Appalachian Community Histories – Black Wolf, McDowell County: Mines, Railroad Sidings, and a Coal Camp Reborn
Black Wolf is one of the smaller coal communities of McDowell County, West Virginia, but its surviving records tell a story much larger than its size. The community appears under several names, including Black Wolf, Blackwolf, and the postal designation Dearing. Its mines were tied to the Norfolk & Western Railway’s Tug Fork Branch, the route that connected the coal beneath McDowell County’s mountains with distant industrial markets.
Black Wolf did not experience only one mining boom. The records point to two separate periods of development. The first grew around the Black Wolf Coal & Coke Company during the early twentieth century. The second began after World War II, when the Nassau Coal Company acquired the old coal property, built new railroad facilities, constructed a tipple, and opened mines in the Pocahontas No. 3 and No. 4 seams.
This made Black Wolf a coal camp that effectively rose twice. Its first life belonged to the early industrialization of McDowell County. Its second belonged to the powerful but increasingly mechanized coal industry of the postwar years.
An Older Story Behind the Name Black Wolf
Coal records do not provide the only historical layer connected to Black Wolf. In 1927, Wells Goodykoontz delivered an address at the unveiling of a tablet dedicated to Black Wolf in McDowell County. The surviving bibliographic record dates the ceremony to June 14, 1927.
The address is significant because it shows that residents during the coal era associated the place with an older frontier story. Like many commemorative speeches, however, it was delivered generations after the events it described. It should be read as evidence of how people in 1927 remembered and interpreted the past, rather than as a contemporary account of eighteenth-century events.
Even with that caution, the tablet reveals that Black Wolf possessed an identity beyond the mine portal and railroad siding. While coal companies were reshaping the landscape, local residents were also attempting to connect the community with a history that existed before industrial mining.
The Railroad Opens McDowell County
For most of the nineteenth century, McDowell County’s rugged mountains limited settlement and commercial development. That changed when investors, land companies, and railroad builders began preparing to reach the region’s immense coal deposits.
The Norfolk & Western Railway spanned McDowell County by 1892. During the following decade, the railroad constructed branches and spurs into many of the county’s coal-producing areas. The railway made large-scale mining possible by providing a dependable means of moving coal from isolated mountain valleys to national markets.
Black Wolf was part of this transformation. A Norfolk & Western engineering plan dated February 28, 1906, shows land at Blackwolf that was to be conveyed by the Pocahontas Coal & Coke Company. The plan placed the property along the Tug Fork Branch at approximately milepost 12.55.
The drawing is one of the earliest known records specifically placing industrial development at Black Wolf. It shows that land ownership, railroad access, and engineering work were being arranged before the surviving company account records began.
The First Black Wolf Coal Company
By 1907, the Black Wolf Coal & Coke Company was conducting enough business to generate account books and financial records. The Eastern Regional Coal Archives at Craft Memorial Library lists a small collection containing the company’s 1907 account records and additional mining memorabilia.
Although the account books have not been widely digitized, their survival is important. Such records can preserve the ordinary workings of a mining company, including employee accounts, equipment purchases, contractor payments, company-store transactions, transportation charges, and operating expenses.
By 1915, the company was firmly established in the state mining reports. The West Virginia Department of Mines listed the Black Wolf Coal & Coke Company in McDowell County and gave Dearing as its post-office address. This explains why some researchers have difficulty locating Black Wolf in government records. A resident could live or work at Black Wolf while appearing in official documents under Dearing.
The company produced 49,475 tons of coal during the reporting year covered by the 1915 state report. That output was modest when compared with the enormous operations surrounding Gary, but it represented a substantial industrial undertaking for a small mountain community.
Inside Black Wolf Mines Nos. 1 and 2
The 1915 mine inspector’s account provides an unusually detailed description of the original Black Wolf operation. The report identified the workings as Black Wolf Nos. 1 and 2 and placed them about thirteen miles southeast of Welch on the Norfolk & Western’s Tug Fork Branch.
The mines worked the Pocahontas No. 4 seam, which the inspector measured at approximately five and one-half feet thick. Coal was cut by machine and moved to side tracks by mules. Electric locomotives then carried it outside, where a larger locomotive hauled the coal approximately two and one-quarter miles down a tram road to the tipple.
This description captures a mine operating between two eras. Animal power still moved coal in the interior workings, but electric haulage had become essential to transporting the output to the tipple and railroad.
Ventilation came from an eighteen-foot fan operating at sixty revolutions per minute and moving approximately 70,000 cubic feet of air each minute. The inspector described the workings as relatively moist and reported that he had not encountered gas during his visits. New overcasts had been installed to improve the circulation of air.
The mine employed approximately fifty to sixty men and was capable of producing around 500 tons per day. Yet the report also stated that it had worked less than half time during the year. This reflected the uncertain rhythm of coal employment. A mine might possess machinery, labor, railroad access, and a productive seam, but market conditions still determined how many days the men received work.
George Smith and the Cost of Coal
The same report that described Black Wolf’s machinery and production also preserved the name of a worker who never returned home.
George Smith was a Black coal loader employed at the Black Wolf Mine. On March 5, 1915, he was working on the main entry when a fall of slate caught and killed him. The state report recorded his death in only a few lines.
Those lines are important because coal-company histories can easily become stories about corporations, railroad tracks, tonnage, machinery, and mineral seams. George Smith’s death returns the focus to the people who entered the mountain each day.
A coal loader performed some of the hardest physical labor in the mine. After coal had been cut and blasted from the seam, loaders shoveled the broken coal into mine cars. They worked beneath rock and slate that could shift without enough warning to permit escape.
Smith’s inclusion in the record also reflects the diverse workforce that industrial mining brought to McDowell County. Coal companies recruited Black workers from the American South and immigrants from Europe because the county’s existing population could not supply enough labor for the rapidly expanding mines. By the mid-twentieth century, McDowell County had become one of West Virginia’s most racially and culturally diverse regions.
The mine report does not reveal where Smith was born, whether he had a wife or children, or where he was buried. Those answers may survive in death records, cemetery records, newspapers, census schedules, or company accounts. His name remains one of the clearest reminders that Black Wolf’s coal was purchased with human risk.
Black Wolf, Blackwolf, and Dearing
Black Wolf’s history is complicated by its changing names. Railroad documents often used Blackwolf as a single word. State mine reports connected the Black Wolf Coal & Coke Company with Dearing. Later records returned to Black Wolf when describing the Nassau Coal Company.
Such naming patterns were common in coal country. A mine name, company name, railroad stop, post office, and residential camp could all refer to the same general place without using identical wording. Boundaries between neighboring communities were often less definite than modern maps suggest.
This means a person searching only for Black Wolf may overlook residents recorded at Dearing. Someone searching only for the Black Wolf Coal & Coke Company may miss later Nassau records. Railroad files, census schedules, mine reports, birth certificates, and death records must therefore be searched under all of the known variations.
The names themselves show how coal communities were organized. A company could define the workplace, while a post office defined the mailing address and a railroad defined the industrial location.
The End of the First Operation
The surviving records do not yet establish a precise date when the original Black Wolf Coal & Coke operation ended. The company remained visible in state mining records during the later 1910s, but by the 1940s its productive years belonged to the past.
The clearest evidence comes from a 1947 report in the mining journal Coal Age. The publication described the Black Wolf property as acreage belonging to the old Black Wolf Coal Company. The language indicates that the earlier operation had ceased or had become inactive before Nassau Coal Company arrived.
Black Wolf’s continued existence between these two mining periods should not be confused with uninterrupted production. Families could remain in or near a former coal camp after its principal mine slowed or closed. Houses, roads, churches, stores, and family ties could preserve a community even when the company that created it had disappeared.
Then, after World War II, industrial attention returned to the coal beneath Black Wolf.
Nassau Coal Company Brings the Mine Back
In October 1947, Coal Age announced that the newly organized Nassau Coal Company expected to begin producing coal around the first of the following year. Roland C. Luther was identified as president of the company.
Nassau planned to mine the Pocahontas No. 3 and No. 4 seams at Black Wolf. Its initial production goal was 1,200 tons per day, more than twice the daily figure reported for the old Black Wolf mines in 1915. The company expected to increase that output as quickly as possible.
The company reportedly purchased all the coal acreage belonging to the old Black Wolf Coal Company. It also leased additional property from the Pocahontas Land Corporation and the United States Coal & Coke Company. Together, the purchased and leased tracts provided approximately 1,500 acres for development.
The No. 3 seam was to be mined first. Coal would initially be shipped as run-of-mine coal, meaning that it would leave the mine without the full preparation and cleaning system Nassau intended to install later.
This was not merely a reopening of an old portal. Nassau was assembling property, developing multiple seams, planning modern preparation facilities, and creating a larger industrial operation around the remains of the first Black Wolf company.
Building a New Siding and Tipple
Norfolk & Western Railway records document the physical construction that followed Nassau’s announcement.
On October 30, 1947, the railroad approved a portion of the proposed siding facilities for Nassau Coal Company at Black Wolf. The memorandum placed the work near milepost 11 on the Tug Fork Branch and referred to blueprints numbered 13564 and 13564-A.
Less than two months later, another agreement permitted Nassau to create a temporary private grade crossing while the company constructed its tipple. Dated December 22, 1947, the file included safety requirements and conditions governing the temporary road’s use and eventual removal.
These records capture Black Wolf during a moment of rebuilding. Construction crews were preparing tracks, arranging crossings, and erecting the structure that would sort and load the coal. The railroad was not simply passing through the community. It was being adapted to serve a newly developing mine.
The siding, crossing, and tipple represented the industrial framework of Black Wolf’s second life.
The Nassau Mines on the Map
The postwar operation continued to appear in engineering and geological records. The Pocahontas Mines Collection at Virginia Tech includes material for Nassau Coal Company’s No. 11 Mine in the Pocahontas No. 3 seam at Blackwolf. The map was posted to September 25, 1950. The collection also contains material connected with the old Black Wolf Coal & Coke Company No. 1 Mine.
A 1953 United States Geological Survey report adds another precise location. During a geological investigation, federal researchers visited Nassau Coal Company Mine No. 1 on November 19, 1952. They described it as a drift mine at the head of the first left fork of Tug Creek, northwest of Black Wolf, in the Welch quadrangle.
The USGS study was concerned with the composition and radioactivity of coal and shale rather than community history. Even so, it confirms that Nassau’s Black Wolf operation remained active enough in late 1952 to be visited, identified, and sampled by federal geologists.
Together, the No. 1 and No. 11 designations suggest an operation more extensive than a single portal. Black Wolf had again become part of the active industrial geography of the Pocahontas coalfield.
Growing Up in the Nassau Coal Camp
Black Wolf’s postwar history survives not only in technical drawings and government reports, but also in the memories of one of Appalachia’s most important novelists.
Denise Giardina was born in 1951 and spent the first thirteen years of her life at Black Wolf. Her father worked as an accountant or bookkeeper for the local coal company, while her mother worked as a nurse. Giardina later drew upon her childhood in the coalfields while writing Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth.
Giardina remembered a mine located within walking distance of the company houses. Miners walked from the camp to their work, and a whistle could be sounded when an accident occurred. To a child, the mine was both familiar and frightening. It provided the economic reason for the community’s existence, but it also carried the possibility of death into daily life.
Her memories help fill the space between the industrial records. The Norfolk & Western files describe where a siding was constructed. Coal Age describes the planned tonnage. The USGS describes the seam and mine location. Giardina’s testimony describes what it felt like to grow up in the houses beneath those operations.
Black Wolf was small, but it belonged to a chain of coal camps extending through the surrounding hollows. Traveling through the area meant passing mine after mine and camp after camp. Each possessed its own houses, workforce, company authority, and relationship with the railroad.
The Closing of the Camp
McDowell County reached its greatest population in 1950, when it had 98,887 residents. During the middle of the twentieth century, it became the leading coal-producing county in the United States, a position it held until neighboring Logan County surpassed it in 1955.
Black Wolf’s postwar redevelopment occurred at the very height of that industrial power. Yet the Nassau operation was also being developed at the beginning of a transformation that would empty many coal communities.
After 1950, increased mechanization allowed companies to produce coal with fewer workers. Employment declined, families left in search of work, and communities that had depended almost entirely upon a single mine lost their economic foundation.
The biographical description accompanying Denise Giardina’s papers states that the Black Wolf mine closed when she was thirteen. Her family then moved to Charleston in search of work. That places the end of the camp’s active role in her family’s life around the middle of the 1960s.
The company’s disappearance did not erase the community all at once. Former company houses, roads, cemeteries, railroad grades, mine openings, family memories, and place names could survive long after regular production ended. Yet the closing removed the force that had brought the second Black Wolf camp into existence.
What Survives of Black Wolf
Black Wolf’s history is scattered, but it is far from lost.
The Eastern Regional Coal Archives preserves the 1907 company account records. The Norfolk & Western Historical Society preserves the 1906 land plan and the 1947 siding and crossing agreements. The West Virginia mine reports document production, machinery, employment, inspections, and the death of George Smith.
Virginia Tech’s Pocahontas Mines Collection contains mine maps and engineering records for both the original Black Wolf company and the later Nassau operation. The United States Geological Survey recorded the location of Nassau Mine No. 1 in 1952. West Virginia University preserves Denise Giardina’s papers, photographs, manuscripts, and records connected to her childhood and writing.
Additional evidence almost certainly survives in McDowell County deeds, land books, death certificates, census schedules, newspapers, cemetery records, corporate charters, mine maps, and railroad valuation files. Those sources may eventually identify the camp’s houses, company store, school, churches, residents, and exact sequence of corporate ownership.
Black Wolf is a strong example of why small Appalachian communities must be researched across multiple kinds of records. No single source tells its full story. The community emerges only when railroad drawings, mine reports, company records, geological surveys, and personal memories are read together.
Why Black Wolf’s Story Matters
Black Wolf represents more than an abandoned or diminished place on the McDowell County map.
Its history follows the larger rise and decline of the southern West Virginia coalfields. The railroad arrived, land was transferred, mines opened, workers entered the mountain, coal moved to national markets, and a community grew around the operation. When the first company faded, another returned and rebuilt the industrial landscape.
The story also demonstrates the instability hidden beneath coalfield prosperity. Black Wolf could produce tens of thousands of tons of coal, employ generations of families, and maintain direct railroad connections, yet its survival remained dependent upon decisions made by companies and markets far beyond the camp.
For George Smith, the cost was immediate and fatal. For Denise Giardina’s family, it came decades later in the form of a closed mine and a move away from home. Between their experiences stood hundreds of other families whose names remain scattered across records that have yet to be fully examined.
Black Wolf rose twice because coal companies twice found value beneath its mountains. Its residents gave the place a history that lasted longer than either company.
Sources & Further Reading
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report, McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways. Silver Lake, OH: Aurora Research Associates LLC, November 15, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Archer, William R. McDowell County. Images of America. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005. https://books.apple.com/us/book/mcdowell-county/id469369660
Battlo, Jean. A Pictorial History of McDowell County, 1858–1958: From Rural Farms to Coal Kingdom. Charleston, WV: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 2002. https://www.abebooks.com/9780870126925/Pictorial-History-McDowell-County-1858-1958-087012692X/plp
Chatman, Jay. McDowell County Coal and Rail. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. https://books.google.com/books/about/McDowell_County_Coal_and_Rail.html?id=xn2VEQAAQBAJ
Coal Age. “Production of Coal from the Properties of the New Nassau Coal Co.” Vol. 52, no. 10, October 1947. https://archive.org/details/sim_coal-age_1947-10_52_10
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Account Records of Black Wolf Coal & Coke Company, 1907.” Willie Walters Collection, Accession 90-133. Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “West Virginia Bureau of Mines Annual Reports, 1893–1980.” Accession 88-67. Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Goodykoontz, Wells. Address Delivered Tuesday, June 14, 1927, at the Unveiling of Tablet of Black Wolf, McDowell County, West Virginia. 1927. Bibliographic listing in the West Virginia State Archives’ McDowell County bibliography. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/McDowell_County%2C_West_Virginia_Genealogy
Myers, Mark. “Coal Mechanization and Migration from McDowell County, West Virginia, 1932–1970.” Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2001. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/116/
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Plan Showing Land at Blackwolf to Be Conveyed by the Pocahontas Coal & Coke Company.” Drawing HS-C06086, document Y-6203, February 28, 1906. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=224539
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Siding Facilities for Nassau Coal Company at Black Wolf.” File Hol-01300.60, document 13564, October 30, 1947. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=269267
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Temporary Private Grade Crossing at Black Wolf during Construction of Nassau Coal Company Tipple.” File Hol-01300.61, document N-21801, December 22, 1947. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=269269
Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. “National Mine Map Repository.” U.S. Department of the Interior. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://www.osmre.gov/programs/national-mine-map-repository
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://search.worldcat.org/title/666823075
Schust, Alex P. Gary Hollow: A History of the Largest Coal Mining Operation in the World. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2005. https://search.worldcat.org/title/61443211
Snider, John L. Reconnaissance for Uranium in Coal and Shale in Southern West Virginia and Southwestern Virginia. Trace Elements Investigations Report 409. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1953. https://pubs.usgs.gov/tei/409/report.pdf
“Saints and Villains: An Interview with Denise Giardina.” Southern Changes 19, nos. 3–4. Southern Regional Council. https://southernchanges.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/sc19-3-4_001/sc19-3-4_008/
United States Census Bureau. “1950 Census Records.” National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://1950census.archives.gov/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Nassau Coal Company No. 11 Mine, No. 3 Seam, Blackwolf, West Virginia, and Black Wolf Coal and Coke Company No. 1 Mine.” Pocahontas Mines Collection, Ms-2004-002, Box 641. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/109188
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Pocahontas Corporation Property Map, McDowell County, West Virginia, and Tazewell County, Virginia.” PLD-1503.041, Box 627, Pocahontas Mines Collection, Ms-2004-002. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/109112
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “McDowell County Historical Sources.” West Virginia State Archives. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” Accessed July 18, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1915. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1915. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde1914west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1918. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1918. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde36west
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Denise Giardina, Author, Papers.” A&M 3740. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, West Virginia. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2179
West Virginia Humanities Council. “McDowell County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1577
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “Mine Map Archives.” Accessed July 18, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/
Author Note: Black Wolf survives in fragments across mine reports, railroad plans, archival maps, and the memories of Denise Giardina. I hope this article reconnects those records with the miners and families who gave the McDowell County camp its life.