Appalachian Community Histories – Pie, Mingo County: Coal, Water, Floods, and a Community Along Pigeon Creek
Pie is the kind of Appalachian place that can disappear on a map long before it disappears from the lives of the people who call it home.
The unincorporated community lies in Mingo County along Pigeon Creek, where houses, roads, branches, and narrow strips of bottomland are pressed between steep mountains. The United States Geological Survey places Pie at about 1,266 feet above sea level on the Barnabus quadrangle. Historically, the community belonged to Magnolia District, alongside places such as Matewan, Musick, Newtown, Red Jacket, Thacker, and Varney.
Pie never became an incorporated town with a municipal government, courthouse, or substantial local archive of its own. Its history must instead be pieced together from post office records, county deeds, census schedules, geological surveys, mining permits, court cases, flood reports, newspaper photographs, and the memories of families who lived along Pigeon Creek.
That documentary trail reveals far more than an unusually named community. During the twentieth century, Pie became part of the larger coal economy that transformed southern West Virginia. During the 1990s, it became associated with one of the most important legal struggles over mountaintop removal mining in the state. In the following decade, devastating floods again placed the community in state and national records.
Pie is small, but its story reaches well beyond the few miles of Mingo County where the name appears on the map.
Before Pie Was in Mingo County
Pie is older as a settled landscape than Mingo County itself.
Before 1895, the territory surrounding Pigeon Creek belonged to Logan County. Mingo County was created from Logan that year, making it the youngest of West Virginia’s counties. This means that the earliest deeds, land books, marriages, court proceedings, and other nineteenth-century records for families living around the future community of Pie must often be searched in Logan County rather than Mingo County. The West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey likewise identifies Mingo as having been formed from Logan in 1895.
The community name itself should not be projected backward without evidence. Families could have been living along Pigeon Creek, Nighway Branch, Grants Branch, and the surrounding mountains long before anyone regularly described the neighborhood as Pie.
This distinction matters because Appalachian communities were frequently organized around geography before they were organized around formal place names. A deed might identify property as lying on Pigeon Creek. A census enumerator might record a family under Magnolia District. A death certificate might use the name of a nearby post office. None of those records necessarily means that the boundaries of a community were understood in exactly the same way from one generation to the next.
The West Virginia State Archives lists Pie in its historical place-name records and also places the community in Magnolia District in the 1933 New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia. By that point, Pie was clearly recognized as a named community.
How Pie Got Its Name
Pie has one of the more memorable names in the West Virginia coalfields, and unlike many strange Appalachian place names, there is a surviving explanation for it.
The traditional account comes from West Virginia place-name research associated with Hamill Kenny’s 1945 book, West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning. According to the story preserved in later place-name references, Pie was named for Leander Blankenship, a local resident remembered for his fondness for pie. One compilation of West Virginia place-name information, drawing on family information from Blankenship’s granddaughter Kathy Deskins, states plainly that the place was named because Blankenship liked pie.
It is a wonderfully simple explanation for a name that otherwise invites elaborate speculation.
There is still room for more research. The National Archives preserves the Post Office Department’s reports of site locations for Mingo County on Microfilm Publication M1126, Roll 648. These records were created when post offices were established or moved and can contain information about roads, streams, nearby communities, mail routes, and sometimes hand-drawn maps. For Pie, the original site report may eventually provide one of the clearest documentary pictures of the community when its post office appeared. The National Archives confirms that Roll 648 is devoted to Mingo County.
A postal-history database compiled from federal records gives Pie’s post office as operating from 1923 until 1983. The National Archives’ official Record of Appointment of Postmasters, M841, is the stronger primary source for confirming the precise dates, postmasters, discontinuances, and changes. Mingo County falls within West Virginia Roll 140 of that collection.
The post office did not create the people of Pie, but it helped give their community an official name recognized far beyond Pigeon Creek.
Coal Beneath the Mountains
By the time Pie’s name entered postal and state records, southern Mingo County was already being transformed by coal.
A massive West Virginia Geological Survey study of Logan and Mingo counties published in 1914 documented the region’s coal seams, geology, transportation routes, streams, and mineral resources. Later federal soil surveys described Mingo County as a landscape of extremely steep side slopes and narrow stream bottoms, exactly the geography that shaped settlement along Pigeon Creek. Those narrow bottoms became the principal places where people could build houses, roads, businesses, and other structures.
Underneath and around those communities lay enormous coal reserves. Mining became one of the defining industries of Mingo County, with underground mines, surface operations, haul roads, preparation facilities, and related development spreading across the mountains.
For families in Pie, coal could not easily be separated into a simple story of outsiders against residents. Coal supported households. Miners lived in the same hollows affected by mining. Patricia Bragg, who would later become one of the best-known opponents of particular mining practices in West Virginia, was herself married to a coal miner.
That tension is essential to understanding what happened in Pie during the 1990s.
The conflict was not simply over whether coal should exist. It was about how mining could be carried out when people lived immediately below, beside, and sometimes above the underground workings.
Christmas 1994 and the Wells of Pie
The event that eventually pushed Pie into a national environmental debate began with something basic: water.
Patricia “Trish” Bragg later remembered the crisis beginning around Christmas 1994. In a first-person account preserved by Marshall University, she said that a deep mine destroyed the wells of neighbors in Pie. The community did not have a large municipal water system waiting to replace them. For families dependent upon private wells, losing groundwater meant losing the source that supplied drinking, cooking, bathing, and daily household life.
Journalist Penny Loeb later reconstructed the struggle in Moving Mountains: How One Woman and Her Community Won Justice from Big Coal. Her account begins in Pie as wells went dry and Bragg began calling state officials, asking questions, gathering neighbors, and trying to force a response.
The fight gradually expanded.
Federal environmental records later preserved complaints from residents of the Pie section of Pigeon Creek concerning longwall mining, subsidence, blasting, cracked structures, shifted ground, and dry wells. An EPA public-comment compendium contains a section specifically labeled for Pie and Mingo Logan Coal. It discusses Deborah Hatfield and Patricia Bragg and records allegations concerning subsidence associated with longwall mining beneath the area. Because the material was submitted as public comment, those individual statements should be understood as the residents’ allegations and experiences rather than automatic findings by the EPA itself.
What began as a water problem became a lesson in permits, mining law, hydrology, state agencies, and political power.
Bragg later summarized the struggle simply. Pie fought for years with coal companies and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, and eventually the community obtained public water.
Patricia Bragg and a Lawsuit Bigger Than Pie
Pie entered national legal history through Bragg v. Robertson.
In 1998, Patricia Bragg became the lead plaintiff in litigation challenging government regulation of mountaintop removal mining and valley fills in West Virginia. The case grew far beyond the original fight over Pie’s wells. It raised questions about streams, valley fills, federal environmental law, state mining regulation, and the authority of citizens to challenge government permitting decisions.
The federal court record shows a large collection of parties. Coal companies including Mingo Logan Coal, Hobet Mining, and Catenary Coal entered the litigation, as did mining associations, government officials, the United Mine Workers, landholding interests, and environmental organizations.
At the center of the legal dispute was the practice of placing excess rock and earth from large surface mines into valleys containing intermittent and perennial streams.
In October 1999, Chief U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II ruled for the plaintiffs on important portions of the case. His opinion concluded that West Virginia regulators had not made findings required under the stream buffer-zone rule before approving certain valley fills.
The ruling was a major moment in the growing fight over mountaintop removal mining.
It was not the end.
The case moved to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2001 affirmed part of the litigation but vacated the district court’s judgment against the state official on Eleventh Amendment grounds and directed that the remaining claims be dismissed without prejudice to litigation in state court. The federal government later filed a brief when the case reached the petition stage before the United States Supreme Court.
The legal outcome was complicated, but Pie’s place in the story was unmistakable.
A woman from a small community along Pigeon Creek had become the named plaintiff in litigation watched by mining companies, labor unions, state officials, federal agencies, environmental organizations, and courts far outside Mingo County.
The West Virginia Encyclopedia still identifies Patricia Bragg of Pie as the lead plaintiff and treats the case as one of the defining episodes in the state’s long argument over mountaintop removal.
A Community Caught Between Coal and Home
It would be easy to turn the story into one in which every person in Pie stood on one side and the coal industry stood on the other. The historical record is more complicated.
Coal remained a source of employment throughout southern West Virginia. Mining families could oppose damage to their homes while still depending upon coal wages. Court decisions affecting mines could also mean layoffs for neighbors, relatives, church members, and friends.
Loeb’s account of Bragg’s fight is valuable partly because it preserves those contradictions. Bragg’s campaign brought praise from environmental activists, but it also produced criticism closer to home. Her husband had been a miner, and she understood that coal helped sustain the very communities she was trying to protect.
Pie therefore became part of a much older Appalachian argument.
Who should benefit from the mineral wealth beneath a mountain? What responsibilities does a company have to the families living above or below its operations? What happens when employment, property, water, and community survival point in different directions?
Those questions were not invented in a courtroom. They were already present whenever another well went dry, another blast shook a house, or another mining permit appeared for the ridge above a hollow.
The Floods of 2004
Water returned to Pie’s history in a very different way in 2004.
Beginning around Memorial Day, repeated storms struck Mingo and Logan counties. The West Virginia Statewide Hazard Mitigation Plan records that on June 4 a storm stalled near the head of Pigeon Creek, causing serious damage in Pie, Musick Bottom, and Varney. Contemporary reporting described roughly three inches of rain falling in only a few hours in the Pie and Varney area.
Pie suffered heavily.
A Los Angeles Times report from that summer described landslides occurring on both sides of the highway near the community. Residents recalled watching mud move into yards and down the mountainsides. The same report also preserved an important distinction. A West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman said the slides were near, but not on, coal company property, that sediment ponds had not failed, and that the agency attributed the immediate slides to the extraordinary rainfall.
That distinction matters because the relationship between mining and Appalachian flooding has long been contested.
Residents and environmental organizations have argued that removal of forests, alteration of slopes, mine roads, valley fills, and other disturbances can accelerate runoff. Companies and regulators have sometimes countered that particular floods resulted from rainfall severe enough to cause catastrophe regardless of mining.
For Pie in June 2004, what cannot be disputed is the destruction itself. The narrow geography that had allowed a community to grow along Pigeon Creek also left homes and roads with very little room to escape when water and mud rushed down from the mountains.
The Pigeon Creek Flood of 2009
Five years later, Pie was struck again.
Heavy rain fell across southern West Virginia during the night of May 8 and into May 9, 2009. Pigeon Creek rose violently through the communities along its course. Photographs taken for the Logan Banner showed homes torn apart, foundations undermined, roads covered, and neighborhoods buried beneath mud and debris.
One of the most frequently reproduced images from the disaster shows Eddie Fields standing beside his damaged home at Pie after floodwater tore through the property. Contemporary material later submitted to the United States Senate also reported that Fields’s home cracked through the middle after floodwater washed away part of its foundation. The Marcum family cemetery at Pie was covered with mud and debris.
The disaster was large enough to leave other official traces.
A West Virginia Court of Claims case recorded that on May 10, 2009, Felicia Christian Roberts was driving north on U.S. 52 “in or near the community of Pie” when she drove into a mudslide covering both sides of the highway. The case provides a remarkably specific government record of the conditions around Pie during the aftermath of the storm.
Once again, the question of mining and flooding followed the destruction.
Residents along Pigeon Creek filed lawsuits against mining companies, arguing that disturbed mine lands had increased runoff and worsened their losses. Mining companies disputed those claims and described the flooding as a natural disaster caused by exceptional rainfall and saturated ground.
Hydrologists retained in the resulting litigation calculated that mining had increased Pigeon Creek’s flow during the May 2009 event by 51 percent compared with estimated pre-mining conditions. According to later reporting based on court records, a Mingo County jury awarded damages to 45 plaintiffs, with awards ranging from $1,050 to $100,000, and additional claims were later resolved through confidential settlements.
Whatever position one takes in the wider debate, the flood became another defining episode in Pie’s history. Once again, local families were forced to confront the relationship between mountains, water, development, and the narrow creek bottom where generations had built their homes.
Why Pie Matters
It is easy to notice Pie first because of its name.
That may even be how the community survives in travel lists and collections of unusual American place names. A town called Pie sounds like a curiosity, the kind of place someone notices while scanning a map and then forgets.
The historical record tells a very different story.
Pie belongs to the older settlement history of Pigeon Creek and to the moment when southern Logan County became Mingo County. Its post office places it within the expanding network of named coalfield communities during the early twentieth century. Its families lived through the growth of an industry that provided livelihoods while radically altering the surrounding mountains.
Then, beginning with dry wells in 1994, Pie helped shape a debate that reached federal courts, the United States Department of Justice, environmental agencies, the coal industry, and the national discussion over mountaintop removal mining.
A decade later, floodwater again carried the name Pie into government reports, newspapers, photographs, lawsuits, and congressional testimony.
For such a small place, an unusual amount of modern Appalachian history passes through this narrow section of Pigeon Creek.
Pie and the History Hidden in Small Places
The history of Pie also demonstrates why unincorporated Appalachian communities deserve to be studied individually.
There may never have been a large downtown. There was no Pie city council keeping minutes and no municipal historian preserving every generation. When the post office disappeared, one of the few institutions that officially carried the community’s name disappeared with it.
Yet Pie did not cease to exist.
The name survived on maps and addresses, in court testimony and flood photographs, in state records and in the memories of people who knew where Pie began and where the next community started.
Much more remains to be recovered.
The original Mingo County post office site reports may show exactly where Pie’s post office stood. Federal census schedules can reconstruct the families who lived along the road from one decade to another. Mingo and Logan County deeds can push the area’s history back before the creation of Mingo County. Mine maps can show what passed underneath the houses. Newspapers and family collections may preserve stores, churches, schools, cemeteries, and people whose stories never reached a county history.
Pie deserves that work because the community is more than its memorable name.
It is a place where the history of coal, water, law, landscape, and ordinary Appalachian families came together in a narrow hollow along Pigeon Creek.
Sources & Further Reading
Bragg, Patricia “Trish.” “Winning Public Water in Pie, W.V.” Presented at the Appalachian Studies Association Annual Conference, 2017. Marshall University Digital Scholar. https://mds.marshall.edu/asa_conference/2017/accepted_proposals/90/
Bragg v. Robertson. 54 F. Supp. 2d 635 (S.D.W. Va. 1999). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/54/635/2520293/
Bragg v. Robertson. 54 F. Supp. 2d 653 (S.D.W. Va. 1999). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/54/653/2520193/
Bragg v. Robertson. 72 F. Supp. 2d 642 (S.D.W. Va. 1999). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/72/642/2336213/
Bragg v. West Virginia Coal Association. 248 F.3d 275 (4th Cir. 2001). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/248/275/550682/
Bruggers, James. “Appalachia’s Strip-Mined Mountains Face a Growing Climate Risk: Flooding.” Inside Climate News, November 21, 2019. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112019/appalachia-mountains-flood-risk-climate-change-coal-mining-west-virginia-extreme-rainfall-runoff-analysis/
Brumfield, Darrell C. Stories About Gilbert, West Virginia and Surrounding Communities. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1993. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Gunnoe, Maria. “Testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.” Washington, DC: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, 2009. https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/9/4/9441e93e-4061-4489-846a-b3a22d2ba3e3/BF9D594B66EBA773D15F23EC2FEC547786CB6ADB4C2DD1862C0C90B6D44D8B5A.mariagunnoetestimony.pdf
Hennen, R. V., D. B. Reger, and W. A. Price. Logan and Mingo Counties. County Geologic Report 13. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1914. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10471.htm
Kenny, Hamill Thomas. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://search.worldcat.org/title/31559497
Loeb, Penny. Moving Mountains: How One Woman and Her Community Won Justice from Big Coal. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_law/5/
Mingo County Genealogical Society. Heritage of Mingo. Williamson, WV: Mingo County Genealogical Society, 1985. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Roll 648, Mingo County, West Virginia. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Roll 140. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census Records.” Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/
Smith, Nancy Sue. An History of Mingo County, West Virginia. Williamson, WV: Williamson Printing Company, 1960. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Smith, Nancy Sue. History of Logan and Mingo Counties, Beginning in 1617. Williamson, WV, 1966. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. Soil Survey of Logan and Mingo Counties, West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-A57-PURL-LPS105825/pdf/GOVPUB-A57-PURL-LPS105825.pdf
United States Department of Justice, Office of the Solicitor General. Bragg v. West Virginia Coal Association: Brief for the Federal Respondents in Opposition. No. 01-619. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2001. https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/bragg-v-west-virginia-coal-assn-opposition
United States Environmental Protection Agency. Mountaintop Mining/Valley Fills in Appalachia Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement: Public Comment Compendium. Vol. 2. Washington, DC: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=P100EUMO.TXT
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection: topoView.” Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. “Water Data for the Nation.” Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Mingo County History Sources.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: P.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamp.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Research Records: Birth Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_bcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Research Records: Death Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_dcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Research Records: Marriage Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Court of Claims. Keith Christian and Felicia Christian Roberts v. Division of Highways. CC-09-0433. In Reports of the Court of Claims of the State of West Virginia, vol. 29. Charleston: State of West Virginia. https://claims.wvlegislature.gov/documents/COC_Volume29.pdf
West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. 2013 West Virginia Statewide Standard Hazard Mitigation Plan Update. Charleston: State of West Virginia, 2013. https://emd.wv.gov/MitigationRecovery/Documents/2013%20WV%20Statewide%20Hazard%20Mitigation%20Plan%20Update.pdf
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Geology: General Information for Mingo County.” Morgantown: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/WWW/GEOLOGY/geolming.htm
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Interactive Coal Bed Mapping Project.” Morgantown: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/coal/cbmp/coalims.html
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Mine Map Archives.” Morgantown: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/coal/minemaparchives.htm
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “West Virginia Mine Maps.” Morgantown: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/coal/wvminemaps.htm
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Logan County Court Records, 1846–1980. A&M 2733. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/844
What’s the Matter With Mingo? Williamson, WV: Mingo Republican Print, 1938. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Author Note: Pie is a reminder that some of Appalachia’s smallest communities have histories that reach far beyond their size. In researching this article, I wanted to preserve both the local story of Pigeon Creek and the larger battles over coal, water, and flooding that brought Pie into the historical record.