Appalachian Community Histories – Havaco, McDowell County: Jed, Little Egypt, and the No. 9 Mine
Havaco sits in the coal country of McDowell County, West Virginia, close enough to Welch that the larger county seat eventually absorbed much of its postal identity. Railroad tracks still pass through the valley, coal continues to move through the region, and the mountains rise sharply above a community whose surviving landscape gives only a partial sense of how important the place once was.
For much of the twentieth century, Havaco existed because of coal. Mines reached beneath the surrounding mountains, rows of houses sheltered mining families, children attended the local school, employees traded at a company store, and the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company operated one of its major McDowell County properties there. At its height, the No. 9 Havaco Mine employed hundreds of men and produced more than two thousand tons of coal on an average working day.
Yet Havaco’s history is especially difficult to separate from disaster. A devastating explosion at nearby Jed in 1912 killed around eighty miners, many of whom were buried in a hillside cemetery that became known as Little Egypt. Another deadly mine emergency occurred at Havaco in 1918. Then, on January 15, 1946, an explosion in the No. 9 Mine killed fifteen miners, injured dozens of others, wrecked surface structures, and sent broken glass flying through the company store.
The documentary record also leaves historians with a problem that cannot simply be ignored. Some sources treat Jed as an earlier name for Havaco. Others show Jed and Havaco as separate places. The history of Havaco therefore begins not with a simple founding date, but with two names, a railroad valley, and a coalfield landscape whose communities grew together as mining transformed McDowell County.
Jed, Havaco, and a Complicated Name
State records make the connection between Jed and Havaco clear, but not entirely simple. West Virginia Archives and History lists Havaco in McDowell County with a date of 1918 and gives Jed and Dial Rock as associated names. Historic postal compilations provide another clue. They identify a Jed post office operating from 1906 until 1914, while Havaco appears beginning in 1914.
That sequence makes it tempting to say that Jed simply became Havaco. Some later historical accounts do exactly that, and the West Virginia Encyclopedia has described the site of the 1912 Jed disaster as Jed, now Havaco.
The physical geography, however, complicates the story. A McDowell County coal camp map prepared for the Coal Heritage Highway Authority labels both Jed and Havaco separately. The map places them within the same general industrial corridor but preserves each as a distinct coal camp.
The safest interpretation is that the histories of Jed and Havaco became closely intertwined as mining expanded, postal names changed, company holdings developed, and local definitions shifted. Jed should not be erased from the story, particularly because contemporary sources in 1912 clearly called the mine and community Jed. At the same time, the disaster site, cemetery, and later community memory became firmly associated with Havaco.
Railroad development had already opened the area to industrial coal production. The professional McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey places Havaco along the Norfolk and Western Railway’s Tug Fork Branch, a line developed between 1902 and 1909 that also served Wilcoe, Gary, Venus, Thorpe, Pageton, Anawalt, and Leckie. As happened repeatedly in McDowell County, railroad access made large-scale mining possible and allowed new coal camps to rise along the tracks.
The Jed Mine Disaster of 1912
On March 26, 1912, an explosion tore through the Jed Coal and Coke Company mine.
The exact death toll was confused almost immediately. West Virginia’s official modern mine-disaster table lists eighty victims. Contemporary newspapers sometimes reported eighty-two or eighty-three. The Charleston Gazette announced a toll of eighty-two, while the Bluefield Daily Telegraph and several other papers carried reports of eighty-three. A nationally circulated dispatch published after the explosion likewise stated that eighty-three miners had been killed.
Such differences were common during large mine disasters. Bodies were recovered over several days, lists could contain duplicate or incorrect names, and reporters often worked from incomplete information while families crowded around the mine waiting for news.
What was not uncertain was the scale of the catastrophe.
Later historical accounts attributed the explosion to methane gas ignited by an open-flame lamp. The blast left families gathering near the mine while rescue and recovery workers entered the workings. Newspapers followed the recovery for days. Headlines preserved by West Virginia Archives and History described bodies pinned beneath slate, relief collections for victims’ families, additional bodies being brought from the mine, and the continuing state investigation.
The dead reflected the extraordinary movement of people into the southern West Virginia coalfields during the industrial era. Many were European immigrants, including men from Italy, Poland, and other countries who had crossed the Atlantic before eventually reaching the coal camps of McDowell County. Their neighbors included Black miners from the American South, native-born Appalachian workers, and migrants from elsewhere in the United States.
Coal companies needed enormous numbers of workers, and McDowell County drew them from remarkably different backgrounds. Underground, those workers shared many of the same dangers. Above ground, however, company communities could still be divided by race, ethnicity, occupation, and status.
Little Egypt and the Miners Left Behind
The most haunting physical reminder of the Jed explosion is not an old mine building. It is a cemetery.
On a hillside at Havaco is an overgrown burial ground known locally as Little Egypt. Dozens of miners associated with the 1912 disaster were buried there, many in graves that were never permanently marked. By the twenty-first century, vegetation, erosion, neglect, and vehicle traffic had made many of the graves nearly impossible to identify.
An Associated Press investigation in 2022 brought renewed attention to the cemetery. Residents described remembering the sunken graves from childhood, while photographs showed an almost vanished burial ground hidden among trees and mountain vegetation. The report also documented the ruins of mining structures nearby and the continuing local memory of men carried from the Jed mine more than a century earlier.
Little Egypt gives the Jed disaster a different kind of historical weight. Mine statistics record numbers. Newspapers record headlines. Government investigations reconstruct explosions. The cemetery records something more personal: many of the workers who died had arrived in West Virginia with little wealth, performed some of the coal industry’s most dangerous labor, and then disappeared into graves that later generations could scarcely locate.
The forgotten condition of the cemetery also mirrors a larger problem throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Industrial sites often outlived the companies that created them, but the people who worked at those sites did not always receive the same preservation. Tipples, coke ovens, railroad grades, company stores, and engineering works may leave visible ruins. Worker cemeteries can disappear beneath a hillside.
At Havaco, the miners of Little Egypt remain part of the landscape even when their individual names are difficult to recover.
The Rise of Havaco
The name Havaco became increasingly visible during the years immediately after the Jed disaster. Postal evidence places a Havaco post office in operation by 1914, and business and mining records show New River and Pocahontas activity there by the middle of the decade.
The New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company became one of the important industrial forces in the community. Its holdings extended far beyond Havaco. By 1946, the company operated several McDowell County mines as well as properties in Fayette and Greenbrier counties. Havaco No. 9 was therefore one part of a much larger coal-producing system.
Havaco developed according to a pattern repeated across McDowell County. Coal companies entering previously rural mountain valleys had to provide much of the infrastructure necessary to support their workers. Houses, stores, schools, churches, utilities, transportation facilities, and other buildings appeared alongside the mines.
The 2016 McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey describes this broader company-town system in detail. Mining companies commonly owned employee housing and commercial buildings, deducted rent and other expenses from wages, and operated stores where company-issued scrip could be used. Housing often reflected occupational rank, with larger houses provided to supervisors and professional employees while miners occupied more modest homes.
Surviving New River and Pocahontas Stores Company scrip associated with Havaco provides material evidence that the community participated in that company-store economy. The mine itself also stood close to the commercial heart of the camp. The federal investigation of the 1946 disaster placed the company store only about five hundred feet from the hoisting shaft.
Havaco had a school as well. Records preserved in West Virginia University’s McDowell County Evaluation Project include Havaco school rosters among a collection of mid-century records documenting communities throughout the county. Those rosters offer a different way to see the town, not as a mine number or production figure, but as a place where children grew up while their parents built lives around the coal industry.
The Deadly Work Between the Disasters
The great explosions of 1912 and 1946 dominate Havaco’s surviving history, but mining danger did not appear only during major disasters.
Newspaper research identifies a succession of individual deaths and injuries associated with Havaco during the twentieth century. Slate falls, mine cars, machinery, and other hazards killed workers whose deaths rarely became more than short items in regional newspapers.
A particularly serious event occurred on December 21, 1918.
Records of the Joseph A. Holmes Safety Association preserve the names of men involved in rescue efforts that day. John Calvin Farmer died while attempting a rescue at Havaco. Samuel Jones then died while attempting to rescue Farmer. The association also recognized George Washington Keith, Frank Krum, Michael Softcheck, Adam B. Mitchell, and Henry Clay Turner for dangerous rescue work connected with the emergency.
The surviving record is a reminder that mine rescue itself could be fatal. Men entered damaged, smoky, or gaseous workings because coworkers remained underground, often before anyone fully understood what conditions they would encounter.
Other Havaco miners died one at a time, without an event large enough to become part of statewide memory. Those deaths mattered just as much to the households that depended upon them. For coal families, the dangers of mining were not confined to famous dates. They were built into ordinary working life.
A Community Built Around the Mine
By the 1930s and 1940s, Havaco was a mature mining community.
The mine created employment not only underground but at the surface plant, tipple, store, and other company facilities. Rail connections moved coal away from the community while also linking Havaco to Welch and the larger network of southern West Virginia mining towns.
The workforce was diverse. An archival photograph preserved by West Virginia University from the 1946 disaster identifies African American miners carrying a body on a stretcher. Another photograph shows the rescue of an injured miner. Together, the images place Black miners visibly within Havaco’s industrial history and document the collective rescue work that followed the explosion.
Life in a place like Havaco could be intensely local even while its coal entered national and international markets. Families shopped near the mine, children attended community schools, and workers lived within sight or walking distance of the operation that controlled the economic rhythm of the valley.
Yet the coal they produced could travel far beyond McDowell County.
Havaco Coal and the Second World War
Federal records show just how widely Havaco coal circulated during World War II.
In March 1943, the federal Office of Price Administration issued an order involving the Berwind Fuel Company. The order concerned briquettes manufactured from coal supplied by New River and Pocahontas mines at Havaco and Capels. Havaco’s contribution came from Mine No. 9.
The briquettes were being sold to customers in New England and to the Canadian government. Havaco was therefore not simply supplying households or industries in southern West Virginia. Coal brought out of a McDowell County mountain became part of a wartime fuel economy stretching into the northeastern United States and Canada.
Demand for coal during the war placed tremendous importance on Appalachian production. Mines operated at heavy capacity because railroads, factories, military production, utilities, and civilian consumers all required fuel.
By the end of the war, Havaco No. 9 was a large operation.
Federal investigators recorded 549 employees at the mine. Sixty worked on the surface and 489 underground, including 121 men assigned to the night shift. Average daily production reached approximately 2,280 tons. Remarkably, that coal was still being hand-loaded into mine cars.
Then, only months after World War II ended, Havaco suffered its best documented disaster.
The No. 9 Havaco Explosion
At approximately 9:55 on the morning of January 15, 1946, an explosion erupted inside the No. 9 Havaco Mine.
Two hundred seventy men were underground.
Most survived. According to the United States Bureau of Mines investigation, 234 miners reached the surface without assistance. Twenty-four injured men had to be rescued. Twelve miners were killed outright by flame, violence, and afterdamp, while three others later died in the hospital.
The final death toll was fifteen, the figure also recorded by the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training.
The violence did not remain underground.
Twelve employees working around the tipple and surface plant were seriously injured. About five hundred feet from the hoisting shaft, eight customers inside the company store were cut by flying glass. The headframe, steel tipple, and nearby surface buildings were damaged when the force of the explosion traveled toward the shaft and released upward.
For Havaco families, the mine and community could never be completely separated. The blast demonstrated this in the most literal possible way. An underground explosion entered the surface world of the camp, damaging the industrial plant and injuring people inside the store.
The Welch Daily News began reporting on the disaster that same day. Over the following days it covered the injured, the investigation, and the funerals of the dead. West Virginia Archives and History preserves an index to those contemporary reports, including stories titled “Havaco Mine Explosion Kills Undetermined Number of Men,” “Question Injured In Havaco Mine Blast,” and accounts of the funerals that followed.
What Federal Investigators Found
The United States Bureau of Mines conducted a detailed investigation of the No. 9 explosion.
Its final report traced the origin of the blast to rock blasting in the empty branch of the mine, approximately 640 feet from the bottom of the hoisting shaft. Investigators concluded that workers had fired an unconfined and excessive charge of a nonpermissible explosive in a dusty location.
The mine used permissible explosives for coal shooting, but investigators found that a nonpermissible DuPont gelatin explosive had also been used in recent weeks for rock blasting. The fatal explosion originated in the area where such blasting was taking place.
Coal dust made the conditions more dangerous.
Investigators recorded quantities of fine float dust around the coal-hoisting shaft and along nearby haulageways and intake airways. Parts of the mine had been rock-dusted, but the report stated that rock dust had not been maintained sufficiently close to every working face and that some active areas had not been treated.
The explosion remained relatively localized underground, but near the shaft it was extraordinarily violent. Investigators followed bent steel, damaged stoppings, wrecked mine cars, displaced beams, and other physical evidence to determine the direction of the force. Much of that force moved toward the hoisting shaft, which provided a path to the surface.
That reconstruction is one reason the 1946 Havaco disaster is so well documented. The report does more than count the dead. It preserves the physical workings of the mine, its labor force, its explosives, its ventilation, its dust conditions, its rescue operations, and the sequence of events that turned an ordinary workday into catastrophe.
Rescue, Recovery, and Grief
Federal mine officials began responding almost immediately.
A federal inspector received notice of the explosion shortly after it occurred, and representatives of the Bureau of Mines traveled to Havaco. A federal mine-rescue truck arrived from Mount Hope later that afternoon. Thirteen Bureau of Mines representatives ultimately participated in rescue work, recovery, the investigation, or some combination of those activities.
Photographs preserved by West Virginia University capture a portion of that response. One shows an injured miner being carried from the disaster scene. Another records Black miners acting as stretcher bearers. Those images take the disaster beyond engineering diagrams and casualty tables. They show men physically carrying one another out of the wreckage.
Funerals followed within days.
For residents of Havaco, the explosion joined the older memory of Jed and the 1918 rescue deaths as another chapter in a long relationship between the community and dangerous underground work. Mine disasters were exceptional events, but by 1946 several generations in the area had already lived with the possibility that a husband, father, son, brother, or neighbor might leave for work and not return.
The Decline of Havaco
Coal communities could grow rapidly when mines opened and decline just as rapidly when production ended.
By 1960, Havaco’s long period as a major New River and Pocahontas operation was nearing its conclusion. Contemporary newspaper research associated with the community records the closing of the Havaco operation that year and the loss of approximately 150 jobs.
The effect of a closure extended well beyond those workers. A company mine supported stores, transportation, schools, services, and other local employment. When the central industry disappeared, the entire economic foundation of a coal camp weakened.
Havaco survived as a community, but the world that had created it faded.
The post office provides one small measure of that decline. The United States Postal Service records that the Havaco main post office and ZIP Code 24841 were discontinued on September 28, 1992. Havaco was later retained as an acceptable place name using Welch’s 24801 ZIP Code.
The change did not erase Havaco, but it reflected how the community increasingly existed in the orbit of Welch rather than as the self-contained industrial place it had once been.
By the twenty-first century, there were no active mines operating in Havaco. Railroad traffic and the physical remains of mining still tied the community to coal, while abandoned industrial ruins and the Little Egypt cemetery preserved less visible parts of its past.
What Remains at Havaco
Havaco’s history survives in fragments.
There are government reports filled with measurements and diagrams. There are newspaper accounts of explosions, roof falls, funerals, relief funds, and rescue work. There are school rosters carrying the names of children who grew up in the camp. There are pieces of company scrip, archival photographs, railroad maps, postal records, and the ruins of mining structures.
Then there is Little Egypt.
The cemetery creates a direct connection between modern Havaco and the earlier community called Jed. The landscape has changed, the companies have disappeared, the mines have closed, and even the boundaries between the old place names have become difficult to untangle. The miners remain.
That may be the most important way to understand Havaco.
It was not simply the location of two mine disasters. It was a community created by an industrial system that brought together Appalachian families, European immigrants, Black miners from the South, railroad workers, company officials, store employees, teachers, and children. Coal gave Havaco its economic reason to exist, but generations of people turned the coal camp into a home.
The mines connected the community to distant markets, including wartime customers hundreds of miles away. They also shaped daily life so completely that an explosion underground could shatter windows in the company store above.
When the mines closed, much of the infrastructure disappeared with them.
Still, Havaco did not vanish completely. Its history remains along the railroad, beneath the mountains, in archival photographs, in federal mine records, and in the sunken ground of Little Egypt. The story of Havaco is therefore larger than the rise and fall of one coal company. It is the story of how the southern West Virginia coalfields created communities, demanded enormous sacrifices from the people who lived in them, and left behind landscapes where industrial history and family memory remain almost impossible to separate.
Sources & Further Reading
Ankeny, M. J., J. L. Gilley, and John Zeleskey. Final Report of Mine Explosion, No. 9 Havaco Mine, New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company, Havaco, McDowell County, West Virginia, January 15, 1946. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1946. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/havaco_1946.pdf
U.S. Bureau of Mines. Jed Mine Disaster Documents: Jed Coal & Coke Company, Jed, West Virginia, March 26, 1912. Bureau of Mines archival collection, 1912. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/Jed_1912.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 Archives and History. “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” West Virginia State Archives. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Mine Explosion at Jed, McDowell County Claims Toll of Eighty-Two Workers’ Lives.” Charleston Gazette, March 27, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Eighty Three Dead.” Raleigh Register, March 28, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Eighty-Three Lives Lost in Coal Mine Explosion.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 27, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Jed Mine Seems Loath to Yield Up Its Dead.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 28, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Broken Bodies Pinned Under Tons of Slate.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 29, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Movement for Relief of Mine Victims.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 29, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“The Jed Mine Yields Up Fourteen More Bodies.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 30, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Relief Fund Goes to Over Two Thousand.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 31, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“State Ends Inquiry Into Jed Disaster.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 5, 1912. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Havaco Mine Explosion Kills Undetermined Number of Men.” Welch Daily News, January 15, 1946. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Question Injured In Havaco Mine Blast.” Welch Daily News, January 17, 1946. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“More Funerals For Mine Dead.” Welch Daily News, January 18, 1946. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Other Mine Dead Funerals Sunday.” Welch Daily News, January 19, 1946. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Havaco.” Place Names in West Virginia. West Virginia State Archives. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamh.html
West Virginia University, West Virginia & Regional History Center. McDowell County Evaluation Project, 1953/1968. A&M 1627. West Virginia University. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/wvmturhc_repositories_2_resources_5021
West Virginia University Libraries. “Havaco Coal Mining Disaster, Havaco, McDowell County, W. Va.” January 15, 1946. Photograph, identifier 013682. West Virginia History OnView. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/013682
West Virginia University Libraries. “Miners Carrying Body on Stretcher, McDowell County, W. Va.” Photograph, identifier 003126. West Virginia History OnView. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/003126
West Virginia University, West Virginia & Regional History Center. Coal Mining Disaster Reports Collection, 1938–1977. West Virginia University. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/3696
United States Office of Price Administration. “Berwind Fuel Company: Order Granting Adjustment.” Federal Register 8, March 23, 1943. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1943-03-23/pdf/FR-1943-03-23.pdf
Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. 2016. Cultural resource survey of McDowell County coal communities, including Havaco. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
National Coal Heritage Area Authority. “King Coal.” West Virginia Coal Heritage. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://coalheritage.wv.gov/coal_history/Pages/King-Coal.aspx
National Coal Heritage Area Authority. “From Shovels to Machines.” West Virginia Coal Heritage. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://coalheritage.wv.gov/coal_history/Pages/From-Shovels-to-Machines.aspx
West Virginia Humanities Council. “Coal Mine Disasters.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1307
Kozar, Mark D., and Samuel H. Austin. Reconnaissance of Potential Alternate Water Supply Sources for the City of Gary, West Virginia. Open-File Report 2025-1037. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2025. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20251037
National Park Service. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County, West Virginia. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation. U.S. Department of the Interior. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500726_text
National Park Service. “National Coal Heritage Area.” U.S. Department of the Interior. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/places/coal-national-heritage-area.htm
Author Note: As an Appalachian historian, I am drawn to coal communities like Havaco, where surviving records preserve both industrial achievement and enormous human loss. I hope this history helps keep the miners of Jed and Havaco, their families, and the community they built from fading from Appalachian memory.