Appalachian Community Histories – Newtown, Mingo County: The Hatfield Cemetery, Coal Mines, and Life Along Mate Creek
Newtown sits in the narrow country of southern Mingo County where Mate Creek winds between steep ridges before reaching the Tug Fork at Matewan. West Virginia Archives and History places the community in Magnolia District, alongside Red Jacket, Meador, Musick, Thacker, North Matewan, and other settlements that grew within the same creek and railroad corridor.
Today Newtown is easy to pass through without realizing how much history surrounds it. It never became a large incorporated town, and its name rarely appears in broad histories of West Virginia. Yet the ground around Newtown connects several of the most important eras in the history of the Tug Valley. Members of the Hatfield family were living and dying here before Mingo County existed. Coal development transformed Mate Creek during the early twentieth century. Miners and their families traveled this road during the turbulent years when nearby Matewan became one of the centers of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Later, mechanization and the decline of the old coal camp economy changed the settlements along the creek again.
The evidence for Newtown’s past is scattered among cemetery records, geological surveys, deeds, oral histories, postal records, mining documents, and the archives of neighboring Matewan. Put together, those records reveal that Newtown was never isolated from the larger history of the Tug Valley. It was part of it from the beginning.
Before Newtown Was Mingo County
The oldest documented history around Newtown begins before the community carried its modern identity.
The National Register nomination for the Hatfield cemeteries records that members of the Hatfield family were among the early settlers of this section of the Tug Valley. According to the nomination, Ephraim Hatfield I settled near present-day Matewan in the late 1790s. His descendants became deeply rooted in the valleys and branches surrounding the Tug Fork, including the country around Mate Creek.
At that time there was no Mingo County. The land that would become Newtown belonged to Logan County, and researchers looking for nineteenth-century families around Mate Creek often have to follow records backward through Logan County courthouses and deed books rather than searching only under Mingo.
That distinction matters because some of the strongest evidence of early settlement near Newtown appears in a small family cemetery overlooking Mate Creek.
The Original Hatfield Cemetery at Newtown
On a steep knoll where Pat’s Branch enters Mate Creek is the Hatfield Cemetery at New Town, one of the most historically important sites in the community.
When historian Michael J. Pauley documented the property for the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, he described a roughly one-acre cemetery overlooking County Route 6. At that time it contained twenty-one burials. The oldest legible marker belonged to Ephraim Hatfield, who died in 1881, though Pauley noted that several illegible stones might have been older.
The nomination calls the Newtown burial ground the first or original Hatfield Cemetery. It predates the better-known Hatfield Cemetery near Sarah Ann where Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield would eventually be buried beneath his famous marble statue. When the Newtown cemetery was laid out in the early 1880s, the surrounding land was still part of Logan County. Mingo County would not be created until 1895.
Ephraim Hatfield was the father of Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield and Ellison Hatfield. Their mother, Nancy Hatfield, was also buried there. The cemetery eventually became the resting place of Ellison himself, his wife Sarah Staton Hatfield, Pat Hatfield, Floyd Hatfield, Reverend Joe Hatfield, former Logan County sheriff Joe Hatfield, Allen Chafin, and other members of the extended family.
Ellison’s grave ties Newtown directly to the most famous chapter of the Hatfield-McCoy story. In August 1882, Ellison was attacked by three sons of Randolph McCoy following an election-day confrontation in Kentucky and later died from his wounds. The killing and the Hatfields’ retaliatory execution of the McCoy brothers pushed the feud into its most violent and nationally publicized period. Ellison was returned to the family cemetery near what became Newtown.
The cemetery therefore preserves something unusual. Long before coal companies, post offices, modern highways, and twentieth-century mining operations defined the community, families were already occupying this part of Mate Creek. In 1980 the Hatfield Cemetery was formally added to the National Register as part of the Hatfield Cemeteries in Southwestern West Virginia thematic nomination. West Virginia’s State Historic Preservation Office still lists the property under the New Town vicinity of Mingo County.
Mingo County and the Coming of Coal
Mingo County was formed from part of Logan County in 1895. Within only a few years, the economic value of land along Mate Creek was changing rapidly.
The narrow valley that had supported farms, timbering, small settlements, and family landholdings was becoming valuable because of what lay beneath the mountains. A West Virginia court case decided in 1913 provides an unusually detailed glimpse of that transformation. The dispute involved land along Mate Creek and referenced a deed made in 1900 granting rights for roads, tramways, railways, bridges, coal transportation, mining privileges, tipples, and other structures needed to remove coal and other minerals. The case even emphasized the physical problem that shaped development throughout Mate Creek: the valley was narrow and the mountainsides were steep, leaving limited space for railroads, roads, houses, and mine facilities.
A massive West Virginia Geological Survey report published in 1914 documented the coal resources of Logan and Mingo counties at precisely the moment when industrial development was remaking the region. State geologists described the steep ridges and narrow coal and shale benches characteristic of the southern Mingo landscape and mapped the coal seams that would support generations of mining.
Newtown’s story during these years cannot be separated neatly from Red Jacket, Thacker, Meador, North Matewan, and Matewan. Coal operations were scattered along the same drainage, while roads and transportation followed the creek toward the Tug Fork.
Newtown Takes Its Place on the Map
Exactly when local residents began consistently calling the settlement Newtown is harder to determine.
The National Register nomination written in 1980 refers to the burial ground as the Hatfield Cemetery at “New Town” and dates the cemetery to approximately 1881. That proves settlement in the immediate area by that period, but it does not necessarily prove that Newtown was already the established community name in 1881.
Postal history offers a better marker for when Newtown had emerged as a recognized community identity. The historical United States Post Offices dataset assembled by Richard Helbock and Cameron Blevins, based principally on the Post Office Department’s Records of Appointments of Postmasters, places the establishment of the Newtown post office in 1925. The dataset should be used cautiously for exact dates, but its underlying source base makes 1925 a strong indication of when Newtown entered the federal postal network under that name.
That timing makes sense within the larger development of Mate Creek. By the 1920s the surrounding coalfield had grown into a network of mines, company communities, railroad facilities, stores, schools, and residences. A post office could give a small mountain settlement something approaching an official identity even when it was never incorporated as a municipality.
Newtown was becoming part of the geography of industrial Mingo County.
Living in the Mate Creek Coalfield
One of the best descriptions of everyday life along Mate Creek comes from Marshall Kirk, interviewed in 1989 for the Matewan Oral History Project.
Kirk moved to Red Jacket in 1938 after growing up in other coal camps and eventually became deeply involved in the Matewan community. His interview is particularly valuable because he remembered the settlements of Mate Creek not as isolated dots on a map but as parts of one connected social and economic world.
Transportation shows how those communities functioned together. Kirk remembered that a man named Kirk Hatfield was already running a small transportation service along Mate Creek during the 1930s, using what Kirk believed was a 1937 Ford station wagon to carry passengers between the creek communities and Matewan. Around 1939 or 1940, businessman C. C. Miller established a larger bus operation that ran early in the morning and late at night so miners working different shifts could reach the mines and return home.
The buses eventually disappeared as automobiles became more affordable after World War II, but for a generation they tied together places such as Newtown, Red Jacket, and Matewan. A miner could live up Mate Creek, work at one operation, shop or conduct business in another community, and travel into Matewan without owning a car.
Kirk’s recollections also show just how thoroughly coal dominated the landscape. He remembered several tipples around Red Jacket and described an old loading operation farther up the creek near Newtown. By the late 1980s he estimated that five or six smaller mining operations were active above Red Jacket and Newtown.
In the Shadow of the Mine Wars
Newtown lay only a short distance up Mate Creek from one of the most important labor conflicts in American history.
On May 19, 1920, the confrontation now known as the Matewan Massacre erupted in downtown Matewan after Baldwin-Felts detectives had been involved in evicting miners and their families from company housing. Matewan police chief Sid Hatfield challenged the detectives, gunfire broke out near the railroad, and ten people were killed. The confrontation helped transform a local union struggle into a wider conflict that eventually contributed to the armed miners’ march and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.
The shooting itself happened in Matewan, not Newtown, but communities along Mate Creek existed within the same mining economy. Miners moved between operations, families traveled into Matewan, and news of strikes, evictions, union meetings, martial law, mine guards, and violence traveled quickly through the creek settlements.
By July 1920, more than 90 percent of Mingo County miners had reportedly taken the union oath. West Virginia Archives and History describes the following thirteen months as a period of virtual war in the county, with attacks on mines and miners’ colonies, repeated violence, and three declarations of martial law.
For Newtown residents, the Mine Wars were not some distant event occurring elsewhere in West Virginia. They unfolded within the same county and within the same coalfield that provided much of the community’s livelihood.
Coal Ownership and a Changing Industry
The coal economy that supported Mate Creek continued changing through the middle and late twentieth century.
Marshall Kirk remembered that large land and mineral owners controlled vast reserves beneath Mate Creek and the surrounding watersheds. He specifically recalled United States Steel, Pocahontas Land, Cotiga Development, and Norfolk & Western interests among the major holders. In his memory, corporate changes and leasing arrangements eventually encouraged the growth of smaller mining operations in the upper reaches of Mate Creek.
Modern geological work confirms how thoroughly the region remains tied to old underground workings. A West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey study of abandoned mine pools identifies Newtown alongside Hinch, Meador, and Thacker Mines within the historic mining landscape surrounding the Majestic quadrangle. The study describes extensive underground workings beneath the ridges drained by streams such as Double Camp Fork and Meador Fork of Mate Creek.
Even abandoned portals remained part of Newtown’s landscape long after particular mines stopped producing. State contracting records identify a Newtown, or Kinder Portals, abandoned mine project in which approximately one hundred acres were mapped for reclamation design and field survey work.
Coal therefore shaped Newtown twice. First it brought investment, jobs, transportation, and population into Mate Creek. Later its decline and the physical remains of mining became another defining part of the community.
When the Coal Camps Began to Thin Out
By the time Marshall Kirk was interviewed in 1989, he had watched much of the older coalfield landscape disappear.
He attributed much of the change to mechanization. Mines could produce coal with fewer workers, and communities that had once needed large numbers of miners no longer required the same rows of houses. Kirk estimated that Red Jacket alone had lost around 150 homes during the previous thirty-five years. Hollows that had once been lined with company houses emptied, while old tipples disappeared or were replaced by newer loading facilities.
The same forces affected Newtown. Employment became less labor intensive. Younger residents had fewer reasons to remain close to the old mining settlements. Cars reduced dependence on the local stores, buses, and services that had once made individual creek communities more self-contained.
Newtown survived, but like many Appalachian coal communities, it became smaller and quieter than the industrial landscape that had developed around it during the first half of the twentieth century.
The End of the Newtown Post Office
The community’s postal history provides a surprisingly clear marker of that change.
Federal postal records show that the Newtown Post Office was discontinued effective August 20, 2015. Two years later, the United States Postal Service formally reorganized the designation. Its 2017 Postal Bulletin listed Newtown’s old ZIP Code, 25686, under Red Jacket while retaining “Newtown” as an accepted place name for mailing purposes.
The distinction is small on paper but historically meaningful. A post office that had helped give the community an official federal identity for generations was gone, yet the name itself remained.
That is often how Appalachian communities endure. The institution disappears before the place does.
What Remains at Newtown
Newtown’s history is still visible for those who know where to look.
Mate Creek continues through the valley. Roads still follow the narrow ground between creek and mountain. Old mining sites and underground workings remain beneath the ridges. State environmental monitoring stations continue to identify streams such as Chafin Branch and Double Camp Fork in relation to the community of Newtown, preserving the name within the geography of the watershed.
Most importantly, the old Hatfield Cemetery remains above the creek.
Historian Brandon Ray Kirk visited the cemetery in 2019 and photographed the route into the burial ground, Ellison Hatfield’s grave, and the surrounding landscape. His photographs show just how closely the cemetery remains tied to Mate Creek and Newtown rather than to some abstract version of the Hatfield-McCoy story.
The cemetery is a reminder that the history of Newtown did not begin with coal. The families buried there were already connected to this ground decades before industrial mining transformed Mingo County.
Why Newtown Matters
Newtown is the kind of Appalachian community that can disappear from history when researchers look only for incorporated towns, courthouse squares, and major industrial centers.
Its significance comes from the layers that overlap there.
The Hatfield Cemetery carries the community’s documented history into the nineteenth century and connects Newtown to one of America’s most famous family conflicts. Mate Creek’s deeds, mineral rights, and mining records show the arrival of industrial coal development. Oral histories preserve the buses, tipples, miners, ballplayers, coal trucks, and families who made the creek communities function as a connected world. Nearby Matewan places Newtown within the geography of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Modern reclamation records document what happened when some of those mines were abandoned. Finally, the closing of the post office shows how the infrastructure of the old community gradually contracted even while the name survived.
Newtown was never the largest place in Mingo County, and it was rarely the place making the headlines. That is precisely why its history matters.
Most of Appalachian history was lived in communities like this one, along creeks and branches where families buried their dead, miners followed work underground, buses carried people toward town, children grew up beneath coal tipples, and generations watched the landscape change around them.
Newtown’s story is not simply the history of a small settlement near Matewan. It is, in miniature, the history of the Tug Valley itself.
Sources & Further Reading
Michael J. Pauley. “Hatfield Cemeteries in Southwestern West Virginia.” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. West Virginia Department of Culture and History and U.S. Department of the Interior, 1980. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000961_text
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “Mingo County: National Register of Historic Places Nominations.” State Historic Preservation Office. https://wvculture.org/agencies/state-historic-preservation-office-shpo/register-of-historical-places/national-register-of-historic-places-nominations/mingo-county/
Pauley, Michael. “Hatfield Cemetery at Newtown.” Photograph, May 1979. Hatfield Cemeteries in Southwestern West Virginia Thematic Resources, National Register of Historic Places. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5a795a07-ca4b-4385-a386-540f6936c841/
Johnson, Kim, comp. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” From The New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, 1933. West Virginia Archives and History, 2004. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
Kirk, Marshall. Interview by John Hennen, June 26, 1989. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/Sc2003-135/mdcoralhen17.html
McCoy, John L. Interview by John Hennen, May 31, 1989. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/Sc2003-135/mdcoralhen01.html
Accord, Dixie. Interview by John Hennen, June 7, 1989. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/sc2003-135/mdcoralhen05.html
Matewan Development Center. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia Archives and History, 1989–1992. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/specialcollections/sc2003-135.html
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. County Reports and Maps: Logan and Mingo Counties. Wheeling, WV: Wheeling News Lithograph Company, 1914. https://books.google.com/books/about/County_Reports_and_Maps.html?id=U3KQDPX4JYQC
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971.” Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28, Roll 140, West Virginia, Mason through Raleigh Counties. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Microfilm Publication M1126, Record Group 28, Roll 648, Mingo County, West Virginia. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
The Mingo Republican. Williamson, WV, 1904–1951. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092084/
The Mingo Republican. Williamson, WV, January 13, 1949. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092084/1949-01-13/ed-1/
The Williamson Enterprise. Williamson, WV, 1907–1911. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092085/
The Progressive West Virginian. Williamson, WV, 1911–1913. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092086/
West Virginia State Archives. “West Virginia State Archives County Court Records Microfilm Holdings: Mingo County.” Includes births, deaths, marriages, wills, estate records, deeds, chancery records, and typed copies of Logan County deeds from 1836–1894. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia State Archives. “County Records at the West Virginia State Archives.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/countyrecords.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Naturalization Records at the West Virginia State Archives: Mingo County.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/natural.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Matewan Trial Transcript. A&M 3608. West Virginia University, 1921. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2047
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Matewan Massacre Records. A&M 2962. West Virginia University, 1914–1934. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1090
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Miscellaneous West Virginia Mine War Documents. A&M 2992. West Virginia University, 1919–1924. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1128
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Mingo County Highway Maps. Collection 4479_Mingo, including Mingo County Highway Map, 1937. West Virginia University. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/3139
U.S. Geological Survey. Matewan, WV-KY-VA Historical Map. 1:48,000. 1915. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://store.usgs.gov/
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service. “Mate Creek Watershed Project, West Virginia: Availability of Negative Declaration.” Federal Register 42, no. 162, August 22, 1977. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1977-08-22/pdf/FR-1977-08-22.pdf
United States Postal Service. “Post Office Changes.” Postal Bulletin 22474, August 17, 2017. Includes the discontinuance of the Newtown Post Office and establishment of Newtown as a place name under Red Jacket. https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2017/pb22474/html/info_001.htm
Smith, Nancy Sue. An History of Mingo County, West Virginia. Williamson, WV: Williamson Printing Company, 1960. Listed in the West Virginia State Archives Mingo County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Smith, Nancy Sue. History of Logan and Mingo Counties, Beginning in 1617. Williamson, WV: Nancy Smith, 1966. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Mingo County Genealogical Society. Heritage of Mingo. Vol. 1. Williamson, WV: Mingo County Genealogical Society, 1985. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Matewan Development Center. The Red Jacketeer. Matewan, WV: Matewan Development Center, n.d. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
What’s the Matter With Mingo? Williamson, WV: Mingo Republican Print, 1938. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Author Note: Newtown is one of those small Mingo County communities whose history becomes much larger once the surviving records are brought together. I wanted to document how the Hatfield cemetery, Mate Creek coalfield, and nearby Matewan labor history all helped shape this place.