Appalachian Community Histories – Hensley, McDowell County: Claren, J.B.B. Coal, and a West Virginia Mining Community
Hensley is one of those McDowell County communities whose history becomes more visible once a researcher learns that the town did not always appear in the records under the same name. Depending on the source and the period, Hensley can appear as Hensley, Claren, Claren Station, Hensley Claren, Hensley Hollow, or Claren Hollow.
That confusion is not merely a modern problem. The West Virginia state place-name records list both Hensley and Claren in McDowell County, identifying Hensley by 1903 and Claren during the period from 1911 through 1935. Later geographic references preserved Claren as a railroad name associated with Hensley.
The overlapping names make Hensley harder to trace than some of the better-known coal towns of the southern West Virginia fields, but they also reveal something important about the community. Hensley existed simultaneously as a postal place, a mining settlement, a railroad point, and a collection of homes scattered through the narrow hollows surrounding the mines.
Its emergence came during one of the most dramatic transformations in McDowell County history. Railroads were penetrating increasingly remote valleys, outside companies were purchasing coal lands, and communities that had once been little more than scattered mountain settlements were becoming industrial towns connected to markets hundreds of miles away.
By 1903, Hensley had become established enough to receive its own post office. Postal-history records date the Hensley office to that year, providing one of the clearest benchmarks for the community’s early development.
Coal would soon define nearly everything around it.
Flournoy Colliery and the Hensley Coal Company
One of the earliest clear snapshots of industrial Hensley comes from a 1905 directory of American coal operators. Under McDowell County, the volume listed both the Flournoy Colliery Company at Hensley and the Hensley Coal Company at Hensley. The entries are short, but their importance is considerable. By 1905, Hensley was not simply a geographic name on a creek or hollow. It was an identifiable coal-producing place recognized by the national mining industry.
Contemporary West Virginia business directories provide a fuller picture of the interests behind those mines. The Hensley Coal Company was associated with prominent Welch businessman Edgar P. Rucker, while related enterprises included the Hensley Land Company and Hensley Supply Company. The appearance of separate coal, land, and supply concerns suggests an industrial operation reaching beyond the mine opening itself. Coal camps depended upon land control, merchandise, transportation, housing, and an organized labor force, and the surviving company names offer glimpses of that larger structure.
This was a familiar process across McDowell County. A company acquired mineral or land interests, mines were opened into the surrounding mountains, rail connections carried the coal away, and houses and stores followed the workforce into the hollow.
At Hensley, however, another company would eventually become the name most strongly associated with the community’s early mining period.
J.B.B. Coal Company Comes to Hensley
The initials J.B.B. represented a much larger coal network built around Jewett, Bigelow & Brooks. Surviving mining research based upon West Virginia Department of Mines reports places J.B.B. Coal Company’s No. 2 and No. 3 mines at Hensley during the early 1910s. Later records indicate that those operations were consolidated under the No. 3 designation.
J.B.B. was anything but an isolated mountain concern. Its owners and investors connected the mines of southern West Virginia to financial and wholesale coal interests reaching into Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, New York, and New England.
A 1912 issue of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle provides an unusually detailed financial glimpse of the company. It reported gross earnings of $415,798 for J.B.B. Coal Company and expenses of $432,976. More significantly, the publication stated that the New England Coal & Coke Company owned approximately 60 percent of J.B.B.’s capital stock. Hensley’s coal economy was therefore connected not only to McDowell County and the Norfolk & Western Railway, but also to investors and energy markets far beyond Appalachia.
The surviving court record tells a similar story.
In J.B.B. Coal Co. v. Halbert, decided in 1916, the Kentucky Court of Appeals described J.B.B. as a West Virginia corporation engaged in litigation against the Norfolk & Western Railway Company. The dispute concerned the railroad’s alleged failure to provide sufficient cars for J.B.B.’s mining operations. The legal question traveled into a Kentucky courtroom, but behind it was one of the basic realities of Appalachian coal production. A mine could employ hundreds of men and cut thousands of tons of coal, yet its profitability still depended upon the arrival of empty railroad cars and the ability to move that coal to market.
For a mining community such as Hensley, the railroad was therefore not simply a line passing through the landscape. It was part of the economic machinery that made the settlement possible.
Hensley Miners and the People Behind the Company Records
Corporate reports tell only part of Hensley’s story. Individual records begin to place names and families inside the community.
William, or Will, Norton provides one example. McDowell County marriage records show W. M. Norton marrying Sarah Artis at Hensley on June 19, 1915. Two years later his World War I draft registration identified him as a miner employed by J.B.B. Coal Company at Hensley. The record described a young man from Carter County, Kentucky who had become part of the labor force moving into the southern West Virginia coalfields.
Norton was far from alone.
George Butcher’s 1918 draft registration likewise identified his occupation as digging coal for J.B.B. Coal Company at Hensley. Butcher had been born in Kentucky and, like thousands of Appalachian miners during the period, crossed county and state lines as industrial employment drew workers toward the expanding coal camps.
These records are important because they bring Hensley down from the level of company balance sheets and mine statistics. The settlement was a place where miners married, raised children, rented or occupied homes, attended churches, purchased necessities, and built communities while performing dangerous work underground.
Marriage records preserve still more evidence of that life. Harrison England, identified as a miner living at Hensley, married Lydia Norton there in June 1916. By 1930, the couple remained connected to Hensley, appearing in the Browns Creek District census records for the community.
The mining camp was becoming a home.
The Company Store and Coal Scrip
One of the most tangible surviving pieces of Hensley’s coal history is extraordinarily small.
A one-cent piece of company scrip survives bearing the name J.B.B. Coal Company and Hensley. The token provides physical evidence that the company operated a store connected with its Hensley operations. Research published through the Newman Numismatic Portal specifically identifies the Hensley token with the company store of Jewett, Bigelow & Brooks Coal Company and corrects an older cataloging mistake that had rendered the initials as J.J.B. instead of J.B.B.
Company stores were among the central institutions of coal-camp life. They supplied food, clothing, tools, household necessities, and countless other goods in places where independent commercial districts were often distant or undeveloped. Coal-company scrip could circulate alongside money in that controlled local economy.
The Hensley token therefore represents considerably more than a numismatic curiosity. It is a remnant of everyday exchange within the community. Someone once carried it in a pocket, received it through the company’s economic system, and presented it across a counter in Hensley.
The token survived even as the company that issued it eventually disappeared.
A Mine Connected to a National Coal Market
By the early 1920s, J.B.B.’s operation had become significant enough to attract attention far outside McDowell County.
The 1927 federal case Dexter & Carpenter, Inc. v. Houston described the J.B.B. Coal Company as operating a mine in the Pocahontas field of McDowell County. The court record stated that the company’s coal was considered a high-grade bituminous product and that the mine’s estimated output around 1920 stood near 25,000 tons per month, or approximately 300,000 tons annually.
The same case reveals how valuable such a mine could become during a strong coal market. Businessmen discussed hundreds of thousands of dollars in financing and sought contracts to handle the operation’s output. New England financial interests controlled much of J.B.B.’s stock, while wholesalers maintained offices in major eastern cities.
From Hensley, coal entered a commercial chain that stretched far beyond the mountains.
Yet those connections also exposed the community to decisions made elsewhere. Ownership could change. Companies could consolidate. Markets could fall. Rail service could determine production. Investors who had never lived in McDowell County could influence the future of families whose homes stood within sight of the mine.
By the later 1920s, the corporate structure surrounding Jewett, Bigelow & Brooks had become entangled in receivership and financial litigation. A 1928 federal case involving West Virginia Rail Company and Jewett Bigelow Brooks Coal Company dealt with receivers, subsidiaries, taxes, and the complicated financial remains of the organization.
Hensley, however, did not disappear with J.B.B.
Fordson Coal Company and Hensley in 1928
One of the strongest surviving descriptions of Hensley as an actual residential mining town appears in an unlikely source, a West Virginia Supreme Court case arising from a double killing.
On the evening of June 9, 1928, Cleveland Atwell shot brothers Sherman and Earnest Darby at Hensley. The later court opinion in State v. Atwell described Hensley directly as a mining town in McDowell County and stated that Atwell and the Darby brothers lived there with their families while working for the Fordson Coal Company.
The opinion also provides an intimate detail about the physical arrangement of the camp. Sherman Darby and Cleveland Atwell occupied neighboring houses, each with several young children, with enclosures separating the properties.
Although the case entered the historical record because of violence, its value for understanding Hensley extends beyond the crime itself. The court inadvertently documented the existence of company employees living with wives and children in neighboring residences. It confirms that Hensley in 1928 was not simply the name of a mine. It was a recognizable residential community organized around coal employment.
It also establishes another stage in the town’s corporate history. By that time, at least some Hensley residents were working for Fordson Coal Company rather than the J.B.B. organization that had dominated earlier records.
The companies changed. The mining community continued.
Hensley Hollow and Claren
The 1930 and 1940 census records make Hensley’s complicated naming history especially visible.
A 1930 Browns Creek District census page specifically identifies residents at Hensley, including families whose members worked in coal mining. By 1940, enumerators used forms such as Hensley Hollow, Claren, and combinations of the two names. Surviving census references identify households within Hensley Hollow and show children attending school, miners heading households, and residents who had remained in the same area since at least 1935.
This explains why searches for Hensley can appear incomplete if Claren is ignored.
The West Virginia place-name archive lists Claren in McDowell County between 1911 and 1935, while later FIPS-derived information describes Claren as the railroad name for Hensley.
The distinction may have been obvious to people who lived there. Postal workers, railroad employees, mine officials, census takers, and local families could use slightly different names for overlapping pieces of the same landscape. Decades later, those distinctions make the settlement seem fragmented in the historical record.
Taken together, however, the sources reconnect them.
Hensley and Claren were part of the same coalfield world.
Churches, Families, and Community Life
Life in Hensley did not stop at the mine portal or company-store counter.
Church records provide evidence of organized religious life. A 1920 Year Book of the Church of God identified a congregation at Hensley in McDowell County associated with W. M. Hager. The reported numbers were small, but their presence is significant. Coal communities throughout southern West Virginia built religious institutions that often served functions extending well beyond Sunday worship.
Churches offered gathering places, social networks, funerals, revivals, assistance during illness or mine accidents, and an institution that did not belong solely to the coal company.
Marriage records similarly show Hensley functioning as a community rather than simply a workplace. Weddings occurred there. Children were born into households connected with the hollow. Families remained after particular employers disappeared. Census records reveal residents from West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and elsewhere, reflecting the enormous movement of people into McDowell County during the coal boom.
Hensley’s history was therefore created by both industry and migration.
The companies provided the economic reason for the settlement’s rapid development, but families turned the camp into a community.
Hensley After the Early Coal Boom
By 1950, the older company names connected with Hensley’s beginnings had not entirely disappeared from memory. A surviving transcription of a Welch Daily News coal-company listing from that year included both Flournoy Colliery Company and Hensley Coal Company at Hensley. The transcription should be treated cautiously until the original newspaper can be examined, but it demonstrates how long those names remained associated with the place.
The wider McDowell County coal economy was changing by then.
Mechanization reduced the number of miners necessary to produce coal. Railroad and industrial restructuring altered employment. Families who had entered the coalfields during the first decades of the twentieth century increasingly watched children and grandchildren leave in search of opportunities elsewhere.
Hensley never became a large incorporated city. That may partly explain why its history can disappear behind the better-known stories of Welch, Gary, Keystone, Coalwood, and other McDowell County communities.
Yet Hensley survived.
Its post office, established in 1903, remained an identifiable institution more than a century later. State records and modern maps continued to preserve the community’s name, even after the industrial system that had created early Hensley changed almost beyond recognition.
What the Records of Hensley Preserve
The surviving history of Hensley is scattered across an unusually broad collection of documents.
Mining directories record Flournoy Colliery Company and Hensley Coal Company. State mine reports place J.B.B. operations there. Financial publications connect those mines to New England investors. Court cases document disputes over railroad cars, corporate finances, and even the arrangement of neighboring miners’ homes. Draft cards preserve the names of men who entered the mines. Marriage records preserve the families they formed. Census schedules map households through Hensley and Claren Hollow. A one-cent token preserves the memory of a company store.
Even the different names matter.
Hensley, Claren, Claren Station, and Hensley Hollow are reminders that Appalachian communities rarely fit neatly into the categories later historians would prefer. A railroad might use one name, the post office another, the census enumerator a variation, while residents understood all of them as parts of the same place.
That complexity is precisely why communities such as Hensley deserve to be reconstructed carefully.
Why Hensley Matters
Hensley’s story is not one of a single famous mine disaster, legendary labor battle, or nationally known figure. Its significance comes from something quieter.
It represents the thousands of smaller coal communities that collectively transformed central Appalachia.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, outside investment, railroad transportation, and the Pocahontas coalfield drew workers and their families into the McDowell County mountains. At Hensley, companies appeared, disappeared, reorganized, and changed ownership. Flournoy Colliery and Hensley Coal were followed in the surviving record by J.B.B. and later Fordson. Financial interests reached from McDowell County to Norfolk, Boston, Detroit, and New York.
Meanwhile, people made lives beneath those corporate structures.
They dug coal, married at Hensley, raised children in neighboring houses, attended church, shopped at the company store, registered for military service, and appeared one household at a time in federal census schedules.
Today, those fragments allow Hensley to emerge again from the hollow.
The community’s history was never merely the history of coal companies. It was the history of the men and women who turned an industrial site into a place they could call home.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Map of Mines of the Hensley Coal Company, McDowell West Virginia.” Pocahontas Mines Collection, Series II, Box 628. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace-dev.cloud.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/top_containers/25896
The Mining World. Coal Mining Companies and Operators of the United States. Chicago: Mining World, 1905. Entries for Flournoy Colliery Company and Hensley Coal Company, Hensley, West Virginia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Coal_mining_companies_and_operators_of_the_United_States_%28IA_coalminingcompan00chic%29.pdf
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory. Entries for Flournoy Colliery Company, Hensley Coal Company, Hensley Land Company, and Hensley Supply Company. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-2-part-30.htm
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1911. Charleston, WV: Union Publishing Company, 1911. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde29west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1915. Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1915. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde1914west
Commercial and Financial Chronicle. “J.B.B. Coal Company.” October 26, 1912. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/cfc/cfc_19121026.pdf
J.B.B. Coal Co. v. Halbert, 169 Ky. 687, 184 S.W. 1116 (Ky. 1916). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/j-b-b-coal-901847418
Dexter & Carpenter, Inc. v. Houston, 20 F.2d 647 (4th Cir. 1927). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/20/647/1476529/
West Virginia Rail Co. v. Jewett Bigelow & Brooks Coal Co., 26 F.2d 503 (E.D. Ky. 1928). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/F2/26/503/1471674/
State v. Atwell, 109 W. Va. 257, 153 S.E. 583 (1930). The case directly identifies Hensley as a McDowell County mining town and documents Fordson Coal Company employees living there. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/state-v-atwell-6593-929794471
TXO Production Corp. v. Alliance Resources Corp., 187 W. Va. 457, 419 S.E.2d 870 (W. Va. 1992). Particularly useful for historic deed descriptions involving Lower Hensley Creek, coal properties, and the Norfolk & Western right-of-way. https://citelaw.org/law/case/txo-production-corp-v-alliance-resources-corp-65a2cfb7a26dae664487f3a2
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Entry for Hensley, McDowell County, dated 1903. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamh.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Research Records Project.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Includes searchable scans of McDowell County marriage, birth, and death records. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Browns Creek Magisterial District, McDowell County, West Virginia, Hensley enumeration, including page 58A. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930.
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Browns Creek Magisterial District, McDowell County, West Virginia, Enumeration District 24-36. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. Search under Hensley, Hensley Hollow, Claren, and Claren Hollow.
United States Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918. McDowell County, West Virginia. Records include miners identifying J.B.B. Coal Company at Hensley as their employer.
Library of Congress. The McDowell Times (Keystone, W. Va.), 1904–1941. Chronicling America. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. This is especially valuable for local coalfield, labor, church, family, and African American community history. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092050/
Library of Congress. McDowell Progress (Elkhorn, W. Va.), 1883–; later McDowell Recorder. Chronicling America. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016270576/
National Scrip Collectors Association. Scrip Talk. October 1992, 6. Newman Numismatic Portal, Washington University in St. Louis. The issue corrects the Hensley token identification from “J.J.B.” to J.B.B. and identifies it with the Jewett, Bigelow & Brooks Coal Company store. https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/540101?page=1
West Virginia Division of Highways. District 10, McDowell County: 2019 Second Half Maintenance Plan. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Transportation, 2019. The state road record preserves both Hensley Hollow Road and Claren Road at Hensley. https://transportation.wv.gov/Documents/SecondaryRoadsMaintenanceInitiative2019SecondHalf/McDowellCounty.pdf
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Friends of the Virginian Railway at Milepost 2008.” 2013. Identifies Hensley, also called Claren, at milepost N410.3 and associates the location with J.B.B. Coal Company. https://nwhs.org/convention/2013mullens/Twin%20Falls%20to%20Bluefield%20to%20Gilbert.pdf
Artifacts of Appalachia. “McDowell County Scrip A–L.” Useful as a specialized finding aid for J.B.B. Coal Company, its Hensley operations, company scrip, and citations leading back to West Virginia mine reports and contemporary newspapers. https://www.artifactsofappalachia.com/mcdowell-county-scrip-a-l
Author Note: As someone from the Appalachian coalfields, I believe communities like Hensley deserve to be remembered as more than names attached to old mines. The records of Claren, J.B.B. Coal Company, and the families of Hensley Hollow preserve another piece of the larger story of coalfield Appalachia.