Appalachian Community Histories – Bartley, McDowell County: Pond Creek No. 1, Company-Town Life, and the Mine Disaster of 1940
In the narrow valleys of southern McDowell County, communities often grew wherever coal seams, rail lines, and creek bottoms allowed them to exist. Bartley rose along the Dry Fork as part of the industrial world created by the Pocahontas coalfield and the Norfolk and Western Railway. For much of the twentieth century, the name Bartley meant company offices, mine shafts, railroad cars, coal dust, scrip, schools, churches, and rows of houses occupied by families whose lives depended upon the mines beneath them. Today, however, the community is remembered most often for one winter afternoon when an underground explosion killed 91 men and placed Bartley among the most tragic names in Appalachian mining history.
The disaster of January 10, 1940, cannot be understood only as a sudden blast beneath the mountain. It belonged to a longer history of industrial expansion, company control, dangerous underground conditions, family life, and repeated loss. Bartley was a coal camp before it became a memorial landscape, and the men who died in Pond Creek No. 1 were part of a living community rather than names waiting to be carved into stone.
A Coal Camp on the Dry Fork
McDowell County’s steep mountains and restricted creek valleys limited settlement before the arrival of industrial coal development. Railroads changed that isolation. Lines followed the waterways because the valleys offered the most practical routes through the terrain, and the Norfolk and Western system became essential to moving Pocahontas coal to distant markets. Bartley developed within that pattern, connected to the Dry Fork valley and to a railroad network that turned remote mountain communities into industrial production centers.
A standard West Virginia place-name study attributes the community’s name to Bartley Ross, an early owner of the town site. Whatever the precise boundaries of the earliest settlement, Bartley’s twentieth-century identity became inseparable from the Pond Creek Pocahontas Company. The company’s operations linked the community to Island Creek Coal Company, the Norfolk and Western Railway, and the wider smokeless-coal economy of southern West Virginia. The surviving archival record includes company reports, engineering plans, historic-property surveys, mine maps, photographs, and records of company housing projects. Those materials show that Bartley was not simply a mine opening beside a road. It was a planned industrial community whose built environment served the needs of coal production.
An August 1931 photograph preserved in the Norfolk Southern collection identifies the Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Company at Bartley. The image belongs to a larger railroad collection, which is fitting because the mine and the railway were parts of the same system. Coal had to be cut, loaded, raised, processed, and shipped, while the railroad carried the finished product out of the valley. By the early 1930s, Bartley was already a mature coal operation rather than a newly opened camp.
Scrip, Stores, and Company Life
The economic reach of Pond Creek Pocahontas extended beyond the mine portal. Surviving metal-scrip manufacturing records identify Bartley as a general office and shipping address for the company. A 1927 order listed the Pond Creek Pocahontas Company at Bartley, while a 1934 purchase order came from the Pond Creek Pocahontas Stores Company. In January 1935, the company wrote from Bartley that it had found a better price for 30,000 scrip pennies. The following year, it requested quotations for thousands of fifty-cent, twenty-five-cent, ten-cent, and five-cent pieces.
These small metal pieces reveal the structure of daily life in a company town. Scrip connected wages to the company store and made the corporation present in ordinary household decisions. Food, clothing, tools, and other necessities passed through a commercial system tied to the same enterprise that controlled the mine. The surviving orders also show the scale of the operation. A request involving tens of thousands of pieces was not intended for a handful of workers. It reflected a large labor force and a community economy built around regular company transactions.
Archival records also point to a Pond Creek Pocahontas building project undertaken by Minter Homes Corporation in 1924 and 1925. The surviving contracts, plans, specifications, and estimates may help reconstruct the appearance of company housing and institutional buildings during Bartley’s growth. Many such structures across McDowell County have since disappeared. A later countywide coal heritage survey found that between one quarter and two fifths of the coal-related resources documented in 1991 had been demolished within the following 25 years. Bartley’s remaining landscape must therefore be read alongside photographs, maps, architectural surveys, and company records that preserve buildings no longer standing.
Pond Creek No. 1
Pond Creek No. 1 was a deep-shaft mine located on the Norfolk and Western Railway. The Pond Creek Pocahontas Company owned the operation and was affiliated with Island Creek Coal Company and Mallory Coal Company. At the time of the disaster, the mine employed 63 men on the surface and 310 underground. Its two regular shifts included 160 loaders and 150 daymen. Average production was about 3,000 tons per day, and the mine produced 446,611 tons of coal in 1939.
The mine was entered through two shafts approximately 585 feet deep. One handled coal and intake air. The other carried men and materials and also formed part of the ventilation system. The workings followed the Pocahontas No. 4 seam, which averaged about five and a half feet thick. The coal was classified as smokeless because of its low volatile content, but it was also friable and crushed readily. That physical quality mattered because broken coal created fine dust capable of carrying flame through underground entries.
The mine was known to release substantial methane. Investigators later found that company records sometimes showed gas levels above the Bureau of Mines threshold for dangerous conditions, and company representatives acknowledged that explosive mixtures were frequently found at the last working places on pillar lines. The mine had safety equipment and formal procedures, but it also contained a combination that demanded constant control: methane, fine coal dust, electrical machinery, complicated ventilation, and miles of underground workings.
A Community Already in Mourning
Three months before the mine explosion, Bartley had suffered another catastrophe. A school bus carrying children from the area left the road and plunged down an embankment. Six children were killed. The losses were not separate in the memory of the community. The Mullins family lost a daughter in the bus wreck, then lost a father and son in the mine. By January 1940, grief had returned to households that had scarcely begun to recover from October.
That earlier tragedy gives the mine disaster a more personal setting. Bartley was not an anonymous workplace where 91 unrelated laborers died. It was a community of interconnected families whose children attended the same schools, whose men entered the same shafts, and whose homes stood along the same roads and creek bottoms. When the mine exploded, the disaster traveled quickly from the underground workings into kitchens, churches, porches, company offices, and neighboring coal camps.
January 10, 1940
At approximately 2:30 in the afternoon, the mine foreman, dispatcher, and another worker were near the bottom of the manway shaft when a violent rush of air swept along the entry. The sound was later described as being “like a fire siren.” Dust immediately filled the air. Men near the two shaft bottoms understood that an explosion had occurred somewhere in the northeastern portion of the mine. On the surface, columns of dust rose from the shaft openings to a reported height of about 100 feet.
There were 138 men underground. Thirty-seven working in the western portion had not felt the explosion because that section was unaffected. They were notified and made their way to the shaft. Ten more men were already at or near the shaft bottoms. All 47 reached the surface without injury. The remaining 91 men were trapped in the damaged and contaminated workings.
Company officials were holding a safety meeting in the nearby general office when word reached them. The safety engineer and superintendent rushed to the shafts. A rescue party entered at about 3:00 p.m., only half an hour after the blast. The first rescuers encountered damaged ventilation structures, fallen material, dust, gas, and the possibility of fire or another explosion. Their work began while families gathered aboveground and waited for news from nearly 600 feet below.
The Men Who Survived the First Blast
The federal report shows that not every victim died at the moment of the explosion. Some men survived the initial violence and attempted to travel through the mine after the air had filled with poisonous gases. Investigators found nine bodies in positions suggesting that most of those men had moved a considerable distance before asphyxiation overcame them.
Fifteen others, including a section foreman, left their working places and entered return airways. Nine were found together, with six more nearby. The investigators found no evidence that they had begun building barricades and believed there may not have been enough time. They may have waited in hope that the atmosphere would clear enough for them to reach the shaft. All 15 died from asphyxiation.
This part of the official record is among its most painful. It replaces the single image of an instantaneous explosion with a longer ordeal. Men walked, gathered, waited, and tried to judge an invisible atmosphere. Their deaths came not only from flame and force, but also from the afterdamp that followed the blast through the entries.
Rescue Beneath the Mountain
Recovery crews came from Pond Creek Pocahontas mines and from companies across the surrounding coalfields. Teams represented Island Creek, Pocahontas Fuel, Carter Coal, Eastern Coal, Koppers, Raleigh Wyoming Mining, and other operations in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. The work continued 24 hours a day in four-hour underground shifts. Company representatives, West Virginia mine inspectors, federal Bureau of Mines personnel, engineers, and trained rescue crews coordinated ventilation changes, mapped the locations of bodies, and advanced through unstable workings.
The danger did not end with the first explosion. A second explosion occurred about seven hours after the original blast, after recovery work had begun. No rescuers were injured, but the event demonstrated how volatile the mine remained. Gas accumulated behind damaged ventilation controls, and each advance required decisions about air, seals, electrical hazards, roof falls, and the possibility of another ignition.
By the morning of January 13, crews had recovered 28 bodies from one area. Twenty-five more were later removed from the third-right section, some by crews wearing oxygen breathing apparatus because of the volume of explosive gas. The work continued until the remaining victims were brought out. Contemporary newspapers reflected the confusion of the first days. Initial reports spoke of men entombed and hopes of survivors. Later headlines described recovered bodies and preparations for mass burial. Some newspapers reported 92 deaths, but the completed federal investigation established the official number at 91.
What Caused the Explosion
The federal investigators concluded that the disaster began with the ignition of methane and spread through gas and coal dust. They could not determine the exact point or source of ignition because the damage patterns were too complex. The report considered explosives, open flames, safety lamps, smoking materials, and electrical equipment. No blasting was underway at the time, no defective flame safety lamp was found, and although two cigarettes were discovered in a miner’s jacket, no matches or evidence of smoking were located. The principal authors therefore considered smoking possible but exceedingly doubtful.
Several possible electrical ignition sources were found. The investigators concluded that an electrical origin was probable, though not proven. They also found that the amount of air moving through the workings was insufficient to dilute and remove the methane generated by the mine. Single doors, limited bleeder entries, and interruptions in ventilation allowed dangerous gas conditions to develop.
Coal dust greatly increased the flame and violence. The mine used considerable rock dust, but the federal report found that it had not been applied or maintained effectively in all necessary areas. Trackless entries and return airways were often untreated, and water was not used to suppress dust where it formed. Investigators believed that adequate protection against the spread of flame through coal dust might have spared one or two sections and saved additional lives.
A later appendix by Bureau of Mines engineer D. Harrington expressed stronger suspicion that smoking may have provided the first spark. Even he acknowledged that no matches, burned cigarette remains, or testimony proved it. An inquest held after completion of the report reached no conclusion beyond the involvement of explosive gas. The precise first spark therefore remains unresolved, but the conditions that allowed a spark to become a mine-wide catastrophe were documented in detail.
Safety Rules and the Weakest Link
The Bartley report did not describe Pond Creek No. 1 as a mine without safety practices. Men were checked into and out of the workings. A safety inspector served the company’s mines. Workers were trained in first aid, mine rescue, gas-mask use, and oxygen-breathing equipment. Employees were searched for smoking materials before entering. Monthly safety meetings were held, permissible electrical equipment was used, and officials were gathered to revise printed safety rules when the explosion occurred.
That record made the investigators’ conclusion more troubling. Safety programs existed, yet maintenance, ventilation, rock dusting, and dust suppression failed in decisive places. Harrington wrote that the operators had gone farther than most American mines in adopting precautions, but had relaxed in the details that determined whether those precautions actually worked. He used the familiar warning that a chain is “no stronger than its weakest link.” At Bartley, the weakest links were underground, hidden within routine operations until the afternoon they failed together.
The report therefore resisted a simple explanation based on either total negligence or unavoidable fate. Pond Creek No. 1 had trained people and modern safety measures, but those measures were incomplete and inconsistently maintained. The lesson was that equipment, rules, and meetings could not protect miners unless ventilation remained adequate, electrical systems remained safe, and explosive dust was controlled throughout the mine.
Bartley and Federal Mine Inspection
The Bartley investigation entered the national record during a period when the federal government still lacked the broad inspection role later associated with mine safety. In 1941, Congress authorized systematic inspection of coal mines by federal inspectors for the first time. The Department of the Interior reported that 400 mines had been inspected by June 30, 1942. Bartley was not the sole cause of that change, but its 91 deaths and the technical findings of the Bureau of Mines formed part of the evidence showing why stronger federal access to mines was being demanded. This connection is best understood as historical context rather than proof that Bartley alone produced the law.
The new inspection authority did not immediately create the full enforcement system that developed in later decades. Federal inspectors now had a right of entry, but stronger enforcement powers did not arrive until the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act of 1952.
The Cost Aboveground
The Bureau of Mines found that physical damage to equipment was comparatively limited, but it called the social and material losses exceedingly difficult to calculate. Compensation benefits alone were estimated between $400,000 and $500,000. Recovery work, reconstruction, lost production, lost wages, and other costs added much more. None of those figures measured the absence of 91 men from their homes, churches, stores, and neighborhoods.
The official report recorded causes of death as burns, violence, and asphyxiation. Families experienced those categories as empty chairs, interrupted pay, funeral processions, and children growing up without fathers. The loss spread beyond Bartley because miners came from nearby communities throughout the southern McDowell coalfield. The mine disaster was local in place but regional in the network of families it affected.
The Memorial at Bartley
A United Mine Workers monument now preserves the names of the dead near the site of Pond Creek No. 1. It transforms the official total of 91 into individual remembrance. The monument also stands within a landscape where many physical traces of the company-town era have vanished. Roads, altered creek bottoms, scattered buildings, mine remains, railroad corridors, and archival photographs must be read together to recover the Bartley that existed before 1940.
The community’s history survives in more than the monument. Federal reports preserve the underground map of the catastrophe. Scrip ledgers preserve the company economy. Railroad photographs preserve the industrial setting. Census schedules, death certificates, newspapers, church records, and family collections can restore names to households and households to neighborhoods. Archival collections at West Virginia University, the Eastern Regional Coal Archives, West Virginia Archives and History, and the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office hold the materials needed to tell Bartley’s story beyond the explosion alone.
Why Bartley’s Story Matters
Bartley represents both the power and the cost of the Appalachian coal economy. The mine provided work, sustained a community, produced hundreds of thousands of tons of coal, and connected a narrow McDowell County valley to national industry. The same system placed generations of miners beneath the ground in an environment where a ventilation failure, damaged cable, pocket of methane, or layer of fine dust could erase nearly an entire shift.
The disaster also warns against allowing remembrance to stop at a number. Ninety-one is the official death toll, but Bartley’s history includes the men who escaped, the rescuers who entered after them, the women and children waiting aboveground, the families already grieving from the school bus wreck, and the generations who preserved the names. It includes the company houses, the store scrip, the railroad, the schools, the churches, and the ordinary days that came before January 10, 1940.
To remember Bartley only as a mine disaster is to miss the community that made the disaster matter. To remember the community without examining the failures underground is to soften a tragedy whose causes were carefully documented. The fullest history must hold both truths together. Bartley was a place built by coal, and it became a place where the human cost of coal could no longer be hidden beneath the mountain.
Sources & Further Reading
Ankeny, M. J., E. J. Gleim, M. C. McCall, and C. W. Owings. Final Report on a Gas and Dust Explosion, January 10, 1940, in Mine No. 1 of the Pond Creek Pocahontas Company, Bartley, McDowell County, West Virginia. Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1940. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/pond_creek_1940.pdf
Appalachian Regional Commission. “McDowell, West Virginia.” Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/mcdowell-west-virginia/
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report, McDowell County, West Virginia. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Transportation, Division of Highways, 2018. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Battlo, Jean. A Pictorial History of McDowell County, 1858–1958: From Rural Farms to Coal Kingdom. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 2003. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://wvbookco.com/product/pictorial-history-of-mcdowell-county-1858-1958/
DiBello, Joseph, Donald E. Briggs, Michael Creasey, and Alisa McCann. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Philadelphia: National Park Service, Mid-Atlantic Regional Office, 1993. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/coal-mining-heritage.pdf
Historical Marker Database. “Bartley Mine Disaster.” Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=1860
Ingle-Schierloh Company. Ingle-Schierloh Records, Volume 1: ACME to Big Creek. National Numismatic Portal, 1947. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/562429?page=341
Korson, George Gershon, and Orville J. Jenks. “Sprinkle Coal Dust on My Grave.” Recorded in Welch, West Virginia, 1940. Audio recording. George Korson Collection of Songs of Bituminous Coal Miners, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197188/
Mine Safety and Health Administration. “Historical Data on Mine Disasters in the United States.” United States Department of Labor. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://arlweb.msha.gov/MSHAINFO/FactSheets/MSHAFCT8.htm
National Archives and Records Administration. “1940 Census Records.” Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
Pond Creek Pocahontas Company. Annual Reports to Stockholders, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1949. Ferdinand C. Menk Coal Mining Records, A&M 3645, West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2040
Richmond News Leader. “Rescue and Recovery Operations at the Bartley Mine.” January 13, 1940, 1. Virginia Chronicle. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=RNL19400113.1.1
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://search.worldcat.org/title/666823075
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection.” TopoView. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Company, Bartley, West Virginia.” August 1931. Norfolk and Western Historical Photograph Collection. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/items/show/36335
Waynesboro News-Virginian. “Miners Trapped Following Pond Creek Mine Explosion.” January 12, 1940, 1. Virginia Chronicle. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=WNV19400112.1.1
Waynesboro News-Virginian. “Rescue Crews Dig Deeper in Ruins Seeking Bodies.” January 13, 1940, 1. Virginia Chronicle. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=WNV19400113.1.1
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Coal Mining Disaster Reports Collection, 1938–1977.” A&M 4203, West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/3696
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Ernest Glenwood Otey Papers, 1935–1965.” A&M 1909, West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5696
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Ferdinand C. Menk Coal Mining Records, 1922–1966.” A&M 3645, West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2040
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Minter Homes Corporation Records, 1923–1932.” A&M 3654, West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2084
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Records Interactive.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://wvculture.org/vital-records-interactive/
West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Bartley Mine Disaster.” Last revised February 8, 2024. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/344
West Virginia Public Broadcasting. “January 10, 1940: Bartley Mine Explosion.” January 10, 2020. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://wvpublic.org/story/radio/january-10-1940-bartley-mine-explosion/
Wieck, Edward A. Preventing Fatal Explosions in Coal Mines: A Study of Recent Major Disasters in the United States as Accompaniments of Technological Change. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1942. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/Preventing-Fatal-Explosions-Coal-Mines.pdf
Author Note: This article reconstructs Bartley through the federal mine investigation, company records, archival photographs, newspapers, and coal heritage studies. It remembers the 91 miners who died while also preserving the larger history of the community they left behind.