Appalachian Community Histories – Dorchester, Wise County: Coal, Coke, and Company Life in Southwest Virginia
A traveler passing through Dorchester today could easily miss how large the community once loomed in the industrial history of Wise County. Tucked into the mountains near Norton, Dorchester survives as an unincorporated community, its name attached to a road, a hollow, and a community center. A century ago, however, the same place was crowded with miners, company houses, railroad cars, schools, churches, coke ovens, and the machinery of one of Southwest Virginia’s important coal and coke operations.
The transformation happened quickly. At the end of the nineteenth century, outside investors were moving aggressively into the coalfields around Norton, Appalachia, Stonega, and neighboring communities. Railroads had finally connected deposits that mountain geography had kept distant from national markets. Once those transportation routes opened, coal companies began buying immense tracts of land, cutting branch lines into narrow hollows, opening drift mines, and building entire settlements around them.
Dorchester grew from that industrial expansion. By the early twentieth century, it had become much more than a scattering of mining houses. It possessed a post office, commissary, railroad facilities, coke ovens, churches, schools, recreational organizations, a hospital, and hundreds of company houses. The community’s history became so closely tied to coal that one of the region’s recognized coal beds eventually carried the Dorchester name.
Yet the history preserved in company accounts and promotional literature is only part of the story. Court cases, census records, federal mining reports, railroad documents, photographs, and geological surveys reveal a more complicated community where families lived beside industrial tracks, Black and white children attended segregated schools, miners worked beneath the mountains, and the rhythms of daily life followed the production schedules of coal and coke.
Colonial Coal and Coke Comes to Dorchester
One of the central figures in Dorchester’s early industrial development was John Alfred Esser, an experienced Pennsylvania coke manufacturer who came to Southwest Virginia during the rapid expansion of the region’s coal industry.
Esser had spent years working in Pennsylvania’s coal and coke business before moving to Virginia in 1896. He initially supervised operations at Stonega, but his attention soon shifted toward Dorchester. According to the Library of Virginia’s Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Esser helped members of Pennsylvania’s Kemmerer family acquire a coke operation at Dorchester in 1899. Colonial Coal and Coke Company followed, with the corporation established around the turn of the century and Esser serving as general manager. He also became Dorchester’s postmaster, holding that position from October 1901 until March 1911.
A contemporary biography published in Men of Mark in Virginia similarly stated that Esser came to Dorchester in 1900 to manage Colonial Coal and Coke Company. By then he possessed nearly two decades of experience in coke manufacturing, much of it gained in Pennsylvania, where the beehive coke industry had transformed communities around Connellsville. Dorchester offered an opportunity to apply that knowledge to the rich bituminous coalfields of Wise County.
The scale of the company’s ambition quickly became apparent. In February 1902, The Engineering and Mining Journal reported that Colonial Coal and Coke Company of Dorchester had purchased another 3,400 acres of coal land and intended to expand its operations significantly. The publication reported plans for 800 additional coke ovens, an enormous industrial investment for a mountain community only beginning to appear on national maps.
By 1904, Henry Gannett’s federal Gazetteer of Virginia identified Dorchester simply as a “post village in Wise County.” The short description concealed the industrial landscape growing around it. Mines were entering the mountains, coke ovens were consuming coal, and a company-controlled community was taking shape around the operation.
From Colonial Coal and Coke to Wise Coal and Coke
The corporate identity behind Dorchester did not remain static. The surviving Colonial Coal and Coke Company journal at the Library of Virginia provides an unusually direct window into the early operation.
The ninety-nine-page account journal contains transactions from 1903 through 1905 involving payroll, merchandise, mining expenses, coal accounts, and coke accounts. Later entries document coke shipments in 1913, recording destinations, railroad cars, weights, bills of lading, and prices. These records transform Dorchester from an abstract coal camp into a functioning industrial business whose coal and coke circulated far beyond Wise County.
The Library of Virginia identifies Colonial Coal and Coke as a company formed in 1899 that conducted business at Dorchester. In 1905 it merged with Little Wise Coal and Coke Company to form Wise Coal and Coke Company.
The change in corporate name did not lessen Dorchester’s importance. Instead, Wise Coal and Coke Company became the name most closely associated with the community for much of the twentieth century.
Coal camps were never simply collections of miners’ houses. The company might own the mine, houses, commissary, transportation system, and much of the ground beneath everyone’s feet. Employment and community life therefore overlapped in ways that would seem unusual in most modern towns. Dorchester was built around an industry, and for generations the fortunes of one could scarcely be separated from the fortunes of the other.
What Dorchester Actually Looked Like
One of the most revealing descriptions of early Dorchester comes from an unexpected source: a Virginia Supreme Court case involving the death of a small child.
In Lunsford’s Administrator v. Colonial Coal & Coke Co., decided in 1913, the court described the family of miner James Lunsford living in a house leased from the coal company in what the judges explicitly called the “mining town of Dorchester.” Their house faced a wagon road. Beyond it ran a company motor track about forty feet from the residence. Three company houses stood in a row, and families regularly crossed the track by a path leading toward the commissary, post office, spring, and mines.
Children played in the space between the houses and industrial track. Company electrical wiring ran through the area. Mine motors passed frequently. The case arose after three-year-old May Lunsford was fatally burned in an accident involving a fallen electrical wire near the track.
The legal arguments centered on liability, but the testimony preserved something equally valuable to local historians. It provides a ground-level description of the physical world in which Dorchester families lived. Houses, roads, tracks, electrical lines, mine traffic, paths, springs, children, miners, and the company store occupied the same narrow landscape.
Dorchester was not divided neatly into an industrial zone and a residential neighborhood. Industry ran directly through everyday life.
Six Hundred Coke Ovens and a Town Built Around Coal
By 1920, Dorchester had developed into a substantial company settlement.
That year Rufus A. Ayers prepared Wise County: Her Industries, Resources and Prominent Men for a special industrial edition of Crawford’s Weekly. The publication is one of the richest contemporary descriptions of Dorchester, although it must be read carefully because its purpose was partly promotional. The writers consistently presented coal companies and local industrial development in favorable terms.
Even with that limitation, the physical details are extraordinary.
The publication identified Dorchester and nearby Sutherland as the two principal camps of Wise Coal and Coke Company. Together, the communities reportedly contained about 450 houses for more than 600 workers. Most homes had four rooms, although some possessed five or six. Electricity was supplied to the houses, and many had running water.
Three drift mines were operating, according to the account, with a combined productive capacity of approximately 75,000 tons of coal per month. Electric cutting machines, lights, and ventilation equipment had become part of the mining operation. Separate tipples served Dorchester and Sutherland, while a company machine shop repaired the equipment needed to keep production moving.
Then there were the coke ovens.
The 1920 account reported 600 beehive ovens capable of producing roughly 24,000 tons of coke each month. Coke was created by heating coal in an oxygen-limited environment, driving away volatile material and leaving a carbon-rich fuel prized by iron and steel manufacturers. The rows of stone or brick ovens could dominate the appearance of coal communities, glowing at night while smoke hung over the hollow.
A later recollection by William Jenkins captured their physical presence more vividly, remembering that Dorchester was “almost covered up with coke ovens.” Although recollections recorded years afterward must be handled carefully, the description is consistent with the enormous number documented in the contemporary industrial account.
The ovens were not merely an accessory to Dorchester’s mines. Coke helped define the community.
The Railroad That Connected the Hollow to the Nation
None of Dorchester’s industrial growth would have mattered much without transportation.
Coal buried beneath Wise County had been known long before the industrial boom, but moving heavy mineral products through the mountains was difficult and expensive. Railroads changed that calculation. By the 1890s, competing systems were penetrating the county and linking its mines to industrial markets across the eastern United States.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources’ architectural history of Wise County records that the Interstate Railroad extended a branch up Dorchester Hollow in 1915 after purchasing an existing railroad constructed by the New York Mining and Manufacturing Company. The branch tied the community into the increasingly complex web of tracks serving the Southwest Virginia coalfield.
The 1920 industrial history described loaded cars moving from Dorchester and Sutherland toward Dorchester Junction. From there, the Interstate could move traffic toward Appalachia and the Southern Railway or toward Norton, where connections were available with the Norfolk and Western and Louisville and Nashville systems.
That meant coal dug from beneath a mountain outside Dorchester could eventually travel hundreds of miles from Wise County.
A surviving photograph in East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia shows the Wise Coal and Coke Company tipple at Dorchester. Tipples were the places where mined coal was sorted and loaded into railroad cars, making them among the most recognizable structures in an Appalachian mining camp. The Dorchester photograph preserves one of the industrial landmarks around which the community’s working life revolved.
Baseball, Movies, and Life Away from the Mine
Coal created Dorchester, but the people who lived there created a community.
The 1920 account described a motion-picture theater, basketball, football, boxing, and a public reading room stocked with newspapers, magazines, and books. A company hospital stood ready to treat miners and their families. A commissary sold groceries, dry goods, shoes, clothing, and fresh meat. A motor bus traveled from Sutherland through Dorchester to Norton several times each day.
Some of those descriptions undoubtedly reflect the booster tone of the publication. Claims that workers were uniformly satisfied or that company management had eliminated virtually every inconvenience should not be taken at face value. Company-town historians have repeatedly shown that amenities could coexist with low wages, dangerous work, racial segregation, corporate paternalism, and the enormous power companies possessed over housing and employment.
Still, the facilities themselves reveal that Dorchester had developed into a socially complex place.
Baseball became especially important.
Virginia’s Department of Conservation and Recreation preserves a photograph of the Dorchester coal camp baseball team from 1907 and notes that the team won the 1909 Fritzi Scheff competition. Company baseball was widespread across the coalfields. Games offered entertainment, community pride, and sometimes fierce rivalries between neighboring mining camps.
Dorchester maintained that reputation for decades. In 1949, the community’s team won the Lonesome Pine League playoff championship after catcher Roy Flanary hit a late home run that helped Dorchester defeat its opponent 6 to 2. Nearly half a century separated that championship from the early photographs, suggesting that baseball had become one of the community’s lasting traditions rather than a short-lived company recreation program.
Churches, Schools, and a Segregated Community
Religion and education also became permanent parts of Dorchester’s landscape.
Catholicism arrived alongside workers drawn into the expanding coalfield from outside the traditional population of Southwest Virginia. A historic survey prepared for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources reports that a Catholic church had been established at Dorchester by 1910, part of a wider Catholic presence that also developed in coal communities such as Stonega, Glamorgan, and Toms Creek.
By 1920, Dorchester and Sutherland reportedly shared five churches representing Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Catholic congregations.
Yet the same account also reveals the racial structure of the company towns.
Three churches were described as serving white residents and two as serving Black residents. Five schools served the two camps, with three designated for white children and two for Black children. The language of the period praised the company’s educational provisions while treating segregation as ordinary. For modern readers, those details show that the social geography of Dorchester followed Virginia’s Jim Crow system just as clearly as other communities across the South.
Black workers and their families were therefore part of Dorchester’s history even though many surviving company narratives gave them far less individual attention than white managers and businessmen.
The distinction matters. A history based only on corporate biographies could make Dorchester appear to have been created exclusively by investors and mine superintendents. The schools, churches, census schedules, and employment records reveal a broader population whose labor and family life actually sustained the town.
Dorchester at Its Mid-Century Height
Dorchester remained a substantial settlement long after its early company-town years.
The federal census counted 870 people in the unincorporated community in 1940. That figure made Dorchester more populous than many incorporated Appalachian towns and demonstrates how misleading its present-day unincorporated status can be when looking backward.
Coal production continued through World War II. A June 1945 Federal Register listing gave Wise Coal and Coke Company’s address as Dorchester and identified company mines Nos. 2, 3, and 5. The following year another federal record identified the company’s No. 3 mine as working the Dorchester Seam, with Dorchester serving as the rail shipping point.
The name of the town had effectively entered the technical vocabulary of the coal industry.
Geologists likewise used “Dorchester” for a recognized coal bed extending beyond the immediate community. State and federal geological studies mapped and correlated the seam across portions of Southwest Virginia. Even as individual mines opened and closed, Dorchester lived on as a geological name beneath the mountains.
Investment did not disappear immediately after World War II either. Contemporary material from the 1950s documents new concrete coke ovens at Dorchester, evidence that Wise Coal and Coke was still modernizing portions of the operation decades after the original beehive batteries had helped establish the town.
Fire Underground in 1960
A federal mine report from July 29, 1960, provides one of the clearest snapshots of Dorchester’s industrial scale near the end of the classic company-town period.
The incident occurred at Wise Coal and Coke Company’s No. 4 Mine in Dorchester.
According to the federal report, the mine employed approximately 160 workers and produced about 1,600 tons of coal per day. Miners worked the Norton seam, where the mining height was only about forty-five to fifty inches in the area documented by investigators.
Shortly after midnight, a hydraulic coupling between a motor and gearbox overheated and ruptured. Oil and hydraulic fluid reached combustible material around a conveyor belt, starting a fire. Smoke initially prevented workers from reaching the nearby power controls, forcing them to disconnect a larger circuit before reversing the belt and applying water.
Ventilation changes eventually allowed workers to reach the fire. Water and rock dust extinguished it after approximately an hour and a half.
No one was killed or injured.
The report is valuable precisely because it is so technical. It shows that Dorchester in 1960 was not simply an aging cluster of abandoned ovens. A mine employing around 160 people and producing roughly 1,600 tons a day remained a significant operation.
At the same time, the coal industry was changing rapidly. Mechanization required fewer workers for each ton of coal produced. Old coke-making methods faced competition from newer technologies. Rail passenger service vanished from many communities. Automobiles allowed families to live farther from the mines, weakening the geographic necessity of the company town.
The structure that had created Dorchester was beginning to disappear.
The Long Decline of the Coal Camp
Dorchester did not vanish in a single dramatic closure.
Like many Appalachian coal communities, it experienced a gradual unraveling as individual industrial functions disappeared. Mines changed ownership, coke production declined, railroad activity contracted, and company housing ceased to define daily life.
The railroad provides perhaps the clearest final marker.
In October 1997, the Interstate Railroad Company filed with the federal Surface Transportation Board to abandon the 2.6-mile line running from milepost D-0.0 at Dorchester Junction to milepost D-2.6 at Dorchester.
That little stretch of railroad had once been an industrial lifeline.
It had carried empty coal cars into the hollow and loaded cars back toward the national rail system. It connected miners in Dorchester to steel mills, factories, furnaces, and consumers they would never see. Generations earlier, the ability to make that connection had helped transform a mountain hollow into an industrial town.
By 1997 the dedicated branch itself had become expendable.
Its abandonment represented more than the loss of a few miles of track. It marked the disappearance of the transportation network around which old Dorchester had been organized.
What Dorchester Left Behind
Dorchester never became a large incorporated city, and that may partly explain why its history is easy to overlook.
Yet the documentary record tells a different story.
Colonial Coal and Coke Company built an operation there at the opening of the twentieth century. Investors acquired thousands of acres. Hundreds of coke ovens filled the hollow. Wise Coal and Coke Company inherited and expanded the operation. Railroad tracks connected the mines with national markets. Hundreds of miners went underground while families occupied rows of company houses nearby.
Children crossed industrial tracks on their way toward the commissary and post office. Churches divided along denominational and racial lines. Schools educated Black and white children separately. Baseball teams carried the name Dorchester into competitions across the coalfields. Movie audiences gathered in a company town theater. Mine machinery hummed beneath the mountains while coke ovens burned outside.
By 1940, 870 people called the community home. During World War II its mines remained part of the country’s coal supply. In 1960, a single Dorchester mine still employed around 160 workers.
Then the industrial system that had created the town slowly withdrew.
Dorchester remains on the map. Wise County still maintains the Dorchester Community Center on Dorchester Road, a small but meaningful continuation of a place that once revolved around company facilities and coal production.
The deeper legacy lies beneath the surface. The Dorchester coal seam still carries the community’s name through the geological history of Southwest Virginia, while archives preserve company ledgers, photographs, maps, court testimony, mining reports, and railroad records that allow the old town to be reconstructed piece by piece.
Dorchester’s history is therefore not simply the story of another coal camp that declined.
It is the story of how industrial Appalachia was made. Capital came from outside the mountains. Railroads opened the hollows. Companies built towns around mineral deposits. Families followed the work and made those towns into communities. Coal and coke moved outward while generations of miners, women, children, merchants, teachers, clergy, and railroad workers built lives around an industry that seemed permanent until suddenly it was not.
Today the rows of ovens no longer dominate the hollow and loaded coal cars no longer depend on a dedicated branch to Dorchester Junction. What remains is a name, a community, and an unusually rich documentary record of the time when one Wise County hollow became part of the industrial machinery of the nation.
Sources & Further Reading
Colonial Coal and Coke Company. Colonial Coal and Coke Company Journal, 1903–1913. Local Government Records Collection, Wise County Court Records. Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/vi_vi01753
Library of Virginia. Wise County (Va.) Business Records, 1891–1937. Local Government Records Collection. Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=Wise+County+%28Va.%29+Business+Records%2C+1891-1937
Ayers, Rufus A. “Wise County: Her Industries, Resources and Prominent Men.” Special industrial edition of Crawford’s Weekly. Norton, VA, October 1920. https://genealogytrails.com/vir/wise/history.html
Lunsford’s Administrator v. Colonial Coal & Coke Co., 115 Va. 346, 79 S.E. 348 (1913). https://app.midpage.ai/document/lunsford-s-administrator-v-colonial-6812827
Colonial Coal & Coke Co. v. Ream, 114 Va. 800, 77 S.E. 508 (1913). https://calculators.law/caselaw/decisions/GpkNgKDvMNag/colonial-coal-coke-co-v-ream
“The Colonial Coal and Coke Company.” Engineering and Mining Journal 73, no. 5, February 1, 1902. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1902-02-01-_Vol_73_Iss_5_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1902-02-01_73_5%29.pdf
Engineering and Mining Journal. October 31, 1903. Contemporary industrial report documenting equipment supplied to the Wise Coal Company at Dorchester. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1903-10-31-_Vol_76_Iss_18_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1903-10-31_76_18%29.pdf
Hill Directory Company. Virginia Business Directory and Gazetteer. 1917. https://ldsgenealogy.com/VA/books/Virginia-business-directory-and-gazetteer-1917-v-2-part-75.htm
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 232. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b232
Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed. Men of Mark in Virginia: Ideals of American Life, A Collection of Biographies of the Leading Men in the State. Vol. 5. Washington, DC: Men of Mark Publishing Company, 1909. https://georgiapioneers.com/backend/public/GB/vabooks/Men%20of%20mark%20in%20Virginia%2C%20a%20collection%20of%20biographies%20of%20the%20leading%20men%20in%20the%20state%20Vol%205%20%281906%29.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Population of Unincorporated Communities: 1940. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1940uninc.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census, Wise County, Virginia, Enumeration District 98-10: Gladeville Magisterial District, Dorchester, Unincorporated.” 1950 Census Records. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=Wise&page=1&state=VA
United States Government. Federal Register. Vol. 10. June 16, 1945. Listing for Wise Coal & Coke Company, Dorchester, Virginia, and Mines Nos. 2, 3, and 5. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1945-06-16/pdf/FR-1945-06-16.pdf
United States Government. Federal Register. Vol. 11, no. 68. April 6, 1946. Records concerning Wise Coal and Coke Company No. 3 Mine and the Dorchester coal seam. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Federal_Register_1946-04-06-_Vol_11_Iss_68_%28IA_sim_federal-register-find_1946-04-06_11_68%29.pdf
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1959. Material concerning coal-mine-safety legislation and testimony involving J. B. Taggart of Wise Coal & Coke Company, Dorchester, Virginia. https://www.congress.gov/crecb/1959/GPO-CRECB-1959-pt17-Pages415-419.pdf
United States Bureau of Mines. “Report of Coal Mine Fire, No. 4 Mine, Wise Coal & Coke Company, Dorchester, Wise County, Virginia, July 29, 1960.” 1960. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/206472/cdc_206472_DS1.pdf
Virginia Record. “New Concrete Coke Ovens at Dorchester, Near Norton.” August 1957. https://www.usmodernist.org/AIAVA/AIAVA-1957-08.pdf
Surface Transportation Board. “Interstate Railroad Company, Abandonment Exemption, in Wise County, Virginia.” Federal Register, October 10, 1997. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1997-10-10/pdf/97-27027.pdf
Fannon, Kenny. “Wise Coal & Coke Company Tipple, Dorchester, Virginia.” Kenny Fannon Photograph Collection, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University. Identifier 478-003. https://archivesofappalachia.omeka.net/items/show/1076
Eby, J. Brian. The Geology and Mineral Resources of Wise County and the Coal-Bearing Portion of Scott County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 24. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1923. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_93590.htm
Brown, Andrew, Henry L. Berryhill Jr., Dorothy A. Taylor, and James V. A. Trumbull. Coal Resources of Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Circular 171. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1952. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/cir171
Giles, Albert W. The Geology and Coal Resources of Dickenson County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 21. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1921. https://energy.virginia.gov/
Giles, Albert W. Geology and Coal Resources of the Coal-Bearing Portion of Lee County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 26. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1925. https://energy.virginia.gov/commercedocs/BUL_26.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Wise County/Norton Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Kennedy, Ralph Emerson. An Economic and Social Survey of Wise County. University of Virginia Record Extension Series 12, no. 11. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1928.
Addington, Luther F. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Centennial Committee and School Board of Wise County, 1956. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL52472909M/The_story_of_Wise_County_Virginia
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. https://utpress.org/9780870498855/coal-towns/
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. https://utpress.org/9780870493416/miners-millhands-and-mountaineers/
Tarter, Brent. “John Alfred Esser (1848–1932).” Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Library of Virginia. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Esser_John_Alfred
Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. “From the Archives: A Coal Camp Photo Tour.” https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/blog/from-the-archives-a-coal-camp-photo-tour
Virginia Chronicle. “Historical Newspapers of Virginia.” Library of Virginia. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/
Wise County, Virginia. “Dorchester Community Center.” https://www.wisecounty.org/facilities/facility/details/Dorchester-Community-Center-2
Author Note: Dorchester’s surviving records reveal how a small Wise County hollow became a substantial center of coal and coke production. Its story also preserves the lives of the families who built a community around an industry that eventually disappeared.