Appalachian Community Histories – Dunbar, Wise County: Stonega, Roaring Fork, and the Rise and Decline of a Coal Camp
Drive north from Appalachia into the mountains of Wise County and the valleys begin to close around the road. Roaring Fork cuts through a narrow corridor beneath steep ridges, one of countless places in Southwest Virginia where geography shaped nearly every decision made by the coal companies that arrived during the industrial boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It was here that Dunbar took shape.
Dunbar was never one of the great cities created by Appalachian coal. It did not grow into another Norton or Big Stone Gap, nor did it become the commercial center that nearby Appalachia became. Instead, Dunbar belonged to another kind of settlement that transformed the coalfields. It was a company town, built primarily to place miners and their families close to the coal that Stonega Coke & Coal Company intended to remove from the mountains surrounding Roaring Fork.
Its history can be followed with unusual clarity through company records, government reports, census schedules, geological surveys, newspapers, and the houses that survived long after the busiest years of the mine.
Those records reveal a place constructed quickly during the closing months of World War I, connected to the outside world by railroad before it possessed an adequate public road, and shaped almost entirely by the demands of coal.
They also reveal something more familiar across Appalachia. Dunbar grew because an industrial corporation needed workers in a particular place. When the original operation no longer required those workers, the community was left to confront a future very different from the one its builders had imagined.
Building Dunbar
Even the date of Dunbar’s beginning is not quite as simple as it first appears.
The Library of Virginia identifies Dunbar as a Stonega community established in 1917 and says the company took its name from a village in Great Britain. Virginia Department of Historic Resources research, however, places Dunbar among Stonega’s camps founded in 1919. Surviving architectural research helps explain the difference. The plans for the settlement were already being drawn in early 1918, and construction was well underway before 1919 began.
The most revealing evidence comes from the Wise County historic architectural survey.
Stonega initially planned approximately 250 single-family houses at Dunbar. The idea worked on paper better than it did on the mountainside. There simply was not enough level ground along the narrow valley to arrange that many conventional company houses.
Stonega changed the plan.
Instead of relying entirely on the four-room single-family houses used in some of its other communities, the company built larger ten-room duplexes that could accommodate two families while occupying less land. By January 1, 1919, twenty-eight of those dwellings had been completed and another sixteen were under construction. The surviving examples were two-story frame houses placed in rows close to the railroad, a physical reminder that Dunbar’s architecture was dictated as much by the mountains as by company policy.
The geography that limited housing also determined nearly everything else.
A Stonega engineering map dated June 1919 placed Dunbar eight miles from Appalachia within a larger network of company mines, railroad lines, pipelines, and communities. Stonega, Osaka, Arno, Imboden, Exeter, Keokee, and Dunbar were not isolated ventures on the map. They were parts of an expanding industrial system connected to the Interstate Railroad and, through Appalachia, to larger rail markets beyond the mountains.
Dunbar had been built to fit into that system.
Coal Beneath the Mountain
The reason for the town was beneath it.
By 1902 the Virginia Coal & Iron Company had created the Stonega Coke & Coal Company to manage its mining operations. Stonega expanded across Wise County during the following decades, creating or operating a chain of communities including Stonega, Osaka, Roda, Arno, Exeter, Dunbar, and Derby.
At Dunbar, the company opened access to coal seams above Roaring Fork. Contemporary geological evidence confirms that mining was underway during the community’s formative period.
On September 25, 1919, investigators collected samples of the Taggart Marker coal bed inside the Stonega Coke & Coal Company mine at Dunbar. The Virginia Geological Survey recorded the underground locations of the samples and the thicknesses of the coal, shale, and other material encountered there. It is an unusually precise snapshot of Dunbar during its first years, recording not memories of a mine that once existed but scientific work conducted while miners were actively driving into the mountain.
Decades later, federal coal regulations continued to identify Stonega’s Dunbar No. 1 operation with the Taggart Marker seam. A 1941 Federal Register schedule listed Dunbar No. 1 under Stonega Coke & Coal Company in Wise County, showing how the mine remained part of the federally regulated coal economy more than twenty years after the community’s construction.
Coal determined where Dunbar stood, but the railroad determined whether that coal could leave.
Local historian Luther Foster Addington later described the Interstate Railroad branch that left the larger rail system at Kent Junction and followed Roaring Fork toward the mines at Dunbar and Pardee. The arrangement was typical of the coalfield economy. Railroads penetrated narrow valleys not because towns were already there, but because coal companies needed transportation. Communities then grew alongside the tracks.
In Dunbar, the railroad came with the mine. Public roads lagged behind.
A Town Before the Road
Few records capture the speed of Dunbar’s industrial development better than an act passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1919.
On September 4 of that year, the legislature authorized Wise County to borrow as much as $80,000 to construct a public road and bridges along Roaring Fork and Pot Camp Fork through Roaring Fork, Dunbar, and Pardee.
The legislature explained why the project was urgent. Several thousand people were already living in and near the three communities, yet the valley lacked a public vehicle road. The act also noted that new enterprises already underway or planned for the near future were expected to increase the population even further.
It is a remarkable description of the way industrial Appalachia developed.
People, houses, mines, and railroad infrastructure could arrive before the ordinary public road system caught up with them. Dunbar existed because coal created an economic reason to build in a place where the terrain had previously discouraged concentrated settlement.
The railroad connected the camp to the industrial world. The road had to follow.
Life Beyond the Mine
Calling Dunbar a coal camp can make the community sound smaller than it actually was.
By the early 1920s, Dunbar had developed a social life that went well beyond shifts underground and trains of coal moving down the valley. One of the richest glimpses comes from the February 1, 1922, edition of the Big Stone Gap Post.
The newspaper reported that the Dunbar Dancing Club had held a dance in its new hall on a Friday evening. The event ran from nine at night until two in the morning, with an orchestra from Bristol providing the music. During the intermission, guests were served ham and pimento cheese sandwiches and hot coffee. People traveled from Big Stone Gap to attend.
In another item on the same page, the newspaper described a banquet at the Dunbar Hotel honoring C. A. Sine, safety engineer for the Stonega Coke & Coal Company. Sine was teaching a vocational training class at Dunbar. Seventeen guests attended the banquet, including thirteen members of the class, and dinner was served in five courses before speeches by company figures and visitors.
These small newspaper notices are important because they preserve a side of company-town life that production reports cannot.
There were miners underground, certainly, but above them were wives and children, dances, meals, hotels, clubs, teachers, visitors, churches, schools, ball teams, gardens, friendships, and all the other relationships that transformed housing built by a corporation into a community.
The Library of Virginia’s research into Virginia coal towns shows that company camps were intended to become largely self-contained settlements. Stores, schools, churches, recreational facilities, and other services developed alongside company housing. Families supplemented mining wages through gardens and other household work, particularly when the coal market slowed.
Dunbar was part of that world.
Company Town, Company System
Stonega did not provide housing, recreation, training, health programs, and community facilities purely as charity.
Modern scholarship describes a deliberate system of welfare capitalism within the company. Historian Christopher Lloyd Tomlinson has examined what Stonega management called “contentment sociology,” an effort to provide services and improve living conditions in ways that encouraged employees and their families to identify their own stability with the stability of the company.
The result was a relationship that could provide real benefits while also increasing company influence over everyday life.
Dunbar became one of the places where those ideas were put into practice.
In 1925 the Stonega Coke & Coal Company and Virginia State Board for Vocational Education conducted a series of conferences in Dunbar on improving foremanship. The surviving report runs more than one hundred leaves and covers accident prevention, production, leadership, health, sanitation, job satisfaction, quality control, and cooperation within the industry.
The subjects show how thoroughly coal companies were beginning to think about management. The mine foreman was not simply expected to get coal out of the mountain. He occupied a position within an increasingly organized industrial system concerned with efficiency, safety, discipline, morale, and the relationship between management and labor.
A federal investigation provides another perspective.
The United States Coal Commission evaluated hundreds of company communities during the 1920s. Economic historian Price Fishback’s research into those records identifies individual schedules for Stonega’s communities at Osaka and Dunbar. Among 349 company communities evaluated, Osaka ranked sixty-seventh and Dunbar ranked 210th.
The number should not be treated as a complete judgment on what life in Dunbar was like. Families experienced the community differently, and federal investigators measured conditions according to their own criteria. Still, the surviving schedule is valuable because it places Dunbar within a national investigation of company housing, stores, sanitation, services, and miners’ living conditions.
It also reminds us that the polished language of corporate welfare programs was only one side of life in a coal camp.
Depression, Recovery, and 764 Residents
Dunbar survived long enough to pass through one of the most destructive periods the American coal industry had faced.
The Great Depression crushed industrial demand and placed enormous pressure on coal communities across Appalachia. Stonega responded by cutting wages, limiting hiring, reducing operations, and closing or contracting some facilities. Across the region, families depended heavily on gardens, informal exchange, and household labor to survive periods when mines did not run steadily.
Yet Dunbar remained a substantial community.
The federal government’s 1940 report on unincorporated communities recorded Dunbar in Wise County’s Gladeville Magisterial District with a population of 764.
That figure gives scale to a place that can now be easy to overlook.
Seven hundred sixty-four people meant hundreds of individual lives gathered in the valley. Children grew up within sight of the mine. Families heard the railroad moving through the camp. Miners walked home carrying the physical evidence of their work. Stores and community institutions depended on paychecks earned underground.
The 1950 census still recognized “Dunbar-Roaring Fork” as a distinct unincorporated place within Gladeville Magisterial District, evidence that the communities along the valley continued to form an identifiable population center after the Second World War.
But coal communities could shrink almost as quickly as they had appeared.
The Closing of the Dunbar Operation
By the early 1950s, the original Dunbar operation was reaching the end of its life.
A 1953 entry in the Congressional Record included a table showing unemployment in United Mine Workers District 28 caused by mine closures and reductions. Among the Stonega operations was Dunbar, identified simply as having “closed Jan. 1.”
For a town created to serve a mine, closure represented more than the loss of an industrial facility.
A company town’s population depended on employment. When mining declined, younger workers left in search of jobs elsewhere. Businesses lost customers. Houses emptied. Schools and churches served fewer families. The industrial landscape that had once made a remote valley valuable could become an obstacle once the reason for concentrating hundreds of people there disappeared.
Yet the closing of the original Dunbar operation did not mean that coal vanished from the surrounding mountains.
The distinction is important.
Mining Continued Around Dunbar
Federal records show substantial mining activity at Dunbar after the original operation’s decline.
On October 14, 1958, a fire occurred at Stonega’s Pine Branch Colliery No. 1 at Dunbar. According to the U.S. Bureau of Mines report, a roof-bolting machine ran over its trailing cable, producing a short circuit and igniting hydraulic oil and insulation. Workers fought the fire with rock dust, extinguishers, and water.
No one was killed or injured.
More revealing for the history of Dunbar are the operating statistics included in the report. Pine Branch Colliery No. 1 worked the Taggart seam, produced approximately 2,000 tons per day, and employed 190 workers across three shifts.
Coal mining therefore remained a significant economic presence around Dunbar even after the older mine had closed.
Corporate names changed as well. Stonega Coke & Coal Company merged with Westmoreland Coal Company in 1964, bringing Dunbar’s later mining history under one of the oldest and best-known coal companies in the United States.
Even decades later, the geology continued to draw miners back to the same mountains. A Mine Safety and Health Administration investigation from 2004 documented the Fork Ridge Mine about three miles north of Dunbar. That operation entered the Taggart Marker seam through six drift openings and employed thirty-eight underground miners and one surface worker at the time of the investigation.
Dunbar’s first coal town had declined, but the coal beneath the surrounding ridges remained part of the region’s economy.
What Remained
As Dunbar’s population fell, the architecture became one of the clearest surviving records of what the town had been.
Virginia’s 1995 architectural survey documented company housing still standing near the railroad corridor. One Dunbar duplex retained the form created by Stonega’s response to the narrow valley: two stories, frame construction, separate entrances, porches, and an arrangement shaped by the railroad tracks and the limited ground available for development.
The houses mattered because they recorded decisions that had been made nearly eighty years earlier.
Dunbar was not laid out like a conventional town where streets, lots, stores, homes, and civic institutions gradually accumulated. The company knew where the coal was. Engineers knew where the railroad needed to run. Mountains and creeks determined what land remained. Houses then had to fit into the spaces left between those necessities.
The result was an industrial landscape compressed into a mountain hollow.
In 1940, the Census Bureau counted 764 people in Dunbar. The 2020 Census counted only 79 residents in the modern Dunbar census-designated place.
Numbers alone cannot describe everything that happened between them, but they reveal the scale of the change.
Why Dunbar Matters
Dunbar’s history is not extraordinary because it escaped the larger patterns of Appalachian coal history.
It matters because it illustrates them so clearly.
A corporation identified valuable coal. Engineers mapped a railroad into the valley. A company planned hundreds of houses but discovered that the mountains forced it to redesign them. Miners and their families arrived. Virginia lawmakers hurried to provide a road for a valley where industrial development had already produced thousands of residents. Hotels, dances, vocational classes, schools, stores, churches, and neighborhoods followed.
For several decades, what had been a narrow mountain valley became a functioning industrial community.
Then the economic reason for concentrating so many people there weakened.
That sequence happened across the Appalachian coalfields, but every community experienced it in its own way. At Dunbar, unusually rich surviving records allow the story to be reconstructed almost year by year. A 1919 geological sample tells us what miners were cutting from the mountain. A legislative act tells us they still lacked a proper public road. A 1922 newspaper tells us people were dancing in a new hall and eating five-course dinners at the Dunbar Hotel. A 1925 company report tells us how Stonega trained its foremen. The census tells us that 764 people called the community home in 1940. A congressional record tells us that the original operation eventually closed.
The surviving houses tell another part of the story without saying anything at all.
They stand where Stonega’s engineers squeezed them between the railroad, the creek, and the mountain because that was where the miners had to live if the coal was going to come out.
Today Dunbar is much smaller than the community built there a century ago, but its history remains written into the narrow geography of Roaring Fork. The railroad, mine sites, surviving company structures, and scattered homes belong to a landscape created when coal could bring hundreds of people into a remote Wise County valley almost overnight.
Dunbar is one of those places where the history of industrial Appalachia can still be read on the ground.
The town became what the coal industry needed it to be.
What remains tells us what happened after the industry no longer needed the same town.
Sources & Further Reading
Hagley Museum and Library. “Westmoreland Coal Company Records, Accession 1765.” Manuscripts and Archives Department. Includes the Stonega Coke & Coal Company records used for Dunbar’s corporate, housing, store, and mining history. https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/980
Hagley Museum and Library. “Penn Virginia Corporation Records, Accession 1764.” Manuscripts and Archives Department. Records of the Virginia Coal & Iron Company and related development in the Southwest Virginia coalfields. https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/resources?field%5B%5D=title&filter_fields%5B%5D=repository&filter_fields%5B%5D=subjects&filter_values%5B%5D=%2Frepositories%2F3&filter_values%5B%5D=Coal+mines+and+mining&from_year%5B%5D=&limit=resource&op%5B%5D=&q%5B%5D=%2A&sort=title_sort+asc&to_year%5B%5D=
Stonega Coke & Coal Company Engineering Department. “Map Showing Mines and Property of the Stonega Coke & Coal Co.” June 1919. Westmoreland Coal Company Archive, Hagley Museum and Library. Reproduced in Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Wise County/Norton Historic Architectural Survey. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Virginia General Assembly. Acts of Assembly, Special Session of 1919. Chapter 10, approved September 4, 1919. Act authorizing road and bridge construction through Roaring Fork, Dunbar, and Pardee. https://modelingjimcrow.virginia.edu/volume/1919es/law/10
Virginia Geological Survey. Bulletin 26. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey. Includes samples of the Taggart Marker coal bed collected at the Stonega Coke & Coal Company mine at Dunbar on September 25, 1919. https://energy.virginia.gov/commercedocs/BUL_26.pdf
“Delightful Dance at Dunbar.” Big Stone Gap Post, February 1, 1922. Library of Congress National Digital Newspaper Program. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/vi/batch_vi_jade_ver01/data/sn88061179/00175033865/1922020101/0231.pdf
Big Stone Gap Post. “Banquet for C. A. Sine.” February 1, 1922. Library of Congress National Digital Newspaper Program. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/vi/batch_vi_jade_ver01/data/sn88061179/00175033865/1922020101/0231.pdf
Stonega Coke and Coal Company. Report on Conferences on Improving Foremanship, Dunbar, Virginia, March 30–April 18, 1925. Accession 45482. Richmond: Library of Virginia. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/news/collections/Q41011.pdf
United States Coal Commission. Report of the United States Coal Commission. 5 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925. Especially part 3, Bituminous Coal: Detailed Labor and Engineering Studies. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6684854M
United States Coal Commission. Report of the United States Coal Commission, Part III: Bituminous Coal, Detailed Labor and Engineering Studies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925. Digital Library of Georgia. https://dlg.usg.edu/record/gsu_mhross_67557
United States Coal Commission. “Community Ratings Schedule: Dunbar, Virginia.” Records of the United States Coal Commission, Record Group 68, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. The Dunbar schedule is identified in Price V. Fishback’s research on coal-company communities.
United States Bureau of the Census. Population of Unincorporated Communities: 1940. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Dunbar, Gladeville Magisterial District, Wise County, population 764. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-C3-PURL-gpo124100/pdf/GOVPUB-C3-PURL-gpo124100.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules. Wise County, Virginia, Gladeville Magisterial District. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population. Wise County, Virginia, Enumeration District 98-11, “Dunbar-Roaring Fork, unincorporated.” Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Wise&page=1&state=VA
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 1953, 9699. Includes the United Mine Workers District 28 unemployment table identifying Dunbar as closed January 1. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1953-pt7/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1953-pt7-10-2.pdf
United States Bureau of Mines. “Pine Branch Colliery No. 1 Mine, Report of Coal Mine (Electrical Machinery) Fire.” October 14, 1958. Dunbar, Wise County, Virginia. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/206472/cdc_206472_DS1.pdf
Mine Safety and Health Administration. “Fatal Accident Investigation Report: Fork Ridge Mine, September 24, 2004.” U.S. Department of Labor. https://arlweb.msha.gov/FATALS/2004/FTL04c18.asp
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Wise County/Norton Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. One of the strongest sources for Dunbar’s construction, housing, company-town plan, and surviving architecture. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Virginia Landmarks Register Spotlight: The Coal Industry in Wise County.” August 19, 2025. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/blog-posts/coal-industry-history-wise-county-southwest-virginia/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Appalachia Commercial Historic District. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2019. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/164-5003_AppalachiaCommercialHD_2019_NRHP_FINAL.pdf
Library of Virginia. “Company Towns.” Virginia’s Coal Towns. Richmond: Library of Virginia. Includes Dunbar and other Stonega communities and provides context on housing, stores, schools, churches, and company life. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/exhibits/coaltown/towns/
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
McKnight, Brian Dallas, Jodi Deal, and Mary B. LaLone. Life in the Coal Camps of Wise County: In Honor of Wise County’s Sesquicentennial. Big Stone Gap, VA: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 2006.
Tomlinson, Christopher Lloyd. “Contentment and Control: The Stonega Coke & Coal Company & Pioneering Welfare Capitalism in Southwest Virginia.” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2024. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/12368/
Fishback, Price V. “Did Coal Miners ‘Owe Their Souls to the Company Store’? Theory and Evidence from the Early 1900s.” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 4 (December 1986): 1011–1029. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/did-coal-miners-owe-their-souls-to-the-company-store-theory-and-evidence-from-the-early-1900s/F576B08F8DB66BDFBBA7D4E346B97873
Fishback, Price V. Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. https://academic.oup.com/book/26253
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
LaLone, Mary B. “Economic Survival Strategies in Appalachia’s Coal Camps.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 2, no. 1 (1996): 53–68.
Addington, Luther Foster. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 1956. https://accessgenealogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-Story-of-Wise-County-Virginia.pdf
Prescott, E. J. The Story of the Virginia Coal and Iron Company, 1882–1945. Big Stone Gap, VA: Virginia Coal and Iron Company, 1945.
Author Note: Dunbar is one of the many Appalachian coal communities whose surviving records reveal far more than its present size might suggest. Its story preserves not only the history of Stonega and coal mining, but also the families who turned a company-built camp into a community.