. Charles carries much of the larger story of Virginia’s western coalfields. It began as a mining community, grew into a busy town of stores, schools, churches, taxis, and coal camp traffic, then became one of the rare Virginia towns whose legal life ended more than a century after its incorporation.
A Town Made by Petition
The legal beginning of St. Charles can be traced to the Lee County Circuit Court. On November 5, 1913, a group of qualified electors living in and around the community filed a petition asking that St. Charles be incorporated as a town. The names listed in the court record included M. R. Kirk, A. J. Leedy, B. Bailey, G. W. Barker, Wilson Lewis, Tip Quillen, M. O. Carter, J. M. Gilliam, George N. Kirk, H. P. Kirk, W. C. Snapp, D. T. McCoy, J. W. Thomas, A. J. Stewart, G. W. Beverly, A. J. Stacy, J. K. Snapp, O. C. Rutherford, R. C. Pitts, and H. F. Kilbourn. The court approved the petition on January 10, 1914, creating the Town of St. Charles by circuit court order rather than by a General Assembly charter.
The incorporation record shows why local residents believed town government mattered. The court found that incorporation would serve the interest of the inhabitants, that the petition was reasonable, that the general good of the community would be promoted, and that the town’s population exceeded 200 but did not exceed 5,000. This was not a symbolic act. It was a practical legal step for a growing coalfield community that needed local order, public identity, and municipal structure.
Coal, Rail, and the Rise of St. Charles
St. Charles did not rise in isolation. Its growth belonged to the wider transformation of northern Lee County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Pennington Gap Commercial Historic District registration form explains that rail development opened the region to coal and timber markets. By the early 1890s, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad passed through Pennington Gap, while a spur known as the Cumberland Valley Branch extended toward St. Charles and the surrounding mining camps. The Virginia and Southwestern Railway also connected St. Charles to Bristol, helping link Lee County coal to markets beyond the mountains.
Coal production around St. Charles became especially important in the first decade of the twentieth century. The National Register documentation states that mines around St. Charles were the first to begin large-scale coal production in Lee County. Charles W. Bondurant, one of the early coal magnates in the area, opened mines around Pennington Gap and traveled into the coalfields by rail, foot, and horseback. The same source gives the local naming tradition that St. Charles took its name from Bondurant and his office assistant, Saint John.
By 1910, several major coal employers were operating in Lee County, including Black Mountain Collieries Company, Black Mountain Mining Company, Bondurant Coal and Coke Company, Dominion Coal Company, Pennington Coal Company, Virginia Lee Company, Darby Coal and Coke Company, and Keokee Consolidated Coke Company. St. Charles was part of that coalfield network, tied to mines, camps, rail lines, commissaries, and families who came into the mountains for work.
A. W. Giles’s 1925 Virginia Geological Survey bulletin remains one of the strongest technical sources for this landscape. Virginia Energy describes the report as a 216-page study of the stratigraphy, structure, coal resources, and mining history of the coal-bearing portion of Lee County, complete with plates, figures, coal-bed descriptions, mine locations, prospects, drill holes, and historical photographs. For St. Charles, this kind of source matters because it documents the physical coalfield beneath the community story.
A Coal Town in Its Working Years
As the mines expanded, St. Charles became more than a point on a map. It became a service town for nearby camps and coal families. Cardinal News described the town’s boom years through memories of a place that once had hotels, grocery stores, restaurants, movie theaters, a bowling alley, clothing stores, beer halls, taxis, a firehouse, and a bus to Pennington Gap. The same account noted that St. Charles was centrally located to the camps, and as the coal business grew, banks, grocery stores, schools, taxis, and town services grew with it.
The town’s peak came in the years when coal still crowded the streets with miners, families, merchants, and weekend shoppers. Cardinal News reported that the 1950 census put St. Charles at 550 residents, but that number does not fully capture the larger camp population that used the town. People living outside the town limits still depended on St. Charles for school, shopping, transportation, church life, and public gathering.
The built environment remembered in photographs and oral memories shows the variety of town life. There was a depot, a school, a theater, stores, a United Mine Workers of America building, a town hall with a jail below it, and public spaces where coalfield life became community life. Even after the boom years passed, those buildings and memories continued to mark St. Charles as a place formed by labor, movement, and mountain industry.
Health Care After the Boom
One of the most important later chapters in St. Charles history began not with a mine opening, but with a clinic. The Student Health Coalition Archive records that after a 1975 health fair in St. Charles, the local health council worked to build a permanent clinic, and by 1976 the St. Charles Health Clinic had opened to the public. That clinic grew out of community organizing, outside student support, local need, and the health burdens of a coalfield population.
The Appalshop Archive video “The St. Charles Health Clinic,” preserved through the Student Health Coalition Archive Project, includes interviews with St. Charles community members and Vanderbilt University Student Health Coalition participants about local health care needs, fundraising, volunteer labor, and the building of the clinic. This makes the clinic story one of the strongest primary audiovisual trails for late twentieth-century St. Charles.
The clinic’s legacy continued through Stone Mountain Health Services. Stone Mountain states that its nonprofit health clinic work has focused on medical and behavioral health services since 1976 and that it now operates 12 clinics across Southwestern Virginia. Its mission language emphasizes accessible, affordable, community-based primary health care for the people of Southwest Virginia.
St. Charles also became a major place in Virginia’s black lung care network. Stone Mountain Health Services identifies its Black Lung Program as the only federally funded Black Lung Clinic in the Commonwealth of Virginia, with a St. Charles Respiratory Care Clinic located on Monarch Road. In 2025, Congressman Morgan Griffith announced a nearly $1.2 million HHS grant to St. Charles Health Council Inc. for work treating those affected by black lung disease.
Decline, Memory, and Disincorporation
The decline of St. Charles followed the larger decline of the coal economy that had built it. As coal employment fell, families left for work elsewhere, businesses closed, and the municipal structure weakened. Cardinal News reported that by the early 2020s, the St. Charles Community Health Clinic and the adjacent black lung clinic were the only commercial enterprises left in town. It also reported that no one ran for town council or voted in the town elections of 2018 or 2020.
The legal ending came in 2022. The Virginia General Assembly found that St. Charles had been created by the Lee County Circuit Court in 1914, had never been granted a General Assembly charter as current law requires, had ceased to function as a town under Virginia law, and had no functioning town council to request termination. Chapter 89 of the 2022 Acts terminated the Town of St. Charles and vested the former town’s property, assets, and debts in Lee County.
VirginiaPlaces summarizes the unusual nature of that ending by noting that St. Charles was one of a small number of Virginia towns created through the judiciary rather than the General Assembly. It also connects the town’s legal disappearance to population loss, coal decline, and the absence of functioning local government.
What St. Charles Still Holds
It would be easy to tell the story of St. Charles only as a rise and fall. That would miss what remains. The town’s legal status changed, but the place did not vanish. The school building, the rescue squad, the post office, the clinic, the black lung services, the miners’ memorial, the old UMWA building, and the memories carried by families still tie St. Charles to its past. Cardinal News recorded a local memorial plaque honoring all coal miners who worked in the St. Charles coalfields, along with bricks bearing family names, labor memories, and messages of affection for the town.
St. Charles is no longer a town in the legal sense, but it remains a community in the historical sense. Its story reaches from railroad expansion and coal company development to public health organizing and black lung treatment. It is a place where the machinery of coal shaped the streets, where families built lives around dangerous work, and where a clinic became one of the strongest surviving institutions after the stores and municipal offices faded.
In that way, St. Charles is not simply a former town. It is a record of how Appalachian communities were made, how they endured after the industry changed, and how memory can outlast the charter papers that once defined a town on the books.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Legislative Information System. “Charter: St Charles.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/st-charles/
Virginia General Assembly. “Chapter 89: An Act to Provide for the Termination of the Town of St. Charles in Lee County.” 2022 Acts of Assembly. Approved April 5, 2022. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/uncodifiedacts/2022/session1/chapter89/
Virginia Legislative Information System. “HB83: Charter; Town of St. Charles.” 2022 Regular Session. Accessed May 19, 2026. https://lis.virginia.gov/bill-details/20221/HB83
Virginia Legislative Information System. “Virginia Acts of Assembly, 2022 Session, Chapter 89.” PDF. https://lis.blob.core.windows.net/legacy/844916.PDF
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Pennington Gap Commercial Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2023. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/281-5002_PenningtonGapCommercialHD_2023_NRHP_Final.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Pennington Gap Commercial Historic District.” December 14, 2023. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/281-5002/
Giles, A. W. “Geology and Coal Resources of the Coal-Bearing Portion of Lee County, Virginia.” Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 026. 1925. https://www.energy.virginia.gov/commerce/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=2299
Brown, Andrew, and others. “Coal Resources of Virginia.” U.S. Geological Survey Circular 171. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1952. https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1952/0171/report.pdf
Hibbard, Walter R., Jr., and Theodore J. Clutter. “Virginia Coal: An Abridged History and Complete Data Manual.” Blacksburg: Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research, 1990. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/90196/VA_Coal_an_abbridged_History.pdf
Mine Safety and Health Administration. “Coal Mine Fatal Accident Investigation Report: Fatality #16, Lone Mountain Processing, Inc.” June 28, 2002. https://arlweb.msha.gov/FATALS/2002/FTL02c16.htm
Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy. “Surface Haulage Fatality Investigation Report: Lone Mountain Processing, Inc., 6-C Mine No. 1 Preparation Plant.” June 28, 2002. https://energy.virginia.gov/coal/coal-mine-safety/documents/AccidentsandFatalities/062802Fatality.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. “US Topo 7.5-Minute Map for Pennington Gap, VA-KY.” 2016. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/VA/VA_Pennington_Gap_20160720_TM_geo.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. “topoView.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
University of Texas Libraries. “Virginia Historical Topographic Maps.” Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. Accessed May 19, 2026. https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/topo/virginia/
U.S. Census Bureau. “QuickFacts: Lee County, Virginia.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/leecountyvirginia/PST045225
U.S. Census Bureau. “Census Bureau Data.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://data.census.gov/
Student Health Coalition Archive Project. “St. Charles Clinic.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://studenthealthcoalition.org/legacy/legacy-st-charles-clinic/
Student Health Coalition Archive Project. “Video: The St. Charles Health Clinic.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://studenthealthcoalition.org/resources-links/st-charles-health-clinic/
Student Health Coalition Archive Project. “St. Charles, VA.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://studenthealthcoalition.org/places/virginia/st-charles-va/
Student Health Coalition Archive Project. “Student Health Coalition Annual Reports.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://studenthealthcoalition.org/resources-links/student-health-coalition-annual-reports/
Student Health Coalition Archive Project. “Annual Report: 1975.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://studenthealthcoalition.org/resources-links/annual-report-1975/
Student Health Coalition Archive Project. “History of the St. Charles Clinic ft. Art Van Zee.” Recorded March 17, 2013. https://studenthealthcoalition.org/stories/history-of-the-st-charles-clinic-ft-art-van-zee/
Stone Mountain Health Services. “Program History.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.stonemountainhealthservices.org/program-history.html
Stone Mountain Health Services. “Respiratory Care Services.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.stonemountainhealthservices.org/black-lung-respiratory-services.html
Stone Mountain Health Services. “Health Clinic.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.stonemountainhealthservices.org/
Health Resources and Services Administration. “Public Letter from St. Charles Health Council, Inc.” July 15, 2014. https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/opa/programintegrity/auditresults/publicletters2012/stcharles.pdf
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “St. Charles Health Council, Inc.” TAGGS Recipient Detail. Accessed May 19, 2026. https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/RecipDetail?arg_EntityId=3OJ6BsvTGCRvjS9I2yP4Fw%3D%3D
Griffith, Morgan. “Griffith Announces $1.12 Million HHS Grant to St. Charles Health Council Inc.” June 25, 2025. https://morgangriffith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=405396
Griffith, Morgan. “Griffith Announces $1.1 Million to St. Charles Health Council for Black Lung Clinic Program.” May 25, 2023. https://morgangriffith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=402865
University of Virginia School of Medicine. “Addressing Pulmonary Health Disparities in Central Appalachia.” Medicine Matters. Accessed May 19, 2026. https://news.med.virginia.edu/medicinematters/?p=20813
DeBolt, Claire L., Chad Brizendine, Margaret M. Tomann, and Drew A. Harris. “Lung Disease in Central Appalachia: It’s More than Coal Dust That Drives Disparities.” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 204, no. 7 (2021): 760–769. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8461577/
Schnabel, Megan. “‘I Can’t Make the Town Stay There.’” Cardinal News, January 26, 2022. https://cardinalnews.org/2022/01/26/i-cant-make-the-town-stay-there/
VirginiaPlaces.org. “Virginia Towns That Have ‘Disappeared’ — and Why.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.virginiaplaces.org/vacities/formertowns.html
The Lee County Story. “St. Charles.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.theleecountystory.com/st-charles/
The Lee County Story. “Coal and Rail in the County.” Accessed May 19, 2026. https://www.theleecountystory.com/coal-and-rail-in-the-county/
Lee County, Virginia. “Lee County Comprehensive Plan: Adopted 2020.” 2020. https://www.leecova.org/pdf/Lee%20County%20Comprehensive%20Plan-Adopted%202020.pdf
Author Note: St. Charles is one of those Appalachian places where the legal record says one thing and community memory says another. The town may have disappeared from Virginia’s municipal rolls, but its coalfield history, health clinic, and black lung work still make it one of Lee County’s most important mountain communities.