Appalachian Community Histories – Jed, McDowell County: Coal, the 1912 Mine Disaster, and the Community That Became Havaco
Long before Jed became associated with one of the worst mine disasters in West Virginia history, the name already belonged to the landscape of McDowell County. In 1904, geographer Henry Gannett included Jed in the United States Geological Survey’s A Gazetteer of West Virginia, identifying Jed Branch as a small tributary of the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. The entry is important because it predates the best documented years of the Jed Coal and Coke Company and shows that the mining settlement inherited a name already attached to the surrounding geography.
Coal development soon transformed that branch into another of the industrial communities appearing across the Pocahontas coalfield. Postal records place a Jed post office in McDowell County from 1906 until 1914, suggesting that a recognizable community had developed there by the first decade of the twentieth century. In February 1908, the Engineering and Mining Journal reported that William Leckie, formerly associated with Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries, had been appointed resident manager of the Jed Coal and Coke Company at Jed.
This was the McDowell County of the coal boom, when communities were being created or greatly enlarged wherever operators could reach valuable seams. A company office, tipple, mine workings, houses, railroad connections, and a post office could quickly turn a narrow hollow or stream valley into an industrial settlement. Jed belonged to that world, situated among the growing mining communities of Adkin District, alongside places such as Gary, Filbert, Jenkinjones, Leckie, and what would later be known as Havaco.
Coal Beneath Jed
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the coal coming from Jed had attracted attention beyond McDowell County. Federal researchers studying one of the most feared dangers in American mines, combustible coal dust, obtained a sample from the Jed mine before the disaster that would eventually make the community nationally known.
The United States Geological Survey published the results in George S. Rice and his colleagues’ 1910 study The Explosibility of Coal Dust. Sample number 10034 was identified specifically as high-carbon bituminous coking coal from the Jed mine in McDowell County. The analysis recorded more than 77 percent fixed carbon, along with volatile matter, ash, sulfur, and moisture. Jed was therefore already part of the federal government’s developing scientific investigation into mine explosions two years before the disaster of 1912.
The significance of that study was larger than one coal sample. Explosions in the early twentieth-century coalfields had demonstrated that methane was not the only threat underground. Once an ignition disturbed fine coal dust, an initial gas explosion could grow into something far more destructive as flame and pressure moved through mine entries. At Jed, that combination of gas and dust would soon become devastatingly real.
The Morning of March 26, 1912
Tuesday, March 26, 1912 began as another working morning in the coalfields. Shortly after 7:20 a.m., an explosion tore through the Jed Coal and Coke Company mine while approximately ninety-one men were underground. The later Bureau of Mines account reported that eleven men positioned near the shaft bottom and in workings not reached by the main force of the explosion escaped, although one of those men, a door boy, later died after reaching the surface.
Early newspaper reports were confused, as reports from major disasters often were. The Fairmont West Virginian initially reported eighty-three men entombed and placed the explosion at about 7:30 that morning. Newspapers elsewhere repeated changing estimates as telegraph dispatches crossed the country. Before officials had even established how many men had entered the mine, readers hundreds of miles from McDowell County were already being told that dozens of miners were trapped underground.
The Bureau of Mines records reveal just how quickly the federal rescue system began responding. Telegrams were exchanged throughout March 26 requesting men, rescue equipment, and specialized mine-rescue cars. One message called for help to be rushed immediately. Another reported rescue cars heading toward the disaster, while still another instructed investigators to collect samples of the deadly gases left after the explosion. These communications preserve the disaster almost minute by minute, as officials attempted to determine what had happened while rescue crews were still trying to reach the missing miners.
Fighting Through Gas, Dust, and Afterdamp
The underground conditions made the rescue enormously dangerous. Federal investigators described Jed as a gassy mine in which ventilation had not always kept methane below dangerous levels. The explosion was strengthened by coal dust as it traveled through portions of the workings, although damp conditions and the width of entries nearer the shaft helped weaken its force before it could destroy the main hoisting and ventilation shafts.
That accident of geography and mine condition probably prevented an even greater catastrophe. Had the explosion destroyed the primary shaft structures, rescue and recovery would have become still more difficult.
Within roughly half an hour, men carrying flame safety lamps were working underground to erect temporary stoppings and restore ventilation. Mine-rescue crews and equipment followed. The newly established United States Bureau of Mines had been created only a few years earlier, and the Jed response came during an era when organized federal mine-rescue work was still developing. The telegrams, reports, correspondence, maps, and rescue documents preserved from Jed therefore provide not only a record of a disaster but also a record of the changing American response to mine catastrophes.
Recovery continued for days. On March 28, a Bureau of Mines telegram reported forty-five bodies located. By March 30, investigators reported that sixty-nine had been found. On April 2, only five remained undiscovered. Newspapers in nearby Bluefield followed the search closely with headlines describing bodies trapped beneath fallen slate and rescuers moving deeper into the mine as damaged ventilation was repaired.
How Many Men Died at Jed?
Even more than a century later, one deceptively simple question remains difficult to answer with absolute certainty: how many men died?
The modern West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training lists eighty fatalities for the Jed Coal and Coke Company explosion. Federal Bureau of Mines material generally gives eighty-one. Contemporary newspapers printed totals of eighty-two and eighty-three as the recovery unfolded and the number of men originally underground was repeatedly revised. The research record therefore supports acknowledging the disagreement rather than forcing the sources into a single figure.
For historical purposes, eighty-one is the figure most closely associated with the federal investigation, while eighty is the figure currently used by West Virginia’s official state disaster table. Whatever figure is selected, the meaning does not change. In a small coal camp, the explosion erased a large part of one morning shift and left families throughout the community waiting beside a mine from which most of their husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, and neighbors would never walk out.
What the Investigation Found
The cause of the Jed disaster requires similar caution.
Later summaries of the federal material often state that methane was ignited by an open lamp. That explanation is plausible and became widely repeated in accounts of the disaster. The surviving coroner’s verdict, however, was more restrained.
After state mine officials examined the workings and testimony was taken before the McDowell County coroner’s jury, investigators determined that the explosion originated from accumulated gas near the face of No. 8 room, off the No. 1 butt left entry on No. 2 main. The jury concluded that the deaths resulted from a gas and dust explosion, but it specifically stated that the evidence did not allow jurors to determine what ignited the gas.
That distinction matters. It is reasonable to say that accumulated methane ignited and that coal dust helped spread or intensify the explosion. It is also reasonable to note that later federal summaries connected the ignition to an open light. It is not safe, however, to present the lamp explanation as an uncontested finding of the contemporary local investigation.
The hearings themselves reveal something about the workforce at Jed. Guido de Vincenzo, secretary of the legal bureau of the Royal Italian Embassy, attended proceedings to represent Italian subjects killed in the explosion. His presence is documentary evidence of the immigrant population that had been drawn into the southern West Virginia coalfields, where companies recruited labor from across the United States and Europe.
Widows, Orphans, and the Jed Relief Fund
The disaster did not end when the final bodies were recovered. It moved from the mine workings into company houses, churches, banks, funeral homes, and relief committees.
Contemporary newspaper material preserved with the federal records shows a rapidly growing Jed relief fund. By early April, more than $4,000 had been collected, with contributions arriving from businesses, individuals, banks, and people connected to the surrounding coalfield. The American Red Cross also offered assistance, particularly for widows and orphans left behind by the explosion. Federal records later listed a $500 Red Cross expenditure for the Jed Mine disaster.
Those records help restore the families to a story that can otherwise become dominated by engineering diagrams and fatality totals. Every recovered body meant a household confronting the loss of income as well as the loss of a person. In a company-town economy where housing and employment could be intertwined, the death of a miner could destabilize an entire family.
The disaster also attracted attention well beyond West Virginia. News of Jed traveled across the United States and even overseas. What had begun before breakfast in a narrow McDowell County hollow became another example in the growing national debate over whether industrial growth had raced ahead of the protections available to the men producing the country’s coal.
The Cemetery Called Little Egypt
For some victims, the final chapter of the disaster was written on a hillside near the community. A burial ground later known locally as Little Egypt became associated with miners killed at Jed. Over the decades, vegetation covered much of the site and many visible signs of individual graves disappeared.
In 2022, Associated Press reporting brought national attention back to Little Egypt, describing an overgrown cemetery in modern Havaco containing the remains of dozens of victims of the 1912 explosion. Residents and former miners interviewed for the report worried that the cemetery itself was being forgotten along with the people buried there.
The condition of Little Egypt makes the history of Jed unusually tangible. The mine disaster is not simply an entry in a government table. Its dead remain in the same narrow McDowell County landscape where the mine operated, even as the name Jed gradually faded from everyday use.
From Jed to Havaco
The transformation of Jed into Havaco can be followed through place-name and postal records.
Postal-history sources record the Jed post office from 1906 through 1914. Havaco’s post office begins in 1914. The West Virginia State Archives later listed Havaco in McDowell County and connected the name with Jed and Dial Rock, while state place-name records place both Jed and Havaco within Adkin District. Together, the records show a transition in local identity during the years immediately following the 1912 disaster.
Local tradition has sometimes explained the new name as an effort to escape Jed’s association with the catastrophe. That story is understandable, considering the scale of the tragedy, but the surviving postal and place-name records establish the timing more firmly than they establish the motive. The documentary evidence proves that Jed disappeared as a postal name in 1914 while Havaco appeared, but it does not by itself prove precisely why the new name was selected.
Jed nevertheless survived on maps, in mine records, in cemetery memory, and in the language used to describe the 1912 disaster. The name that had once belonged to a small mountain branch became inseparable from one of the darkest mornings in McDowell County mining history.
Disaster Returned to Havaco
Coal mining continued beneath the community after the name Jed receded, and the ground would again become the scene of disaster.
On January 15, 1946, an explosion struck the No. 9 Havaco mine of the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company. The Bureau of Mines reported that 270 men were underground. Two hundred thirty-four escaped without assistance, twenty-four injured miners were rescued, twelve men were killed outright, and three more later died in the hospital. The final federal and state death toll was fifteen.
The 1946 investigation concluded that an excessive, unconfined charge of nonpermissible explosive had been fired while workers were blasting rock in a dusty area near the bottom of the shaft. The resulting explosion was extraordinarily violent near the shaft, damaging the headframe, tipple, and nearby surface structures. Workers and customers above ground were injured by debris and broken glass as the force reached the surface.
For older residents who knew the history of Jed, the second explosion connected two generations of miners through the same industrial landscape. The names had changed. The ownership had changed. Mining technology and regulation had changed. Yet Havaco again became a place where families gathered and waited for word from underground.
What Remains of Jed
Modern West Virginia still recognizes both Jed and Havaco as McDowell County place names, although the coal camp that existed in the early twentieth century has largely vanished as an organized community. Mine ruins, altered railroad landscapes, abandoned industrial structures, the cemetery, and archival records now carry much of its history.
Jed is therefore a good example of why the history of Appalachian coal camps cannot be measured only by their present populations. Some communities that appear almost invisible on a modern map once contained mines important enough to draw federal engineers, immigrant workers, government investigators, rescue trains, newspaper correspondents, and national relief organizations into the mountains.
The surviving Jed archive is unusually rich. Federal records contain reports, telegrams, correspondence, newspaper clippings, rescue documents, and maps. State records preserve disaster statistics and place-name evidence. Contemporary newspapers capture the uncertainty of the first hours and the anguish of the recovery. Even the coal itself survives in federal scientific data collected before the explosion. Together they allow Jed to be reconstructed not simply as the location of a disaster, but as a living coal community that existed before March 26, 1912 and continued afterward under another name.
Remembering Jed
It would be easy for Jed to disappear beneath the larger histories of Welch, Gary, and the Pocahontas coalfield. Its post office lasted only a few years, its old name was replaced by Havaco, and many physical traces of the community have been reclaimed by the mountains.
Yet the documentary trail refuses to let Jed vanish.
A federal gazetteer preserves the name before the coal boom. Mining journals document the company years. Government scientists tested its coal. Telegrams record desperate calls for rescue crews. Newspapers followed the recovery of the dead. A coroner’s jury tried to determine what happened underground. Relief committees collected money for grieving families. Decades later, another explosion under the name Havaco reminded McDowell County that the industrial story of the hollow had never truly ended.
Today, the forgotten graves at Little Egypt may be the most powerful surviving monument to that history. Jed no longer needs to be a large community to matter. Its story remains beneath the landscape, in the archives, and in the names of the miners who went underground on an ordinary Tuesday morning in 1912 and became part of the history of the Appalachian coalfields.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Bureau of Mines. Jed Mine Disaster Documents: Jed Coal & Coke Company, Jed, West Virginia, March 26, 1912. 1912. Collection of correspondence, maps, newspaper clippings, reports, and telegrams concerning the disaster. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/Jed_1912.pdf
Rice, George S., and J. W. Paul. “Jed Coal and Coke Company Mine Explosion, Jed, McDowell County, West Virginia, March 26, 1912.” United States Bureau of Mines. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/jed.htm
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 233. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b233
Rice, George S., Joseph C. W. Frazer, Axel Larsen, Frank Haas, and Carl Scholz. The Explosibility of Coal Dust. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 425. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b425
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1912. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1912. Copy identified in the Ferdinand C. Menk Coal Mining Records, West Virginia University. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2040
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1913. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1913. Copy identified in the Ferdinand C. Menk Coal Mining Records, West Virginia University. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2040
West Virginia Coal Mining Institute. Proceedings of the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute. 1912. Ferdinand C. Menk Coal Mining Records, West Virginia University. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2040
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “WV Mine Disasters 1884 to Present.” Accessed September 12, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
Humphrey, H. B. Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States, 1810–1958. U.S. Bureau of Mines Bulletin 586. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12740/
“Mine Explosion at Jed, McDowell County Claims Toll of Eighty-Two Workers’ Lives.” Charleston Gazette, March 27, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Eighty-Three Lives Lost in Coal Mine Explosion.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 27, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Jed Mine Seems Loath to Yield Up Its Dead.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 28, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Broken Bodies Pinned Under Tons of Slate.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 29, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Movement for Relief of Mine Victims.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 29, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“The Jed Mine Yields Up Fourteen More Bodies.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 30, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Three Bodies Taken From Under Slate.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 31, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Relief Fund Goes to Over Two Thousand.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 31, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Relief Fund Passes Three Thousand Mark.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 2, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Three More Bodies Taken From Jed Mine.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 2, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Jed Relief Fund Given Big Boost.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 3, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Seven Bodies Still Remain in Jed Mine.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 3, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“State Ends Inquiry Into Jed Disaster.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, April 5, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Eighty Three Dead.” Raleigh Register, March 28, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Returned From Jed.” Raleigh Register, April 11, 1912. Listed in West Virginia State Archives, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 12, 2026. The Havaco entry identifies Jed and Dial Rock as associated names. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamh.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways, November 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1992. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/coal-mining-heritage.pdf
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006731317
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p007656
Tams, William Purviance, Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1964. https://archive.org/details/smokelesscoalfie0000unse
Author Note: Growing up in the Appalachian coalfields, I have always been interested in the communities whose names nearly disappeared even though their stories remain beneath the mountains. Jed is one of those places, remembered through a devastating mine disaster, the families who lived there, and the community that continued under the name Havaco.