Appalachian Community Histories – Faraday, McDowell County: Frick Coal Lands, Beech Fork, and the Amonate No. 31 Mine
Faraday is easy to miss in the history of McDowell County. It never grew into a town like Welch, Gary, or Keystone, and much of the history connected to its name eventually became associated with Amonate, Virginia, just across the state line. Yet the surviving records tell a different story. Faraday was once the name attached to a massive coal-land enterprise, proposed industrial works, railroad construction, electrical infrastructure, and one of the largest mining operations in this corner of the Pocahontas coalfield.
Understanding Faraday requires ignoring the state line for a moment. The coal seams beneath the mountains did not stop at Virginia, and neither did the companies that acquired them. Faraday Coal and Coke Company accumulated property in both McDowell County, West Virginia, and Tazewell County, Virginia. Later, Pocahontas Corporation and Pocahontas Fuel Company developed mines and a company community that stretched across the same borderland. A worker might have lived in Amonate, Virginia, while the mine where he worked was legally in McDowell County, West Virginia.
That overlap explains why historical records can seem contradictory. Some describe Faraday as the earlier name of Amonate. Others place Faraday firmly in West Virginia. Railroad drawings identify mining facilities north of Amonate in McDowell County, while a Norfolk and Western photograph from about 1955 labels the industrial complex the “Amonate Colliery 31, Faraday WV.” Both descriptions can be true because Faraday’s history belongs to a coal operation that crossed the boundary rather than fitting neatly inside it.
The Faraday Coal and Coke Company
The corporate story began at the opening of the twentieth century. West Virginia Secretary of State records show that the business was incorporated on June 11, 1901, with $500,000 in capital stock divided into 5,000 shares valued at $100 each. The company was initially recorded as the Farraday Coal & Coke Company. Only eight days later, on June 19, the spelling was formally changed to Faraday. Its principal office was listed in Pittsburgh, a reminder that much of the capital flowing into the southern Appalachian coalfields came from industrial centers far beyond the mountains.
The scale of the project became apparent almost immediately. In February 1902, the Engineering and Mining Journal reported that the company, backed principally by Pittsburgh capitalists, had purchased about 23,000 acres of coal and timber land in Tazewell County and neighboring McDowell County. Much of the property was believed to contain coal, placing the new company over part of the enormously valuable Pocahontas field.
The holdings continued to grow. The Henry Clay Frick Business Records at the University of Pittsburgh state that Faraday eventually controlled more than 25,000 acres, assembled largely through the purchase of smaller individual tracts. The properties lay on or near the Pocahontas coal seam and spread across the Virginia and West Virginia boundary. Faraday even acquired property in Kentucky, though the borderlands of McDowell and Tazewell remained at the heart of the enterprise.
Those surviving corporate records make Faraday unusually well documented for a place that later became so obscure. Minute books preserve meetings of directors and stockholders. Other files contain correspondence, deeds, leases, financial ledgers, maps, surveys, newspaper clippings, drilling reports, stockholder lists, and plans for proposed coal works. The archive also preserves maps showing coal seams, neighboring mining companies, and railroad lines, allowing Faraday to be reconstructed not simply as a name but as a planned industrial landscape.
Henry Clay Frick and the Mountains
One of the most important figures behind Faraday was Henry Clay Frick, already one of the most powerful industrialists in the United States. Frick began purchasing Faraday stock until his holdings exceeded those of other investors. He also loaned the company money as it continued buying coal property.
By 1910, according to the University of Pittsburgh’s account of the business records, Faraday owed Frick more than $100,000. Some property was transferred to him in payment of company debts, but investment in the border coal lands continued. The archive contains files concerning additional property purchases, drill testing, and money advanced for coal acreage during the 1910s.
The records reveal the speculative side of Appalachian industrialization. Before a tipple rose or a coal car rolled down a siding, investors were purchasing mineral rights, examining seams, surveying mountains, planning railroads, and calculating whether thousands of acres could become profitable. Faraday existed on paper as a vast industrial project years before the later Amonate operation became a recognizable company community.
Among the more revealing surviving materials are reports from the Beech Fork Works dating to 1912 and 1913, along with blueprints and later drilling studies. A 1923 report analyzed the results of drilling and prospecting on the Faraday property, showing that the company continued studying the coal beneath these mountains almost until the end of its corporate existence. The attachment’s archival inventory also traces railway correspondence back to 1902 and 1903, showing how closely transportation and coal development were linked from the beginning.
Beech Fork and the Railroad
Coal acreage had little value on an industrial scale without a way to move the coal. Faraday’s eventual development therefore depended on the railroad network that penetrated the narrow valleys of southern McDowell County.
The Norfolk and Western Railway records are especially useful because they show exactly how the Faraday name remained attached to the landscape. A railway drawing dated August 13, 1924, and revised in January 1925 shows a proposed spur extending up the Right Fork of Beech Fork to a tipple layout for the Pocahontas Corporation. Related records describe the siding as being north of Farraday in McDowell County. Another 1925 drawing is simply titled “Faraday Operation” and concerns bridges constructed for Pocahontas Fuel Company’s facilities along the Right Fork Branch.
These documents are important because they show Faraday surviving the transition from one company to another. The Faraday Coal and Coke Company was disappearing as a corporation, but the name remained useful to engineers, railroad employees, surveyors, and miners describing the West Virginia side of the operation.
Faraday’s surviving landscape is still tied to Beech Fork. West Virginia Division of Highways records identify County Route 9/6 as “Beech Fork (Faraday)” and “Beech Fork Rd (Faraday).” Modern McDowell County property maps continue to label Faraday Road near the Right Fork of Beech Fork and the old Norfolk and Western railroad alignment. The corporate empire vanished, but its name never completely left the map.
The End of the Original Faraday Company
Henry Clay Frick died in 1919, and the company’s debts became increasingly important to what happened next. The University of Pittsburgh records state that on November 3, 1924, Faraday’s directors acknowledged the company’s indebtedness to Frick’s estate and voted to discontinue the enterprise. West Virginia’s corporate record gives the formal date of voluntary dissolution as December 5, 1924.
The end of the corporation did not mean the end of mining on its lands. In fact, some of the most intensive development was only beginning.
Faraday’s property entered the orbit of the Pocahontas interests, and the name became intertwined with the new coal camp developing across the line in Tazewell County. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes Amonate as having been “originally called Faraday” and states that development began in 1924 to serve a new Pocahontas Fuel Company mine. The camp soon had paved sidewalks, telephones, electricity, a company store, post office, barber shop, tennis court, baseball field, depot, and a meeting hall that could function as a church, movie house, and union hall. By 1925, its population was reported at about 700.
This is where the history becomes easy to oversimplify. Faraday did become closely associated with the Virginia community known as Amonate, but the older name was not merely erased and replaced. Faraday continued to identify the mining and railroad landscape on the West Virginia side.
Faraday and Amonate Become One Industrial Landscape
Railroad records make the connection especially clear. A 1945 Norfolk and Western drawing describes the siding facilities for Pocahontas Corporation’s Operation No. 31 as being north of Amonate, Virginia, in McDowell County, West Virginia. The spur followed the Right Fork of Beech Creek. The wording captures the unusual geography perfectly. Amonate was the community name most people recognized, but the industrial operation extended into West Virginia where Faraday remained part of the local vocabulary.
Virginia Tech’s Pocahontas Mines Collection preserves another layer of this history. Among its hundreds of boxes of mining maps, drawings, plans, photographs, and engineering materials is a Faraday Coal and Coke Company property and topographic map. Other records cataloged under Faraday continued into the decades after the original corporation disappeared, evidence that surveyors and mine engineers retained the name as a geographic and operational designation.
A Norfolk and Western archival photograph from approximately 1955 makes the connection unmistakable. The photograph is cataloged as “Pocahontas Fuel Co Amonate Colliery 31, Faraday WV.” Its subject is the tipple and railroad infrastructure of the No. 31 operation. By then, Amonate had been established for three decades, yet the railroad archive still considered Faraday the West Virginia location of the colliery.
Faraday Becomes an Electrical Crossroads
Coal was not the only reason Faraday remained important. By the 1930s it had also become a node in the electrical system serving mining communities along the state line.
A West Virginia Supreme Court case arising from a fatal electrical accident in 1934 described how Appalachian Electric Power transmitted 88,000 volts to Faraday. At a transformer station there, the voltage was reduced to 13,000 volts and carried onward to Bishop. Another station at Bishop reduced the current again before power continued toward Squire and other consumers in McDowell County.
The court testimony provides an unusual glimpse of Faraday outside the normal coal-company records. It shows that the place had become part of the infrastructure holding several mining communities together. Coal camps required more than mines and houses. They depended on a web of generating facilities, substations, transmission lines, railroad spurs, bridges, roads, water systems, and communications equipment.
Even that part of Faraday’s identity survived. Appalachian Power continues to use the name Faraday Station for electrical infrastructure in McDowell County, with a transmission line extending from the station toward McDowell Station near Bishop.
The No. 31 Mine
By the middle of the twentieth century, the No. 31 Mine was an enormous operation. The United States Bureau of Mines reported that Pocahontas Fuel Company employed 754 people at the mine in December 1957, including 636 underground workers and 118 surface employees. Three shifts operated each day, producing an average of about 6,500 tons of coal daily. During the first eleven months of 1957 alone, production reached 1,427,879 tons.
The mine entered the Pocahontas No. 4 coal bed through several drifts and two concrete-lined shafts. Federal investigators recorded an average seam thickness of about seventy-eight inches in the areas being worked. Underground entries stretched beneath the border mountains in a system so extensive that the familiar names used above ground became inadequate descriptions of what existed below.
The federal report explicitly placed the No. 31 Mine in McDowell County, West Virginia, near Amonate, Virginia. It was served by the Norfolk and Western Railway. Even inside the mine, old geographic names survived. Federal inspectors referred to workings such as the Beech Fork section, connecting the underground operation to the same creek valley found in earlier Faraday records.
The December 1957 Explosion
On the evening of December 27, 1957, Faraday’s industrial history entered one of its darkest chapters.
At approximately 6:35 p.m., an explosion tore through part of the No. 31 Mine. Eleven miners were killed. The Bureau of Mines reported that all eleven died from burns, explosive force, or both. Another fourteen men, including a foreman, became trapped when the blast destroyed ventilation structures. They constructed a barricade underground and remained behind it until a recovery crew reached them around midnight. All fourteen were brought out alive and were reported to be in good physical condition.
Federal investigators concluded that the explosion originated in the No. 4 entry of the Q Left airways. An explosive mixture of methane and air was believed to have been ignited by an electric arc or spark from electrical equipment or a power conductor. The mine had already been classified as gassy by both the West Virginia Department of Mines and the Bureau of Mines. During a federal inspection earlier that fall, investigators calculated that the mine was liberating more than 2.8 million cubic feet of methane every twenty-four hours.
The official report is also an important geographic record. Its title identifies the disaster as occurring at the No. 31 Mine of the Pocahontas Fuel Company in “McDowell County, West Virginia,” followed by the clarifying phrase “Near Amonate, Tazewell County, Virginia.” Few documents better summarize Faraday’s peculiar history. The mine was commonly associated with a Virginia coal camp, but the disaster itself occurred on the West Virginia side of the line.
The People Behind the Production
Production statistics explain the scale of the mine, but they can hide the people who made those numbers possible. Hundreds of men entered the No. 31 workings every day. Their families lived throughout Amonate, Bishop, Squire, Berwind, and other communities scattered along the Virginia and West Virginia border.
The surviving records reveal only fragments of those lives. Federal mine reports record occupations and fatalities. Corporate ledgers record wages and expenditures. Railroad maps reduce the landscape to lines, measurements, bridges, and sidings. Photographs show tipples, coal cars, company buildings, and workers standing beside machinery.
Taken together, however, they show a world built around the daily movement of men underground and coal outward. Faraday was part of a chain that began at the working face, continued through underground haulage and preparation facilities, crossed railroad sidings along Beech Fork, and eventually carried Pocahontas coal to distant industrial markets.
The history of the place therefore cannot belong only to Henry Clay Frick, Pocahontas Fuel Company, or the Norfolk and Western Railway. It also belongs to the miners who worked the seams, the railroad crews who moved the coal, the families who built lives around the camps, and the eleven men who did not return from No. 31 on December 27, 1957.
Why Faraday Nearly Disappeared from the Story
Faraday illustrates how an Appalachian community can disappear without completely vanishing.
Part of the problem is the changing meaning of the name. Faraday began as a corporation controlling enormous coal acreage. It also described land and proposed works along Beech Fork. Later it identified a geographic point, a railroad location, a mining operation, and an electrical station. Meanwhile, the company town on the Virginia side became known as Amonate and developed a much stronger public identity.
Over time, Amonate absorbed much of the story. Photographs, newspaper reports, mine histories, and memories frequently described the No. 31 operation simply as the Amonate mine. That description made sense to the people who lived there, but it gradually obscured the West Virginia geography beneath the operation.
The surviving evidence corrects that picture. Official railroad drawings place Operation No. 31 in McDowell County. The Bureau of Mines did the same. Norfolk and Western photographers used Faraday as the location. West Virginia highway records still preserve Beech Fork Road as Faraday, and modern utility infrastructure continues using the Faraday name.
Faraday did not simply become Amonate. Instead, the two names became different ways of describing pieces of the same cross-border coal landscape.
Faraday’s Place in McDowell County History
The history of McDowell County is filled with communities whose importance was once obvious because coal trains, company stores, mine whistles, tipples, and thousands of workers kept their names alive. When the industrial systems disappeared, some of those places became little more than road names or labels on old maps.
Faraday is one of the clearest examples.
Its history begins with Pittsburgh investors purchasing tens of thousands of acres at the dawn of the twentieth century. It passes through Henry Clay Frick’s financial empire, railroad surveys along Beech Fork, the dissolution of the original coal company, the rise of Pocahontas Fuel Company, and the development of Amonate across the Virginia line. It continues through electrical transmission stations, the enormous No. 31 Mine, and the eleven miners killed in 1957.
Today, a traveler might see Faraday Road or Beech Fork and never suspect how much industrial history is buried behind the name. Yet the archival record remains unusually deep. Corporate minutes, maps, mine plans, court testimony, railroad drawings, federal investigations, and photographs all preserve pieces of the same story.
Faraday was never merely a forgotten dot in McDowell County. It was part of a coalfield landscape that ignored the state boundary, linking West Virginia mines with Virginia homes and connecting a remote mountain valley to some of the largest industrial and financial interests in the nation.
The town name may have faded, but Faraday never entirely disappeared. It survived in the railroad records, in the mine maps, beside Beech Fork, on the electrical grid, and in the official report of a disaster that forever tied No. 31 to McDowell County. In those records, Faraday remains what it was for much of the twentieth century: a small name attached to a very large story.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia Secretary of State. “Faraday Coal and Coke Company.” Business Organization Detail. Accessed September 13, 2026. The state corporate record documents Faraday’s 1901 incorporation, $500,000 capitalization, original “Farraday” spelling, name change, and 1924 dissolution. https://apps.sos.wv.gov/business/corporations/organization.aspx?org=53872
University of Pittsburgh Library System. Henry Clay Frick Business Records, Series XI: Faraday Coal & Coke Company, 1862–1934. Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais200206
Faraday Coal & Coke Company. Minute Book and Corporate Records. Henry Clay Frick Business Records, University of Pittsburgh Library System. The collection includes directors’ and stockholders’ minutes, charters, bylaws, annual reports, stockholder records, deeds, maps, and financial material. Your research attachment identifies these records as some of the strongest surviving primary sources for Faraday. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais200206
Faraday Coal & Coke Company. “Results of Drilling and Prospecting, February 1920: Analysis of Drill Holes for Faraday Coal & Coke Company.” 1923. Box 70, Folder 1. Henry Clay Frick Business Records, University of Pittsburgh Library System. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais200206
Faraday Coal & Coke Company. “Low Volatile Coals for By-Product Coking Purposes from Southern West Virginia and Southwestern Virginia.” March 1923. Box 69, Folder 7. Henry Clay Frick Business Records, University of Pittsburgh Library System. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais200206
Engineering and Mining Journal. “Faraday Coal and Coke Company.” February 15, 1902. Contemporary trade reporting on the company’s acquisition of roughly 23,000 acres of coal and timber land in Tazewell County, Virginia, and McDowell County, West Virginia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1902-02-15-_Vol_73_Iss_7_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1902-02-15_73_7%29.pdf
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Pocahontas Mines Collection, 1883–1997. Ms2004-002. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. The collection contains thousands of mining maps, surveys, drawings, ledgers, and engineering records from the Pocahontas coalfield. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3408
Faraday Coal & Coke Company. “Faraday C&C Co. Property and Topographic Map.” PLD-1635, Box 626. Pocahontas Mines Collection, Ms2004-002. Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/109104
Norfolk & Western Railway Company. “Dry Fork Branch, Proposed Spur Track up Right Fork of Beech Fork and Tipple Track Layout of the Pocahontas Corporation.” Drawing No. 11097 Rev., August 13, 1924, revised January 19, 1925. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=255490
Norfolk & Western Railway Company. “Faraday Operation.” Drawing M-1030, February 6, 1925. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=265735
Norfolk & Western Railway Company. “Siding Facilities Serving Operation No. 31.” Drawing 11097-D, December 19, 1945. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. The drawing locates Operation No. 31 north of Amonate in McDowell County, West Virginia. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=192627
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Pocahontas Fuel Co. Amonate Colliery 31, Faraday WV.” Photograph DS00364, ca. 1955. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=94527
Park, William R., Edward M. Lewis, and John Zeleskey. Final Report of Major Mine Explosion Disaster: No. 31 Mine, Pocahontas Fuel Company, Incorporated, McDowell County, West Virginia, near Amonate, Tazewell County, Virginia, December 27, 1957. Mount Hope, WV: United States Bureau of Mines, Health and Safety District C, 1957. The federal report explicitly places the mine in McDowell County and records 754 employees and average production of about 6,500 tons per day immediately before the explosion. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/Pocahontas_31_1957.pdf
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “WV Mine Disasters 1884 to Present.” Accessed September 13, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
West Virginia University Libraries. “Amonate Preparation Plant, Pocahontas Fuel Company.” Photograph 003390. West Virginia History OnView. Morgantown: West Virginia & Regional History Center. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/003390
Worsham, Gibson. Historic Architectural Survey of Tazewell County, Virginia. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2001. Particularly useful for Amonate’s development, company buildings, community institutions, and relationship to Faraday. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/TZ-045_Tazewell_AH_Survey_2001_GWorsham_report_cost_share.pdf
Windolph, John F., Jr. Geologic Map of the Amonate Quadrangle, Virginia-West Virginia. Open-File Report 83-446. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1983. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr83446
Windolph, John F., Jr. Maps Showing Coal Resources of the Amonate Quadrangle, Buchanan and Tazewell Counties, Virginia and McDowell County, West Virginia. Miscellaneous Field Studies Map 1730. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1986. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/mf1730
Windolph, John F. Geologic Map of the Amonate Quadrangle, Buchanan and Tazewell Counties, Virginia, and McDowell County, West Virginia. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-1597. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1987. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq1597
Mullins, Terry W. A Coal Camp and Its Classroom: A Historical Study of a Virginia Coalfield Community and Its School, 1888–1987. PhD diss., Virginia Tech, 1996. Although centered on nearby Bishop, the dissertation provides strong scholarly context for the same Pocahontas coalfield and border-company system. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/items/5e578726-48da-4326-a0cf-2cb4bceb0e1a
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. 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/
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p007656
Author Note: Faraday’s history fascinated me because the community cannot be understood by looking at West Virginia or Virginia alone. Following the records across the state line reveals how Frick’s coal lands, Beech Fork, Amonate, the railroad, and Mine No. 31 became parts of one interconnected coalfield story.