Appalachian Community Histories – Filbert, McDowell County: U.S. Coal & Coke, Mine No. 9, and Life at the End of Gary Hollow
At the upper end of Gary Hollow, where Sand Lick Creek presses against steep McDowell County mountains, the community of Filbert grew around one of the most important mines in the United States Coal & Coke Company system. It was never a courthouse town, an independent commercial center, or a place that existed before the coal industry arrived. Filbert was built because there was coal in the mountain and because one of the largest industrial corporations in the world wanted that coal for its steel mills.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey identifies Filbert as a satellite community of Gary whose creation coincided with the opening of U.S. Coal & Coke Mine No. 9 in 1907. Company houses rose near the mine, the railroad pushed farther into the hollow, and families from Appalachia, eastern Europe, and other parts of the United States built lives in a settlement whose fortunes were tied almost completely to coal.
Filbert’s history is unusually well documented for a small coal community. Historic photographs preserve the entrance to No. 9. Federal photographers recorded the post office and nearby company houses in 1946. West Virginia University preserves images of community activities. State archives contain engineering drawings of the mining complex. Census schedules, mine reports, company records, railroad maps, and immigrant newspapers can still reveal the people who lived there. The research record includes everything from West Virginia Department of Mines reports to 122 engineering drawings of the No. 9 facilities dating from 1958 through 1961.
What survives is enough to tell the story of more than a mine. Filbert was a place where the history of U.S. Steel, Hungarian immigration, African American coalfield life, company paternalism, railroad expansion, mechanization, and industrial decline all met in one narrow mountain hollow.
The Building of Gary Hollow
Filbert’s story began several years before Filbert itself appeared.
United States Steel was created in 1901 as an industrial combination on a scale Americans had rarely seen. Producing steel required enormous quantities of raw materials, including iron ore, limestone, coke, and coal. Rather than depend entirely upon outside suppliers, U.S. Steel pursued control over its own sources.
In southern West Virginia, that strategy led to the United States Coal & Coke Company. Chartered in 1902, the company obtained access to approximately 50,000 acres of coal-bearing land in McDowell County and began developing what became Gary Hollow. The area contained high-quality Pocahontas coal particularly valuable to the steel industry.
The result was not one coal camp but a chain of them. Gary, Wilcoe, Thorpe, Ream, Elbert, Filbert, and other settlements occupied different portions of the industrial landscape. Each had a relationship to particular mines and facilities, but together they formed a single massive operation.
The Historic American Landscapes Survey describes Gary Hollow as a collection of fourteen historic underground mines and supporting communities. At its height, the system became one of the largest coal mining operations in the world. Hundreds of houses and community buildings were constructed along a landscape that had been transformed from a sparsely developed mountain valley into an industrial corridor.
Filbert developed near the far end of that corridor.
The Railroad Reaches Toward Filbert
Coal beneath a mountain was valuable only if it could be carried out.
The Norfolk & Western Railway therefore became as important to Gary Hollow as the mines themselves. Rail lines moved coal from the hollow into a national transportation system connecting southern West Virginia with industrial markets far beyond Appalachia.
A surviving Norfolk & Western engineering drawing dated February 23, 1907, shows the Right Fork Spur of the Sand Lick Branch running from Gary toward Elbert. The drawing was prepared as U.S. Coal & Coke continued developing the upper hollow and demonstrates how rapidly railroad construction and mining development were advancing together.
The Sand Lick Branch eventually reached the communities farther up the valley, with Filbert standing near one of the end points of the railway system. Norfolk & Western Historical Society research describes a network of branch lines running through Gary and Wilcoe toward locations including Filbert, Leckie, Jenkinjones, and Munson. Those lines carried hundreds of millions of tons of coal during the industrial life of the region.
For Filbert, the railroad was more than transportation infrastructure. It was one of the reasons the community existed at all.
Tracks, tipples, sidings, mine openings, company houses, roads, and Sand Lick Creek were squeezed together in a narrow space. The physical form of the town reflected the mountain geography and the demands of the industry. There was little room for a traditional street grid. Filbert instead followed the shape of the hollow.
Mine No. 9
The Coal Heritage Survey places the creation of Filbert alongside the opening of U.S. Coal & Coke Mine No. 9 in 1907. The survey describes the settlement as a satellite hamlet of Gary and identifies company housing built specifically for mine workers.
A surviving photograph preserved by West Virginia University makes the connection unmistakable. Cataloged simply as “Number Nine Mine Entrance, Filbert, W. Va.,” the image preserves the industrial identity of the community in a way that census figures and corporate reports cannot. The photograph belongs to a collection created largely during the 1920s that also contains images of U.S. Coal & Coke plants and buildings throughout Gary Hollow.
No. 9 was part of an industrial network whose scale is difficult to appreciate today. The larger Gary operation employed thousands of workers. A 1915 state mine report cited by the West Virginia Encyclopedia counted 1,479 hand-loading miners in the Gary system alone. Those workers included native-born white Appalachians, African Americans, Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Poles, and other eastern European immigrants.
That diversity became one of the defining characteristics of the Gary coalfield.
At Filbert, it became particularly visible through a Hungarian community that developed around No. 9.
A Hungarian Village in McDowell County
West Virginia’s coal boom drew labor from much farther away than Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, or the Carolinas. Thousands of eastern and southern European immigrants entered Appalachian mines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Among them were Hungarians.
West Virginia University’s Appalachian Hungarian Heritage Project identifies Filbert as a Hungarian village by the 1920s and states that most of the men in the community worked at U.S. Steel’s No. 9 mine. The project’s research also notes the broader importance of Hungarian workers in Gary, where they became a major part of the labor force.
That finding changes the way Filbert should be remembered. It was not simply another West Virginia coal camp populated by people from nearby mountain counties. It was one small piece of an international migration story.
Hungarian families brought languages, food traditions, religious practices, kinship networks, newspapers, and cultural organizations into southern West Virginia. Evidence of those connections occasionally appears in places researchers might easily overlook. The Hungarian Miners’ Journal, for example, carried correspondence from miners and residents scattered through Appalachian coal communities, including Filbert.
For immigrants arriving in McDowell County, the mountain landscape may have been unfamiliar, but the industrial logic of the community was immediately clear. The mine determined employment. The company controlled much of the housing. The railroad connected the settlement with the outside world. Work underground established the rhythm of daily life above it.
Children raised in Filbert could therefore be West Virginians, Appalachians, Americans, and members of immigrant families at the same time.
Life in a Company Town
The company town system extended U.S. Coal & Coke’s influence far beyond the mine portal.
The company owned houses, stores, roads, and many community facilities. Across Gary Hollow it helped provide schools, churches, medical services, recreational facilities, and other amenities. By the 1940s, the greater Gary area contained thousands of residents along with churches, stores, schools, athletic facilities, restaurants, and a hospital.
Those services were real, but so was the power imbalance behind them.
Historian Ronald Garay’s study of Gary describes a community in which U.S. Steel provided jobs, housing, commercial facilities, medical services, and much of the infrastructure upon which families depended. A worker could therefore live in a company house, work in a company mine, and depend upon institutions associated with the same corporation for major parts of family life.
Housing itself reflected industrial hierarchy.
The Coal Heritage Survey notes that house plans in Gary Hollow distinguished supervisors, foremen, and ordinary miners. Race created another division. Housing and schools in the hollow were segregated, even while Black miners, European immigrants, and native-born white miners worked within the same enormous industrial system.
Filbert was part of that landscape of opportunity, community, inequality, and control.
Russell Lee Photographs Filbert
On August 17, 1946, photographer Russell Lee arrived in the Gary Mines area as part of the federal Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry.
Lee’s photographs are among the most important visual records ever created of American coalfield life. Rather than concentrating only on tipples and machinery, he photographed miners, wives, children, houses, clinics, privies, stores, transportation, roads, medical facilities, and the ordinary surroundings of families whose labor powered the industry.
One of his photographs is explicitly titled “Post office for the Filbert mine area.” The National Archives record identifies the location with U.S. Coal & Coke Company’s Gary Mines in McDowell County and dates the photograph to August 17, 1946.
Another photograph from the same series shows a house near the Filbert mine. The federal caption observed evidence of maintenance and repair among houses in the Gary Mines area.
These are extraordinary documents because they move the story beyond corporate production figures.
A mine report might tell us how much coal came out of No. 9. A company ledger might identify a payroll. A railroad map might show a siding.
Lee’s camera recorded the world surrounding those statistics.
A post office meant letters from relatives elsewhere in West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Europe. A house represented a family waiting for a miner to come home. A road carried children to school, families to church, and workers toward another shift underground.
Seen together, Lee’s photographs turn Filbert from an industrial location into a lived community.
African American Community Life
Filbert’s documentary record also preserves a part of African American community history that could easily disappear from a mine-centered account.
Around 1950, a photograph now held by West Virginia University documented a “Filbert Achievement Day Exhibit and Luncheon.” The image shows African American Extension workers gathered around a large table, with women and exhibits filling the room.
The photograph reveals something important about coalfield history.
Life in Filbert did not end when a miner came out of the mine. Women organized community activities. Families participated in churches, schools, agricultural extension programs, social groups, and neighborhood networks. People cooked, sewed, raised children, maintained homes, visited neighbors, celebrated occasions, and created communities that could not be reduced to the name of the corporation employing them.
African American miners had been a major part of McDowell County’s workforce for decades. In the Gary operation, Black workers were present alongside European immigrants and white Appalachian miners from the earliest years of the industrial expansion. The segregated structure of company housing and education meant that racial divisions remained visible even within one corporate system.
The Filbert Achievement Day photograph preserves a different side of that history, one centered not on industrial management but on community participation.
From U.S. Coal & Coke to U.S. Steel
By the middle of the twentieth century, the corporate identity surrounding Filbert began to change even though the relationship between coal and steel remained.
U.S. Coal & Coke had been created as part of the U.S. Steel industrial system, but by the postwar era the parent corporation became increasingly direct in the operation of the Gary mines. Local historical accounts of No. 9 record continuing work in different sections and seams as mining technology, market demand, and accessible coal changed.
The mine was not a single hole driven into the mountain and worked in the same way for eighty years. Underground workings expanded, connected, exhausted sections, and shifted into other seams. Facilities above ground were rebuilt and modernized accordingly.
The archival record is particularly valuable for this later period. West Virginia State Archives holdings include more than one hundred engineering sheets for U.S. Steel’s No. 9 facilities at Filbert from 1958 through 1961, covering structures such as dumping and loading installations. Those drawings preserve a technical picture of the mine during an era when mechanized coal production looked very different from the hand-loading world of the early twentieth century.
By then, however, the larger economic world that had created Gary Hollow was beginning to change.
The Long Decline of Gary Hollow
Gary Hollow had been constructed around an assumption that seems almost permanent when viewed from the boom years: U.S. Steel would continue needing enormous quantities of Pocahontas coal.
That assumption eventually failed.
Changes in steelmaking, competition, energy markets, mine economics, corporate decisions, labor conditions, and the exhaustion of particular workings weakened the industrial system that had supported the hollow. The Coal Heritage Survey notes that U.S. Steel began closing mines and divesting itself of property as the postwar era progressed. Houses and other company buildings were sold, abandoned, or demolished.
The transformation was not instantaneous. Mines could close and reopen. Workers could be laid off and later called back. One section might be exhausted while another remained productive.
Filbert therefore experienced decline as a long process rather than a single moment.
Local accounts of Gary No. 9 describe sections being idled in 1962, reopened in 1966, and continuing through later changes before the final collapse of the U.S. Steel mining system in Gary Hollow during the 1980s.
In 1971, another change altered Filbert’s political identity.
Gary incorporated as a city, bringing Filbert and other former satellite coal communities into the larger municipality. The Coal Heritage Survey has accordingly described Filbert as part of Gary since 1971.
A place that had begun as the settlement around Mine No. 9 was now officially part of a larger city assembled from the industrial communities U.S. Coal & Coke had created decades earlier.
The End of No. 9
The final break came in the 1980s.
The West Virginia Encyclopedia records the end of U.S. Steel’s Gary operations during that decade, while the Coal Heritage Survey dates the permanent closure of the Gary Hollow mines to 1986 after years of layoffs and shutdowns.
For Filbert, closure meant more than losing a workplace.
The mine was the original reason for the community’s development. Generations had oriented their lives around No. 9. Shift whistles, mine locomotives, railroad cars, tipple machinery, miners walking to work, and coal moving out of the hollow had formed part of the community’s everyday soundscape.
When those operations ended, the industrial landscape began disappearing rapidly.
Mine buildings were demolished. Portals were closed. Equipment disappeared. Areas that had once been filled with specialized structures were reclaimed or altered until a visitor unfamiliar with the history might have difficulty imagining what once occupied the ground.
The railroad remained as a physical reminder, but even that no longer carried coal with the intensity that had defined the hollow.
What Remains of Filbert
The disappearance of the mine makes the surviving houses increasingly important.
In 2018, preservation researchers recommended a Filbert Historic District with a period of significance stretching from 1908 through 1968. They identified 39 contributing resources and recognized the community for its association with the coal industry and its company-town architecture.
That recommendation recognizes a basic truth about industrial history.
The spectacular structures usually disappear first.
Tipples are demolished. Mine portals are sealed. Railroad buildings vanish. Shops collapse. Machinery is scrapped. The places most obviously connected with coal can be gone within a generation.
Houses sometimes survive longer.
A row of homes along a mountain road may not look as dramatic as a massive coal tipple, but those buildings preserve the shape of the community. They show where families lived in relation to the mine, creek, railroad, and surrounding slopes. Their repetition reflects corporate planning. Their differences can reveal job status and social hierarchy.
The Historic American Landscapes Survey reached a similar conclusion about Gary Hollow as a whole. Much of the industrial infrastructure has disappeared, yet hundreds of residential and community structures remain as traces of the enormous coal operation once centered there.
Filbert is therefore not simply a vanished coal camp.
It is a surviving fragment of one of the largest corporate mining landscapes in Appalachian history.
Filbert and the Story of Industrial Appalachia
It would be easy to describe Filbert as a small place.
Geographically, it is.
Historically, it was connected to something enormous.
Coal taken from beneath the mountains around Gary Hollow entered the industrial system of U.S. Steel. Railroad cars carried it beyond McDowell County. The fuel helped serve steelmaking operations far removed from the narrow valley where miners entered the earth.
At the same time, workers came into Filbert from places equally distant. Hungarians crossed an ocean before reaching the West Virginia coalfields. African American families became part of McDowell County’s industrial communities. White Appalachian families moved between mining camps as employment shifted. Their children grew up in company towns that were at once intensely local and connected to global industrial forces.
Those lives complicate the idea that a coal town existed only to produce coal.
Filbert contained a mine, but it also contained homes, a post office, immigrant networks, African American community organizations, children, churches, families, and memories. The corporation designed much of the physical environment, yet the people who lived there turned that environment into a community.
Today No. 9 is silent.
The mine entrance photographed decades ago no longer represents an active industrial world. The buildings surrounding it have largely disappeared. Filbert has been part of Gary for more than half a century, and the great U.S. Steel operation that created both communities is gone.
Yet the documentary record remains remarkably rich.
A railroad engineer’s map preserves the approach toward the upper hollow. A company photograph preserves the No. 9 entrance. Russell Lee’s camera preserves Filbert’s post office and a miner’s house. Another photograph preserves African American women gathered for an Achievement Day luncheon. Engineering drawings preserve the machinery of the later mine. The surviving houses preserve the town itself.
Together, those records allow Filbert to be seen not as a forgotten name on a map, but as a community that stood at the intersection of coal, steel, immigration, race, industry, and family life in southern West Virginia.
Its mine may be gone, but Filbert still tells the story of what happened when one of the world’s largest corporations reached deep into an Appalachian hollow, opened Mine No. 9, and built a town around it.
Sources & Further Reading
National Coal Heritage Area. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
West Virginia University, West Virginia & Regional History Center. Hal Scrugham, Collector, Photographs of Town of Gary and Local Coal & Coke Plant. A&M 4306. Morgantown: West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6376
West Virginia University Libraries. “Number Nine Mine Entrance, Filbert, W. Va.” West Virginia History OnView, identifier 052815. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/052815
Lee, Russell. “Post Office for the Filbert Mine Area. U.S. Coal and Coke Company, Gary Mines, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Photograph, August 17, 1946. National Archives Identifier 540851. National Archives and Records Administration. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/540851
Lee, Russell. “House Near the Filbert Mine. U.S. Coal and Coke Company, Gary Mines, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Photograph, 1946. National Archives Identifier 540849. National Archives and Records Administration. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/540849
National Archives and Records Administration. Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1946–1947. Record Group 245, Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/245.html
West Virginia University Libraries. “Filbert Achievement Day Exhibit and Luncheon.” Photograph, ca. 1950. West Virginia History OnView, identifier 001519. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/001519
West Virginia State Archives. U.S. Steel No. 9 Filbert Drawings, 1958–1961. Sc2011-129. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/specialcollections.html
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Map and Profile of the Right Fork Spur of the Sand Lick Branch of the Tug Fork Branch of the Ohio Extension.” February 23, 1907. HS-CC10672. Norfolk & Western Historical Society. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122583
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Reports of the Department of Mines of West Virginia. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, various years. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/search?query=West+Virginia+Department+of+Mines+annual+report
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. County Geologic Report 30. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://books.google.com/books/about/Wyoming_and_McDowell_Counties.html?id=MsgbAAAAMAAJ
Eavenson, Howard N. “Safety Methods and Organization of United States Coal & Coke Co.” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, 1915. https://www.onetunnel.org/documents/safety-methods-and-organization-of-united-states-coal-coke-co-
O’Toole, Edward. “Pocahontas Coal Field, and Operating Methods of the United States Coal and Coke Co.” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers 72. https://aimehq.org/themes/custom/aime/doclibrary/transactions/vol072.html
United States Census Bureau. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules, McDowell County, West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 1940. Enumeration districts for Filbert include portions of ED 24-5 and ED 24-7. https://www.us-census.org/states/westvirginia/teams/McDowell1940.htm
National Archives and Records Administration. 1950 Census of Population and Housing. Record Group 29, Records of the Bureau of the Census. https://1950census.archives.gov/
The McDowell Times. Keystone, WV, 1904–1941. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/issues/
Library of Congress. Historic American Landscapes Survey. “Gary Hollow, 38 Church Street, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia.” HALS WV-6. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0557/
West Virginia University. Appalachian Hungarian Heritage Project. “Maps Data in Table Format.” Morgantown: West Virginia University. https://appalachianhungarians.wvu.edu/resources/maps/maps-data-in-table-format
McGehee, C. Stuart. “Gary.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Last revised April 24, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/2025
McGehee, C. Stuart. “Gary: A First-Class Operation.” Goldenseal, Fall 1988.
Garay, Ronald G. U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. https://utpress.org/9781572337978/u-s-steel-and-gary-west-virginia/
Schust, Alex P. Gary Hollow: A History of the Largest Coal Mining Operation in the World. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2005. https://search.worldcat.org/title/61443211
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010.
Schust, Alex P., and Mason Cooper. Tug Fork: Norfolk & Western Branch Line. Roanoke, VA: Norfolk & Western Historical Society. https://www.nwhs.org/commissary/books-nwhs.html
Torok, George D. A Guide to Historic Coal Towns of the Big Sandy River Valley. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. https://utpress.org/9781572332829/guide-to-the-historic-coal-towns-of-the-big-sandy-river-valley/
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Sullivan, Charles Kenneth. Coal Men and Coal Towns: Development of the Smokeless Coalfields of Southern West Virginia, 1873–1923. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989.
Lambie, Joseph T. From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway. New York: New York University Press, 1954.
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1992. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/coal-mining-heritage.pdf
Sowers, Auburn Daniel. Facts About McDowell County, West Virginia. 1912.
Author Note: As someone from the Appalachian coalfields, I find places like Filbert important because their histories can disappear quickly once the mines and industrial buildings are gone. The surviving photographs, records, and homes allow us to remember Filbert not simply as Gary No. 9, but as a community built by generations of families.