Appalachian Community Histories – Premier, McDowell County: Coal Mines, Company Life, and the 1942 Military Plane Crash
Premier, West Virginia, is one of those McDowell County communities whose name can be easy to overlook on a modern map. Yet the surviving record tells a much larger story. Railroad engineering drawings, state mine reports, court cases, census schedules, historic photographs, federal coal records, and newspaper accounts preserve evidence of a community built around one of the many mining complexes that transformed southern West Virginia during the early twentieth century.
The key to finding Premier in the historical record is often to search for the company rather than the town. Premier appears under names such as Premier Pocahontas Coal Company, Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company, and later Premier Pocahontas Company. Records also connect the community to the Norfolk and Western Railway’s Spice Creek Branch and, during later decades, to operators including Royalty Smokeless Coal Company and Trace Fork Coal Company.
What emerges from those scattered records is the history of more than a mine. Premier was a company community with houses, a store, railroad sidings, numbered mining operations, families, children, and workers whose lives were closely tied to the coal beneath the surrounding mountains.
Premier and the Pocahontas Coalfield
Premier developed during the great expansion of the Pocahontas coalfield, when railroads opened increasingly remote hollows of McDowell County to industrial mining. Coal companies did not simply sink openings into mountains. They constructed entire systems around them, including tracks, tipples, stores, houses, offices, utilities, and transportation connections capable of moving enormous quantities of coal out of the mountains.
By 1912, Premier was already firmly connected to that expanding transportation network. A Norfolk and Western Railway engineering diagram dated June 24, 1912, and later revised in 1916, identifies the Premier Pocahontas Coal Company among the operators connected with the railroad’s coalfield branches. The drawing places the company within a much larger web of mining concerns spread across the Tug River, Dry Fork, Clear Fork, and other valleys of southern West Virginia. It specifically includes the Spice Creek Branch, the short railroad line that became essential to Premier’s development.
The railroad made Premier possible on an industrial scale. Coal could be loaded near the mines, moved down the branch line, gathered with production from other operations, and then sent toward markets far beyond McDowell County. Premier therefore belonged to an economic system that stretched from a narrow Appalachian hollow to steel mills, industrial cities, ports, and coal markets across the country.
Premier Pocahontas Collieries
By the years surrounding World War I, Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company was operating enough property to generate disputes over leases, royalties, and the accounting of coal production.
One of the clearest glimpses into the company’s early operations comes from the 1920 West Virginia Supreme Court case Sperry v. Premier Pocahontas Collieries Co. The dispute grew from a mining lease in McDowell County. The plaintiffs claimed the company owed more than $5,300 in royalties as of July 1, 1919, and accused it of failing to keep proper accounts of coal removed from the leased property. They also alleged that coal from the property had been mixed with coal from adjoining lands in a way that made it difficult to determine exactly how much had been mined from each tract.
The lawsuit is valuable for more than its legal arguments. It shows that Premier Pocahontas was already working multiple neighboring properties and moving enough coal that questions of tonnage, shipment, leases, and royalty accounting had become significant financial matters.
A few years later, the West Virginia Department of Mines provided an even clearer picture of the operation. Its annual report for the year ending June 30, 1923, listed four Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company mines in McDowell County: No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4. Each carried Premier as its post office address. The same information appears among the strongest primary sources collected for Premier, confirming that the community served several numbered mining operations rather than a single isolated opening.
By then, Premier had become a substantial mining complex.
Life in a Company Town
Mine reports tell us where coal was being extracted, but court records sometimes reveal more about how people actually lived.
The 1923 case Walke v. Premier Pocahontas Collieries Co. began after an accident on October 13, 1921. A child living near the mining operation was struck and dragged by a runaway horse that had been used in company work. In describing the circumstances, the West Virginia Supreme Court recorded that Premier Pocahontas had constructed houses for its miners and that the injured child’s parents occupied one of them. The houses stood close enough to the company’s operations that work animals and equipment moved through the same general space where mining families lived.
It is an unusually intimate surviving description of Premier. Company towns are sometimes remembered through rows of nearly identical houses, but the Walke case reminds us that those houses were occupied by families whose children played near the industrial landscape surrounding them. The boundaries between workplace and neighborhood could be remarkably thin.
Horses remained part of the mining system even as rail lines and machinery transformed coal production. Steel rails, mine equipment, animals, company houses, miners, and children could all occupy the same narrow valley because the geography offered little room for separating one part of the community from another.
The Premier Company Store
Another center of life was the company store.
West Virginia University’s West Virginia History OnView collection preserves at least two photographs identified specifically as the Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company Store. One image, catalog number 003123, shows what the archive describes as a large company store with several people standing outside. A second view, catalog number 003122, records the same institution.
The size of the structure is significant. In coal communities such as Premier, the company store could serve as far more than a place to buy flour, clothing, or household goods. It stood at the center of a company-controlled landscape in which the same corporation could influence employment, housing, transportation, and commerce.
These photographs also give Premier something that many vanished or diminished coal camps lack: a visual record. The surviving images allow modern researchers to move beyond mine statistics and see part of the built environment that miners and their families encountered every day.
Premier Mining Village
Federal census records provide another way of finding the people who lived behind the company name.
The 1930 census schedules identify the settlement directly as “Premier Mining Village” in Browns Creek District. The surviving schedules can be used to reconstruct the community household by household, recording miners and their families along with occupations, ages, birthplaces, racial classifications, immigration information, and family relationships. The 1940 and 1950 censuses continue the record into the mature and postwar years of the town.
That wording, Premier Mining Village, is important. Premier was not simply a shipping point printed in a coal directory. Federal enumerators regarded it as a recognizable residential community.
A school also operated in the community. A surviving reference to a November 3, 1928, Welch Daily News honor roll for Premier provides evidence of local students and organized schooling. Although the original newspaper should be consulted before individual names are reproduced, the notice helps fill out the picture of a community containing families rather than only a transient industrial workforce.
Children attended school, families shopped at the company store, miners went to their shifts, trains moved through the valley, and the numbered mines stretched into the surrounding hills. By the interwar years, Premier had become one of the many fully developed coal communities that defined McDowell County.
The Spice Creek Branch
Premier’s physical arrangement can be understood particularly well through Norfolk and Western Railway records.
The Spice Creek Branch tied the mines to the main coal transportation system. A later Norfolk and Western engineering drawing dated January 28, 1946, details siding facilities serving Operation No. 8 of Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company near Premier. The drawing places the facilities at approximately milepost R3+3304.4 and was revised in 1951. A notation records a change in the company’s name to Premier Pocahontas Company.
The existence of a No. 8 operation by this period also shows how the mining complex had evolved beyond the four numbered mines appearing in the 1923 state directory.
Railroad documents preserve the industrial geography that otherwise becomes difficult to recognize after mines close and structures disappear. Tracks that once curved toward tipples may be removed. Mine portals may be sealed or collapse. Buildings may burn, decay, or be demolished. A railroad drawing can preserve where the infrastructure stood long after the physical landscape has changed.
At Premier, the railroad was not merely transportation passing through town. It was one of the organizing features of the settlement itself.
Premier Coal Goes to War
By the beginning of World War II, Premier coal was part of a regulated national market.
Federal coal price schedules published in December 1941 identified Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company as a District 7 producer and listed Premier as both the mine and shipping point. The Norfolk and Western Railway was identified as the railroad serving the operation.
The connection extended well beyond West Virginia. Federal records from July 1942 identified Premier Pocahontas coal among the products sold through docks at New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut. Coal extracted in the mountains of McDowell County could therefore enter supply chains hundreds of miles away.
For Premier families, however, the war arrived in a far more immediate and tragic way that same summer.
The 1942 Plane Crash Near Premier
Shortly after noon on July 1, 1942, residents around Premier and nearby Coalwood looked toward the sky as a large military transport aircraft struggled through heavy rain and low clouds.
The aircraft passed over the area at low altitude. Witnesses later described seeing smoke and then a wing separating from the plane. Moments later, the aircraft crashed into the mountainside near Premier in the area known as No. 4 Hollow. Wreckage and equipment were scattered across the slope.
All 21 United States Army Air Corps personnel aboard were killed.
The Welch Daily News rushed reporters to the scene. Its July 1 edition reported charred wreckage, soldiers’ equipment scattered across the ground, state police searching the hillside, and local residents trying to understand what they had witnessed. The newspaper placed the wreck about half a mile from Premier.
The following day’s coverage described the difficult recovery operation. Heavy rain had turned the mountainside muddy and treacherous. Volunteers, police officers, miners, and ambulance crews worked to bring the bodies down the slope while military investigators arrived to examine the wreckage. By evening, officials reported that all 21 victims had been recovered.
For a community accustomed to industrial danger underground, the disaster brought wartime death suddenly from the sky.
Premier Pocahontas superintendent Lawrence Runyon was among the local people associated with the response described in contemporary coverage. Other residents and coal workers provided eyewitness accounts, making the newspaper reports valuable not only for aviation history but also for documenting people living and working at Premier in 1942.
McDowell County Mourns
The victims were strangers to most people in McDowell County, but the community treated them as its own.
On July 5, hundreds gathered in Welch for a memorial service before the bodies were transported home. The July 6 Welch Daily News described flag-draped caskets lining the Norfolk and Western station platform. A salute was fired and taps sounded as local residents stood in tribute.
The crash became one of the defining historical events associated with Premier. West Virginia Archives and History continues to commemorate July 1, 1942, as the date when 21 soldiers died in the transport crash near the community, and a monument was later erected near the crash site.
The tragedy permanently connected a small McDowell County mining settlement to the wider history of World War II.
Mining After the War
Coal production around Premier continued after the crash and after the war.
The 1946 Norfolk and Western drawing for Premier’s No. 8 operation demonstrates continued investment in railroad and mine infrastructure. Its 1951 revision recording the name Premier Pocahontas Company shows that the operation was still evolving.
By November 1952, however, a United States Geological Survey record described an abandoned Premier Coal Company opening along U.S. Route 52 near Havaco. That does not mean every Premier operation had closed, but it shows the complicated nature of coalfield decline. Individual mines could be abandoned while other workings, preparation facilities, or nearby operations continued.
Premier did not simply disappear when the original Premier Pocahontas era faded. New operators continued to use the community’s coal infrastructure.
Royalty Smokeless and Trace Fork
Federal labor records from 1979 show that Premier remained part of McDowell County’s coal economy decades after the company’s early numbered mines had entered the historical record.
Royalty Smokeless Coal Company operated the Premier Tipple, where workers were involved with the preparation of coal. A Department of Labor notice from May 1979 specifically listed Royalty Smokeless Coal Company, Premier Tipple, in connection with United Mine Workers of America employees.
Photographic evidence also survives from this later period. A 1991 State Historic Preservation Office photograph identifies a coal tipple at Premier as belonging to Royalty Smokeless Coal Company. A separate August 1944 image preserved through Virginia Tech’s collections shows miners at Premier moving loaded mine cars toward the headhouse or tipple.
Trace Fork Coal Company was another later operator associated with Premier. Federal records from October 1979 refer to Trace Fork’s Premier office and Mine No. 12, where workers produced metallurgical coal. The Department of Labor records arose during a period of layoffs and trade adjustment investigations, offering a glimpse of the economic pressures affecting central Appalachian coal employment by the end of the 1970s.
The company names had changed, but Premier remained tied to the industry that had created it.
What Premier Leaves Behind
Premier’s history is unusually well documented for a relatively small coal community because so many different institutions recorded pieces of its story.
The Department of Mines recorded its numbered mines. Norfolk and Western engineers mapped its railroad sidings. Courts documented disputes over mineral leases and accidents near company housing. Census enumerators walked through Premier Mining Village and wrote down the people who lived there. Photographers preserved the company store. Federal agencies recorded coal prices, shipping routes, mine openings, later operators, and displaced workers. Local newspaper reporters documented the terrible afternoon when a military airplane fell into the mountains near No. 4 Hollow.
Each source sees Premier differently.
To the railroad it was a shipping point. To the mining department it was a group of mines. To Premier Pocahontas Collieries it was an industrial operation. To a census taker it was a village. To the families who lived there, it was home.
That difference matters when studying the coalfields. Communities such as Premier were never merely collections of company houses surrounding a mine opening. They were places where several generations experienced childhood, work, danger, education, family life, economic change, and loss.
Why Premier Matters
Premier represents the larger history of McDowell County in miniature.
Its growth depended on coal and the railroad. Its landscape was shaped by company ownership. Its residents lived beside the machinery and transportation systems that supported the mines. Its coal entered national markets. Its fortunes changed as companies reorganized and mining methods shifted. By the late twentieth century, workers were confronting the employment instability that would transform communities across the southern West Virginia coalfields.
Yet Premier also possesses a story that belongs uniquely to that hollow. Few coal camps can connect a 1912 railroad map, a 1920 Supreme Court mining dispute, a 1921 accident among company houses, a 1923 directory of four numbered mines, photographs of a large company store, a federal census explicitly calling the place a mining village, World War II coal shipments, a 21-man military aviation disaster, and later mining operations stretching into the 1970s and beyond.
Today, the remaining landscape may reveal only fragments of what once stood there. Historical records restore some of what time has erased.
Premier was a mining operation, but it was also a community. Its history belongs not only to the corporations that removed coal from the mountains, but to the miners, wives, children, store workers, railroad employees, schoolchildren, and neighbors who turned an industrial settlement along the Spice Creek Branch into a place people called home.
Sources & Further Reading
“Airliner Falls Near Premier.” Welch Daily News, July 1, 1942. Reproduced by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/disasters/mcdowellplanecrash01.html.
“Identify 17 Army Plane Dead.” Welch Daily News, July 2, 1942. Reproduced by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/disasters/mcdowellplanecrash02.html.
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.
McDowell County Centennial, 1858–1958. McDowell County, WV, 1958. Listed in the West Virginia Archives and History McDowell County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html.
National Coal Heritage Area. Coal Heritage Survey. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf.
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Diagram of Various Coal Fields Showing Distances from Branch Lines to Gathering Points.” June 24, 1912. Revised 1916. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=103794.
Norfolk and Western Railway. Mileage Analysis, Pocahontas Division. February 25, 1971. https://www.multimodalways.org/docs/railroads/companies/N%26W/N%26W%20Mileage%20Analysis%202-25-1971.pdf.
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Siding Facilities Serving Operation No. 8 of the Premier Pocahontas Collieries Co.” January 28, 1946. Revised July 30, 1951. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=213787.
Solins and Jones. McDowell County History: A Pictorial History. 1959. Listed in the West Virginia Archives and History McDowell County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html.
Sowers, Auburn Daniel. Facts About McDowell County, West Virginia. 1912. Listed in the West Virginia Archives and History McDowell County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html.
Sperry v. Premier Pocahontas Collieries Co., 87 W. Va. 223, 104 S.E. 486 (1920). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/sperry-v-premier-pocahontas-929799191.
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. McDowell County, West Virginia, Browns Creek District, “Premier Mining Village.” Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1930. https://coalexchange.com/smith/mcdowella/pafn2763.htm.
United States Bureau of the Census. Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950. McDowell County, West Virginia, Premier enumeration schedules. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1950. https://www.coalexchange.com/smith/mcdowella/pafn2775.htm.
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. McDowell County, West Virginia, Browns Creek District and Premier enumeration schedules. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1940. https://www.coalexchange.com/smith/mcdowella/pafn2801.htm.
United States Congress. Congressional Record. May 17, 1946. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1946-pt4/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1946-pt4-17.pdf.
United States Department of Labor. “Royalty Smokeless Coal Company, Premier Tipple.” Trade Adjustment Assistance Records, 1979. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/tradeact/petitioners/petitions/.
United States Department of Labor. “Trace Fork Coal Company, Premier, West Virginia.” Trade Adjustment Assistance Records, 1979. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/tradeact/petitioners/petitions.
United States Geological Survey. Geologic Investigations of Radioactive Deposits. 1952. Includes a November 20, 1952, record for an abandoned Premier Coal Company opening near Havaco, West Virginia. https://pubs.usgs.gov/tei/409/report.pdf.
United States Government. Federal Register 6, December 23, 1941. Bituminous coal price schedules listing Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1941-12-23/pdf/FR-1941-12-23.pdf.
United States Government. Federal Register 7, July 21, 1942. Records concerning Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company and District 7 coal distribution. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1942-07-21/pdf/FR-1942-07-21.pdf.
United States Government. Federal Register 8, October 12, 1943. Records listing Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company of Bluefield, West Virginia. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1943-10-12/pdf/FR-1943-10-12.pdf.
United States Government. Federal Register 44, no. 133, July 10, 1979. Records concerning Royalty Smokeless Coal Company and the Premier Tipple. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Federal_Register_1979-07-10-_Vol_44_Iss_133_%28IA_sim_federal-register-find_1979-07-10_44_133%29.pdf.
United States Government. Federal Register 44, no. 195, October 5, 1979. Records concerning Royalty Smokeless Coal Company and Trace Fork Coal Company operations at Premier. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Federal_Register_1979-10-05-_Vol_44_Iss_195_%28IA_sim_federal-register-find_1979-10-05_44_195%29.pdf.
Walke v. Premier Pocahontas Collieries Co., 94 W. Va. 38, 117 S.E. 905 (1923). https://openjurist.org/94/wva/38/walke-v-premier-pocahontas-collieries-co.
Welch Daily News. “Honor Roll, Premier.” November 3, 1928. Referenced through surviving McDowell County genealogical records. https://www.coalexchange.com/smith/mcdowella/pafn2769.htm.
“Welch Honors Memory of 21 Dead Soldiers.” Welch Daily News, July 6, 1942. Reproduced by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/disasters/mcdowellplanecrash04.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “McDowell County.” County bibliography and archival research guide. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “McDowell County Circuit Court Case Files.” Includes Charles Bateman v. Premier-Pocahontas Collieries Company, case 267:3160, 1914. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “World War II.” Collection of contemporary newspaper material concerning the July 1942 military aircraft crash near Premier. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/military/military.html.
West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Appendix II. Mining and environmental records identifying Royalty Smokeless and Premier No. 8 in McDowell County. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://dep.wv.gov/dmr/studies%20and%20investigations/Documents/Appendix%20II.pdf.
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV, 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 Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1923. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1923.pdf.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting. “Army Transport Crashes Near Premier: July 1, 1942.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wvpublic.org/story/radio/army-transport-crashes-near-premier-july-1-1942/.
West Virginia University Libraries. “Premier Pocahontas Collieries Company Store.” West Virginia History OnView, photograph no. 003123. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/003123.
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Maps, Atlases, and Gazetteers.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/maps-atlases-and-gazetteers.
Author Note: Premier’s history survives through mine reports, railroad drawings, court cases, census schedules, company-store photographs, and the newspaper accounts of the tragic 1942 military plane crash. This article brings those scattered records together to preserve the story of a McDowell County community whose history reached far beyond its narrow coalfield hollow.