Appalachian Community Histories – Jenkinjones, McDowell County: Pocahontas Fuel, Mines Nos. 6, 7, and 8, and the Town Built by Coal
Deep in southern McDowell County, close to the Virginia line and near the headwaters of the Tug Fork, Jenkinjones grew around one of the most ambitious coal operations in the Pocahontas field. The community was never positioned along one of West Virginia’s broad river valleys or at a major commercial crossroads. Instead, houses, churches, railroad tracks, company buildings, and mine works were pressed into narrow hollows beneath steep wooded mountains.
For much of the twentieth century, however, isolation did not mean insignificance. Jenkinjones became home to thousands of people, three major coal mines, substantial company housing, schools, churches, a theater, a post office, railroad infrastructure, and two unusually imposing brick buildings that became the physical center of town. By 1915, state mining officials were describing the young community in remarkably favorable terms. Decades later, after coal production declined and the mines closed, those same mountains surrounded a much quieter place.
The history of Jenkinjones is therefore a familiar Appalachian story, but it is also an unusually well-documented one. State mine reports, company records, newspapers, photographs, architectural surveys, federal records, and enormous collections of mining maps preserve pieces of a community that might otherwise have disappeared into the broader history of McDowell County.
Before Jenkinjones
Before large-scale coal development, this corner of McDowell County was sparsely settled and difficult to reach. Farms and small mountain communities existed, but poor roads and rugged terrain kept much of southern West Virginia distant from national markets.
The transformation came with the railroad. The Norfolk & Western Railway pushed through the southern West Virginia coalfields during the late nineteenth century, creating the transportation network necessary to move enormous quantities of Pocahontas coal toward industrial markets. The official McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey notes that the railroad’s Ohio Extension was completed through the county in 1892, helping turn once remote valleys into some of the most heavily industrialized coal territory in Appalachia.
Jenkinjones belonged to the next phase of that expansion.
The corporate history surrounding the town can be confusing because the company name changed as coal properties were consolidated. West Virginia Secretary of State records show that the Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries Company later became Pocahontas Fuel Company Incorporated on June 29, 1917. The Norfolk & Western Historical Society likewise traces the Pocahontas operations through several reorganizations before the Pocahontas Fuel name became established.
Those corporate changes mattered because Jenkinjones was not simply a settlement located beside a mine. It was built as part of an integrated company system in which mining, housing, transportation, commerce, and community institutions developed around the same industrial enterprise.
The Town Named for Jenkin Jones
The official Coal Heritage Survey places the establishment of Jenkinjones in the early twentieth century and records the creation of its post office in 1912. The community was named for Jenkin Jones, the Welsh immigrant coal operator whose career became closely connected with the development of the Pocahontas coalfield.
Virginia Tech’s extensive Pocahontas Mines Collection provides a larger picture of Jones’s career. Its historical documentation notes that Jenkin Jones began leasing coal property from the Flat Top interests in the 1880s and eventually brought numerous mining operations together under the Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries Company. The archival collection now stretches across more than a century of company activity and contains maps, engineering records, survey books, ledgers, and other material from Pocahontas Fuel and its successors.
By the early 1910s, the company was transforming the upper Tug Fork country into a major industrial community centered on what became the Pocahontas Nos. 6, 7, and 8 mines.
Even the roads reflected the company’s investment. A 1919 Virginia Geological Survey report remarked on an exceptionally good road connecting Boissevain, Virginia, with Jenkinjones, identifying the West Virginia community as a mining camp of the Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries Company. At a time when the same geological report described many regional roads as rough routes suitable mainly for wagons and horseback travel, the improved connection between the two company communities stood out.
Jenkinjones was becoming part of a coal landscape that crossed the Virginia-West Virginia boundary.
A “Good Town” in 1915
One of the most revealing descriptions of early Jenkinjones comes from the West Virginia Department of Mines.
The department’s 1914-1915 annual report survives in digitized form and was later used extensively by researchers documenting the community. The modern Coal Heritage Survey, drawing from that report, records an estimated Jenkinjones population of about 3,000 and repeats the state inspector’s description of the settlement as a “good town.” Even more strikingly, the report credited Jenkinjones with “probably the best miners’ houses in the State.”
That was extraordinary praise for a coal camp only a few years into its development.
The community reportedly offered railroad service, churches, schools, and a moving picture show. Its housing did not follow only one standard company pattern. Wooden houses existed, but Jenkinjones was also distinguished by unusual two-story concrete-block residences, evidence of the greater investment placed into portions of the community.
The description should still be read in the context of a company town. Better housing and public amenities could improve life for miners and their families, but they also served the company’s interest in maintaining a stable workforce near the mines. Housing, employment, commerce, and transportation were all closely connected to the same industrial system.
Jenkinjones could simultaneously be a genuine home to thousands of families and a community whose existence depended heavily upon decisions made by a coal corporation.
Mines Nos. 6, 7, and 8
Coal made everything else possible.
State mining records from the period repeatedly identify Pocahontas Nos. 6, 7, and 8 with Jenkinjones. A later Department of Mines directory lists all three under Pocahontas Fuel Company, providing unmistakable documentary evidence of the industrial complex that defined the community.
By 1920, those three mines produced a combined 664,769 tons of coal, according to the state mine report figures reproduced in the Coal Heritage Survey. The scale of production helps explain how a remote hollow could sustain such substantial company investment.
Jenkinjones also became notable for engineering. National Register documentation describes a drainage tunnel serving the mining complex that allowed coal beneath roughly 12,000 acres to be worked without relying on the expensive pumping systems that would otherwise have been required to remove water. The nomination characterized the project as an important early engineering achievement within the industry.
Underground, however, impressive engineering did not make mining safe.
West Virginia archival records preserve a Department of Mines file specifically concerning explosions at Pocahontas Fuel Company’s Jenkinjones Mine in October 1936 and at Poca No. 35 the following month. Other accident reports, inspection files, and fatality records survive in state archival collections, creating a paper trail behind the human cost of coal production.
The story of Jenkinjones was therefore never only a story of tonnage and technology. Every production figure represented men entering the mountain to earn the wages that supported households throughout the hollows.
The Brick Heart of Jenkinjones
By 1917, the coal operation had become successful enough for the company to make a dramatic architectural statement.
Across from one another near County Route 8, Pocahontas Fuel erected a large brick company store and a separate office building. Both were designed by Bluefield architect A. B. Mahood, whose work appeared throughout the prosperous southern West Virginia coalfields. National Register documentation identifies 1917 as the construction year and describes the buildings as the center of activity within an otherwise isolated company-owned community.
The store was much more than a place to buy groceries.
Its two floors carried merchandise for miners and their families, while the building also contained the post office. Railroad tracks ran beside the structure, and a delivery entrance once opened directly onto an elevator that allowed arriving merchandise to be moved upstairs. Across the road stood the company offices, where residents could conduct business connected with the industrial operation that employed much of the town.
The architecture projected permanence and authority. Concrete lettering displayed the company name along the roofline. Brickwork, classical detailing, arched entrances, metal-framed windows, and interior decorative elements distinguished the buildings from the more utilitarian structures surrounding them.
The National Register nomination makes the company’s intention clear. These were buildings meant to reflect wealth and success. They announced that Pocahontas Fuel expected Jenkinjones to matter.
A surviving photograph in West Virginia University’s collections shows the Pocahontas Fuel Company building around 1936. People stand near its entrances, the post office operated inside, and an automobile rests outside the substantial brick facade. It captures something that abandoned buildings cannot. Jenkinjones was once busy.
Life Beyond the Mine Portal
The company dominated Jenkinjones, but residents made a community within the industrial landscape.
Schools educated miners’ children. Churches became centers of worship, music, fellowship, and social organization. The post office connected families with relatives beyond the coalfield. Stores offered both necessities and gathering places. Trains carried more than coal because the railroad also connected Jenkinjones to the outside world.
One small newspaper account captures that social life particularly well.
In April 1941, the African American newspaper The McDowell Times reported that a quarterly choral society meeting held at Jenkinjones had drawn fifteen choirs along with visiting quartets. It was described as an all-day gathering associated with an old-fashioned basket meeting. That brief notice offers a glimpse of Jenkinjones that mine production tables cannot provide. There were singers, congregations, visiting neighbors, shared food, and traditions strong enough to bring people together from surrounding communities.
Archival records provide another view of daily life. The West Virginia and Regional History Center holds Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries and Pocahontas Fuel records connected specifically with the No. 8 Mine. They include payroll statements, time records, receipts, and ledgers recording earnings and deductions for such things as merchandise, powder, insurance, and medical expenses. Such records reveal how completely employment and household economics could become intertwined within the company-town system.
Jenkinjones was built for coal, but residents filled that framework with families, churches, schools, friendships, celebrations, grief, and memory.
Coal Through War and the Mid-Century Years
Jenkinjones remained important well beyond its early boom.
Federal records list Jenkinjones No. 8 among Pocahontas Fuel operations during World War II, when Appalachian coal was essential to wartime industry and transportation.
By 1950, the Coal Heritage Survey gives the town’s population as approximately 1,850. That was below the roughly 3,000 estimated during the early boom years, but it still represented a substantial mountain community.
Mining technology continued changing. Mechanization reduced the number of men needed to produce coal, while companies consolidated operations and modernized preparation facilities. Jenkinjones remained tied to the larger corporate coal system even as that system evolved.
Federal mine-safety records show that the operation remained active into the 1970s. In 1974, Pocahontas Fuel filed a petition concerning application of a federal mandatory safety standard at the Jenkinjones Mine. The filing dealt with an underground electrical installation, ventilation, fire protection, and measures intended to keep smoke from miners’ travelways in the event of a fire.
A federal mining bibliography also records a 1971 fire at the Jenkin Jones preparation plant, where sparks ignited coal and dust. The fire was extinguished with water, but four people were injured.
More than half a century after its founding, this was still a working industrial place.
Hard Times Come to Jenkinjones
Eventually, the economic foundation beneath the community weakened.
By the late twentieth century, the changes visible throughout McDowell County were becoming impossible to ignore. Mines required fewer workers. Coal seams that had supported communities for generations became less economical to exploit. Younger residents left in search of employment. Houses emptied. Businesses disappeared.
In 1978, Bluefield Daily Telegraph reporter Garret Mathews captured the transition in an article whose title told much of the story: “Jenkinjones: A Forgotten Town Tries to Cope with Hard Times and Bad Water.” The article later became one of the key contemporary sources used by the Coal Heritage Survey to reconstruct the town’s decline.
Yet mining did not disappear immediately.
Federal records in the 1970s still treated Jenkinjones as part of an active Consolidation Coal industrial system, and Virginia Tech’s Pocahontas Mines Collection contains Jenkin Jones engineering and survey records extending through the late 1970s and early 1980s. The documentary trail shows how long the operation survived after the community’s first great population boom had passed.
Then came the final closure.
The Mine Closes in 1989
In May 1989, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported that the Jenkinjones mine was shutting down.
The modern Coal Heritage Survey identifies depletion of the coal reserves as the reason for the closure and places the end of mining at Jenkinjones in 1989. Nearly eight decades had passed since the community emerged around the Pocahontas operations.
When the mine closed, Jenkinjones lost more than an employer.
The industrial system had been the reason roads were improved, railroad branches constructed, houses built, schools supported, stores opened, and families drawn into the hollow in the first place. When that system disappeared, there was no comparable industry waiting to replace it.
Buildings were sold, abandoned, demolished, or left to deteriorate. Vegetation reclaimed former industrial ground. Empty spaces appeared between surviving houses where neighboring families had once lived.
The brick company buildings remained as some of the most powerful reminders of what had been there.
The Store and Office Become Historic Landmarks
Recognition arrived just a few years after the mine closed.
The Pocahontas Fuel Company Store and Office Buildings were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 as part of the broader Coal Company Stores in McDowell County project. The designation recognized their importance to architecture, commerce, and the coal industry.
Their survival matters because company towns were systems, not simply collections of houses.
The Jenkinjones store represented commerce, mail, transportation, employment, and social gathering. The office across the road represented corporate management. Railroad tracks connected both to a larger industrial network. Beyond them stood the houses where the workers and their families lived.
Together, the surviving structures help reconstruct the geography of company power in the Appalachian coalfields.
The attachment’s source collection points to an unusually deep documentary record for this reconstruction, including state mine reports, mine maps, photographs, census schedules, company records, historic-property surveys, newspapers, and the immense Pocahontas Mines Collection at Virginia Tech.
What Jenkinjones Leaves Behind
Jenkinjones can be easy to misunderstand if viewed only in its present condition.
An abandoned company building can suggest that the town was always small and fading. An empty lot can make a former row of company houses impossible to imagine. A silent railroad grade reveals little about the trains that once passed through the hollow carrying Pocahontas coal toward distant markets.
The historical record tells a different story.
Jenkinjones was once a community of thousands. State officials praised its housing. Children attended its schools. Residents watched films, collected their mail, shopped at the company store, worshiped in local churches, and gathered for music and basket meetings. Miners entered Nos. 6, 7, and 8 while railroad cars waited to carry the coal away. Engineers devised a drainage system capable of opening thousands of acres of coal without constant pumping. An accomplished architect designed buildings substantial enough to survive long after the industrial system around them weakened.
Coal created Jenkinjones, but coal production alone does not explain why the place matters.
Its deeper history belongs to the people who turned an industrial camp into a community and then watched the economic structure beneath that community slowly disappear.
Why Jenkinjones Matters
Across Appalachia, hundreds of communities were created because a seam of coal lay beneath a mountain. Many flourished for a generation or two and then declined when the mine closed. Jenkinjones is one of the clearest places to see that entire cycle.
The town rose from industrial expansion in the Pocahontas coalfield. By the 1910s, it had become an unusually developed company community. Its mines produced hundreds of thousands of tons annually. Its brick store and office projected corporate confidence. Its churches, schools, choirs, families, and neighborhood life made the town something more than a collection of company property.
Then the coal economy changed.
Production declined, employment disappeared, families moved away, and the mine finally closed in 1989. What remained were buildings, photographs, maps, records, memories, and a landscape that still carries the shape of the community built there.
Jenkinjones may be quieter today, but its history reaches far beyond one McDowell County hollow. It tells the story of how coal companies built towns almost overnight, how Appalachian families made lives inside them, and what happened when the industry that had created those communities finally withdrew.
In that sense, Jenkinjones is not simply an abandoned coal camp.
It is one of the surviving records of how the Pocahontas coalfield once worked, lived, and endured.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1915. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1916. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde1914west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1922. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1922. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde40west
West Virginia Department of Mines. West Virginia Department of Mines Reports, 1916–1932. A&M 2143. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6001
Smokeless Coal Operators Association. Smokeless Coal Operators Association Historical Records, 1886–1961. A&M 0049. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2381
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Pocahontas Mines Collection, 1883–1997. Ms. 2004-002. Blacksburg, VA. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3408
McDowell County Evaluation Project. McDowell County Evaluation Project, 1953–1968. A&M 1627. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/wvmturhc_repositories_2_resources_5021
United States Bureau of Mines. Analyses of Mine and Car Samples of Coal Collected in the Fiscal Years 1913 to 1916. Bulletin 123. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12329/
Sone, Stacy. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Store and Office Buildings.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Culture and History, 1991. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Pocahontas-fuel-company-store-and-office-buildings.pdf
Sone, Stacy. “Coal Company Stores in McDowell County.” National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Culture and History, 1991–1992. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/64500726.pdf
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways, November 15, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
National Park Service. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Store and Office Buildings, McDowell County, West Virginia.” National Register of Historic Places Weekly List, 1992. National Register No. 92000326. https://home.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/weekly-list-1992-national-register-of-historic-places.pdf
West Virginia University Libraries. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Building, Jenkinsjones, W. Va.” West Virginia History OnView, ca. 1936. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/003182
Grubb Photo Service. “Jenkinjones Preparation Plant, Jenkinjones, W. Va.” West Virginia History OnView. West Virginia University Libraries. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/003458
“The Quarterly Meeting of the Choral Society at Jenkinjones.” The McDowell Times, April 4, 1941, 3. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/1941-04-04/ed-1/seq-3/
United States Department of the Interior. “Pocahontas Fuel Co.: Petition for Modification of Application of Mandatory Safety Standard.” Federal Register 39, no. 187, September 25, 1974. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1974-09-25/pdf/FR-1974-09-25.pdf
United States Department of the Interior. “Pocahontas Fuel Co.: Notice of Petition for Modification of Mandatory Safety Standard.” Federal Register 37, no. 83, April 28, 1972. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Federal_Register_1972-04-28-_Vol_37_Iss_83_%28IA_sim_federal-register-find_1972-04-28_37_83%29.pdf
Ferrell, Gloria M. Underground Coal Mines as Sources of Water for Public Supply in West Virginia. Water-Resources Investigations Report 84-4115. Charleston, WV: U.S. Geological Survey, 1984. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/1984/4115/report.pdf
Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. 1963. Reprint, with an introduction by Ronald D. Eller. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2002. https://wvupressonline.com/node/35?page=1
Lewis, Ronald L. Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. https://uncpress.org/9780807887905/welsh-americans/
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://books.google.com/books/about/West_Virginia_Place_Names.html?id=61YlAAAAMAAJ
Artifacts of Appalachia. “McDowell County Scrip A–L.” Includes Pocahontas Fuel Company material and an extensive bibliography of Jenkinjones newspapers, mine reports, fatalities, and company records. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.artifactsofappalachia.com/mcdowell-county-scrip-a-l
Appalachian Regional Commission. “McDowell County, West Virginia.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/mcdowell-west-virginia/
Author Note: Jenkinjones is one of those McDowell County communities whose surviving buildings can make its former size and importance difficult to imagine. I hope this history helps preserve the story of the miners, families, churches, schools, and company institutions that once filled this coalfield hollow.