Appalachian Community Histories – Landgraff, McDowell County: Empire Coal, the Norfolk & Western, and Life Along Elkhorn Creek
Along U.S. Route 52 in eastern McDowell County, the community of Landgraff occupies a narrow strip of ground between Elkhorn Creek, the railroad, and the steep mountains that define the upper reaches of the Pocahontas coalfield. Today it can be easy to pass through without realizing how closely this small place was once connected to the industrial system that carried southern West Virginia coal across the United States.
Landgraff emerged during the great transformation of McDowell County in the closing years of the nineteenth century, when the Norfolk & Western Railway pushed deeper into the coalfields and mining companies followed almost immediately behind it. The West Virginia Coal Heritage Survey dates the community to 1891, while the Norfolk & Western’s Ohio Extension, constructed between 1890 and 1892, placed Landgraff directly on one of the most important coal transportation corridors in Appalachia.
Within a few years, Empire Coal & Coke Company had become the dominant presence in the community. Mines, railroad sidings, coke ovens, a company store, houses, and eventually an elaborate clubhouse transformed the creek valley into an industrial settlement whose existence revolved around getting Pocahontas coal out of the mountains and onto railroad cars.
Landgraff was never one of McDowell County’s largest towns, but surviving records make it one of the better documented examples of how a relatively small coal community functioned during the height of the Pocahontas field.
The Railroad Comes to Landgraff
Before large-scale coal development could succeed in this part of West Virginia, operators needed a practical way to move enormous quantities of coal out of the mountains. The arrival of the Norfolk & Western changed that equation.
The railroad’s Ohio Extension reached through communities that would become some of the best known names in McDowell County coal history, including Northfork, Keystone, Eckman, Landgraff, Vivian, Kimball, Welch, and Iaeger. Mining camps appeared along the route as operators opened the Pocahontas seams and connected their workings to the main line.
By 1904, the federal government recognized Landgraff as an established place. Henry Gannett’s U.S. Geological Survey publication A Gazetteer of West Virginia identified Landgraff as a post village in McDowell County on the Norfolk & Western Railway. That brief description reveals something fundamental about the community. Landgraff’s identity was tied from an early date not only to coal, but also to the railroad that made commercial coal production possible.
An early West Virginia state gazetteer and business directory gives an even clearer picture of the town during its active years. It listed a population of about 700 and placed Landgraff on the Norfolk & Western approximately ten miles east of Welch and fifteen miles from Bramwell, which it identified as the community’s banking point. William D. Ord served as postmaster, railroad agent, and general manager of the Empire Coal & Coke Company.
Those titles concentrated in a single person reveal how closely the mine, railroad, post office, and community administration could overlap in a company town. Landgraff was not simply a settlement beside a coal mine. Its major institutions were woven together around the business of producing and shipping coal.
Empire Coal & Coke Company
Historical surveys date Landgraff itself to about 1891, and later coalfield histories place Empire Coal & Coke Company’s mining activity there in the early 1890s. The National Register documentation for the Empire Coal Company Store records that the company formally established itself on land leased from the Flat-Top Coal Land Association in 1896. Around the same period, the company constructed the large wooden store that became one of Landgraff’s principal landmarks.
Empire worked the famous Pocahontas coal measures that helped make southern West Virginia nationally important. The Pocahontas seams were valued for high-quality smokeless coal, particularly for railroad, industrial, and metallurgical uses.
At Landgraff, the company developed not merely underground workings but an entire landscape built around production. Tracks ran between mine openings and the tipple. Loaded cars descended toward the railroad. Coke ovens stood beside the transportation network. Workers and their families lived in housing constructed close to the operations, while the store became the place where much of everyday commercial life occurred.
State mine records continued to identify the Empire Coal & Coke Company and its Landgraff operation into the twentieth century. The West Virginia Department of Mines’ report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1923, for example, listed the Empire mine at Landgraff among McDowell County’s operating mines.
The persistence of Empire in state mining reports over many years is important because coal communities were often less permanent than the towns they created. Companies reorganized, merged, failed, sold their properties, or exhausted particular workings. Empire remained closely associated with Landgraff for decades.
One of the Most Modern Tipples in the Coalfield
One of the most remarkable surviving descriptions of Landgraff appeared in the August 20, 1910, issue of The Engineering and Mining Journal.
Rather than describing the community in general terms, the article examined Empire’s coal tipple as a piece of modern industrial engineering. It placed the facility at Landgraff on the Norfolk & Western main line, roughly ten miles east of Welch, and described it as one of the most modern coal tipples then installed.
The structure had been designed for handling Pocahontas No. 3 seam coal. Because that coal could break apart easily, engineers attempted to reduce unnecessary breakage as the coal traveled from the mine through the preparation system and into railroad cars. The new tipple used steel construction covered with corrugated iron and incorporated machinery intended to grade, size, and move the coal more efficiently. The article also described coke ovens beside the tipple and mine tracks coming down the valley toward the processing plant.
What survives in that technical article is essentially a written snapshot of industrial Landgraff.
Coal was not simply dug from the mountain and shoveled into a railroad car. By 1910, operators were investing heavily in systems that separated coal by size, reduced waste, protected valuable pieces from excessive breakage, and prepared different grades for different customers. Landgraff had become part of an increasingly sophisticated national energy industry.
The journal’s attention to Empire’s operation also suggests that the mine was considered noteworthy beyond McDowell County. Engineers elsewhere in the country could open an industry publication and study machinery being used in this small West Virginia community.
Landgraff in a 1918 Photograph
Eight years later, another extraordinary primary source captured the operation.
A 1918 photograph now preserved by the Library of Congress shows the Empire Coal & Coke Company tipple and loading booms at Landgraff. Taken by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, the image shows three railroad coal cars being loaded at the facility. The Library of Congress identifies the photograph as Jeffrey No. 3234-C and preserves it in its Prints and Photographs Division.
The photograph gives physical form to what the engineering journal had described in words. Railroad cars sit beneath the loading apparatus while the mine’s infrastructure rises around them. It is a scene built almost entirely around movement: coal coming down from the workings, passing through the preparation plant, falling into waiting cars, and beginning a journey out of McDowell County.
Another surviving primary image dates from June 6, 1922. The West Virginia State Archives holds a panoramic photograph of the Empire Coal Company at Landgraff taken by Harry Staley of Harrisburg, Virginia. The photograph entered the State Archives as accession Ph94-37.
For a community whose physical landscape has since been greatly reduced, these photographs are particularly valuable. They allow Landgraff to be seen as residents and workers knew it, not merely as an abandoned mine site or a name on a map, but as a working industrial settlement filled with buildings, rail lines, equipment, and people.
The Company Store at the Center of Town
Coal company stores have become one of the most recognizable symbols of Appalachian mining history, and Landgraff once possessed an unusually significant example.
The Empire Coal Company Store appears to have been constructed around the time the company established itself on leased land in 1896. Unlike the brick commercial buildings later erected by many wealthy coal companies, the Landgraff store was a large wooden frame structure. It stood near the railroad and residential sections of the community and eventually became important enough to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
According to the National Register nomination, the store functioned as far more than a place to purchase groceries. Families visited regularly for merchandise and mail, while company business was handled through office space inside the building. Its location near both workers’ houses and the mine made it a natural gathering place.
In practical terms, the store sat at the intersection of work and domestic life. A miner could earn his pay through the company, live in company-associated housing, and purchase necessities through the company store. Records preserved by scrip collectors also confirm that Empire Coal & Coke Company issued company money at Landgraff, and surviving Ingle-Schierloh records contain correspondence concerning Empire’s scrip orders.
Such arrangements were common across the southern West Virginia coalfields. The broader McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey explains that company towns frequently provided housing, stores, schools, churches, and other services because little infrastructure existed before industrial development. Purchases could be made with company-issued scrip, while rent and other expenses might be deducted from wages.
Landgraff was one local expression of that larger system.
A Clubhouse for a Prosperous Coal Company
By the early 1920s, Empire Coal & Coke Company had enough confidence in its future to commission a building unlike the utilitarian structures required to dig and ship coal.
In 1922, Empire hired prominent Bluefield architect Alex B. Mahood to design a clubhouse at Landgraff. Mahood’s work appears throughout the southern West Virginia coalfields, where wealthy companies increasingly used architecture to project permanence and prosperity.
The Landgraff clubhouse became a community social center. The Coal Heritage Survey identifies the building as an important example of commerce, social history, and Mahood’s architecture.
Its construction also tells us something about the maturity of the community. A coal camp’s earliest investments generally went toward mine openings, rail connections, houses, stores, and equipment. A substantial clubhouse represented a later stage, when an operator had been established long enough to invest in social facilities and architectural display.
Interestingly, Empire did not replace its older wooden company store when the clubhouse was erected. The National Register nomination observed that the company apparently considered the store adequate even as it spent money on the Mahood-designed clubhouse. The old wooden building therefore continued to serve as the commercial center while the newer clubhouse represented another side of company life.
Together, the mine, tipple, store, railroad, and clubhouse formed the physical heart of Landgraff.
Work, Danger, and the Human Cost of Coal
Industrial photographs often make mining communities appear orderly. Tracks line up beneath tipples, company buildings stand beside clean roads, and rows of houses stretch through narrow valleys. Yet the work beneath the mountain was dangerous.
Coal mining in early twentieth-century West Virginia exposed workers to roof falls, machinery accidents, haulage injuries, explosions, and other hazards. State mine reports, compensation records, death certificates, and contemporary newspapers preserve names that otherwise might disappear from the story.
Research into Empire Coal & Coke Company records has identified miners who died in accidents connected with its operations across several decades, including deaths reported in 1910, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1919, 1926, 1929, and 1937.
These cases matter because the history of Landgraff cannot be told only through companies and machinery. Every railroad car represented labor performed underground. Every ton passing through the tipple depended upon men entering the mountain, families waiting for them to return, and a community shaped by the recurring possibility that someone might not.
Federal census schedules for Brown’s Creek District, county vital records, draft registrations, and state mine reports offer the possibility of reconstructing those families in much greater detail. Landgraff was never merely the Empire Coal & Coke Company. It was also the people who made lives around the mine.
From Empire to Vera Pocahontas
Empire’s long association with Landgraff eventually came to an end.
By 1938, the operation had entered the Vera Pocahontas period. A particularly useful contemporary newspaper item appeared in The McDowell Times on December 9, 1938, under the headline “The Vera Poca Coal company, Landgraff working every day.” The report provides direct evidence that mining remained active at Landgraff during the transition away from Empire.
The old Empire operation became associated with Vera Pocahontas Mine No. 3. Later accounts indicate that Vera Pocahontas continued mining at Landgraff into the 1950s and opened an additional operation into another seam during the 1940s.
A surviving photograph identified in the William Archer Research Papers at West Virginia University captures the Vera Pocahontas No. 3 day shift at Landgraff in July 1940. It is the kind of photograph that changes the scale of the story. Tipples, company stores, and railroad cars show an industry, but a shift photograph shows the men whose labor kept that industry moving.
By this time, Landgraff had already survived nearly half a century of coalfield development. The company name had changed, but mining still defined the community.
Coal Continues Into the Late Twentieth Century
Mining did not disappear from Landgraff when Vera Pocahontas declined.
Later operators continued working coal in the area, including Hawley Coal Mining Corporation. By 1980, federal records were still identifying active mining employment at Landgraff.
A Department of Labor proceeding published in the Federal Register described workers at Hawley Coal Mining Corporation’s No. 2 Mine in Landgraff as producers of metallurgical coal. Their petition stated that layoffs had begun in August 1980 and argued that imported coal had depressed sales. Another federal determination referred to Hawley’s No. 1 and No. 2 mines at Landgraff.
Nearly ninety years had passed since the community’s early development, yet coal was still providing employment.
The 1980 proceedings also foreshadowed the economic uncertainty that would reshape McDowell County during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Mechanization, market changes, corporate restructuring, mine closures, and population loss were transforming communities throughout the coalfields.
Landgraff had been created by industrial expansion. It would now experience the consequences of industrial retreat.
The Loss of the Empire Company Store
In 1992, the Empire Coal Company Store received formal recognition when it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Coal Company Stores in McDowell County Multiple Property Submission. Federal records assigned it National Register reference number 92000321.
The nomination emphasized both its architectural rarity and its historical importance. At the time, it was one of only a small number of surviving wooden company stores in McDowell County. Its age made it especially valuable as an example of the first generation of coal-company commercial buildings.
Recognition, however, did not guarantee survival.
The West Virginia State Archives indexes a November 25, 1996, Charleston Gazette article titled “Up in Smoke, Landgraff Coal Company Store.” Later preservation surveys list the Empire store simply as demolished.
Its disappearance illustrates one of the central problems facing the preservation of Appalachian coal history. Many coalfield buildings survived the mining companies that constructed them but entered periods of vacancy and deterioration after the industries around them contracted. Floods, fires, abandonment, demolition, and simple exposure to time have erased much of the built environment that once filled McDowell County’s narrow valleys.
At Landgraff, the loss is particularly striking because the store had stood for roughly a century and had served generations of miners and families.
Floods, Decline, and What Remains
The geography that made Landgraff possible also made it vulnerable.
There was little level ground available in the valley, so the railroad, road, mine buildings, houses, and creek all competed for space. Flooding has repeatedly damaged communities throughout McDowell County, and Landgraff suffered heavily during the severe floods of the early twenty-first century.
The Coal Heritage Survey eventually concluded that most buildings associated with Landgraff’s active coal-mining period, roughly 1890 through 1960, had disappeared because of flooding, neglect, or demolition. The survey still identified the 1922 Empire clubhouse as one of the community’s significant surviving historic resources.
That pattern is repeated across the county. The same preservation study estimated that a substantial portion of the approximately 1,200 coal-related resources surveyed in McDowell County in 1991 had disappeared within the following quarter century.
Landgraff therefore offers more than the history of a single company town. It demonstrates how quickly an industrial landscape can vanish once the industry that created it no longer maintains it.
The railroad still follows Elkhorn Creek. U.S. 52 still passes through the valley. Mountains still rise abruptly from the narrow strip of ground where miners, railroad workers, store clerks, company officials, and their families once lived. Yet much of the architecture that made Landgraff instantly recognizable as a coal town is gone.
Why Landgraff Matters
Landgraff never became as famous as Welch, Keystone, or some of the larger communities of McDowell County, but that is precisely what makes its history important.
Thousands of Appalachian coal communities were places like Landgraff. They were not enormous cities or corporate headquarters. They were small settlements where a railroad connection, a mine opening, and a company payroll created communities almost overnight.
Landgraff’s surviving records allow that process to be followed with unusual clarity. The Norfolk & Western brought access to the valley. Empire Coal & Coke Company established a long-running mining operation. Engineers built a tipple advanced enough to attract national attention in 1910. A government photographer recorded coal cars being loaded in 1918. A prominent architect designed a clubhouse in 1922. State mine inspectors recorded the operation. Scrip records preserved traces of the company economy. Vera Pocahontas carried mining into another generation, while federal records show that coal employment remained at Landgraff as late as 1980.
Then much of the physical town disappeared.
That final chapter is as much a part of Appalachian history as the opening of the mines. The rise of Landgraff tells the story of industrialization, capital, railroads, engineering, and coal. Its decline tells the story of what happened when those forces withdrew.
Today, photographs, mine reports, maps, company records, and the few surviving structures allow the community to be reconstructed. They remind us that places easily overlooked from a passing car once stood at the center of an industrial system that powered railroads, factories, ships, and cities far beyond the mountains.
Landgraff was small, but the coal that left its valley connected it to the nation.
Sources & Further Reading
Library of Congress. “Empire Coal & Coke Company, Tipple and Loading Booms, Landgraff, West Virginia.” Photograph, 1918. U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, Jeffrey No. 3234-C, LOT 8255. https://www.loc.gov/item/91795728/
Harrison, Henry. “Modern Methods in a Coal Tipple.” Engineering and Mining Journal 90, no. 8 (August 20, 1910): 370–374. Discussion of the Empire Coal & Coke Company tipple at Landgraff. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1910-08-20-_Vol_90_Iss_8.pdf
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0233/report.pdf
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1923. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_%28IA_annualreportofde41west%29.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “Empire Coal Company, Landgraff, McDowell County.” Panoramic photograph by Harry Staley, June 6, 1922. Ph94-37. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/accessions/94acc.html
Sone, Stacy. “Empire Coal Company Store.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, December 16, 1991. National Register No. 92000321. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/2e150f08-d396-4614-9eb3-95348c3a0e6c
National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places, 1992 Weekly Lists.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1992. Empire Coal Company Store listed April 17, 1992. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/weekly-list-1992-national-register-of-historic-places.pdf
West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory. “Landgraff.” Historical directory entry listing Landgraff’s population, Norfolk & Western Railway connection, postmaster, railroad agent, and Empire Coal & Coke Company. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-1-part-50.htm
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Vera Pocahontas Mine No. 3, ‘Day Shift,’ Landgraff, WV, July 9–19, 1940.” William Archer, Journalist, Research Papers Regarding McDowell and Mercer Counties. Collection 4388, identifier 4388_disc3_b1_f35. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6481/digitized?page=3
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Smokeless Coal Operators Association Records. A&M 1830. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. Includes Pocahontas coalfield production statistics, company records, labor information, and a 1902 Norfolk & Western Pocahontas Coal Field map. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5450
Ingle-Schierloh Company. Ingle-Schierloh Records, Volume 6: Kimball to Lost Creek. 1926. Newman Numismatic Portal, Washington University in St. Louis. Includes correspondence and scrip orders from Empire Coal & Coke Company at Landgraff. https://nnp.wustl.edu/Library/AdvancedSearch?contenttype=Archive&fullsearchterm=L&page=1916
National Scrip Collectors Association. “Records: Landgraff, Empire Coal & Coke Co.” NSCA Records. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.scripcollectors.org/records
U.S. Department of Labor. “Hawley Coal Corp., No. 1 and 2 Mines, Landgraff, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Federal Register 45, no. 194 (October 3, 1980). https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/fedreg/fr045/fr045194/fr045194.pdf
U.S. Department of Labor. “Hawley Coal Mining Corporation, No. 2 Mine, Landgraff, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Federal Register 45, no. 203 (October 17, 1980): 69075. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Federal_Register_1980-10-17-_Vol_45_Iss_203.pdf
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Update: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways. Charleston, WV. https://www.aurora-llc.com/portfolio/mcdowell-county-survey/
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Update: Demolished Properties. June 2018. Includes former historic resources at Landgraff documented as demolished by 2016. https://www.aurora-llc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Coal-Heritage-Survey-Demolished-Properties.pdf
U.S. Department of Transportation. “Cities and Towns along the Norfolk & Western Railway Route in Virginia and West Virginia.” Historic railroad corridor study. Includes Landgraff, the Empire operation, and the 1922 A. B. Mahood clubhouse. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/75177/dot_75177_DS1.pdf
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/
Author Note: Landgraff is the kind of McDowell County community whose surviving records reveal far more history than its size might suggest. I wanted to preserve the story of the miners, families, railroad workers, company buildings, and generations who made this narrow stretch of Elkhorn Creek a community rather than simply another coal operation.