Appalachian Community Histories – Marine, McDowell County: The Rise and Abandonment of a West Virginia Coal Town
In September 1938, Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott traveled into the coalfields of McDowell County and stopped at a place called Marine. By then, the community she found was far removed from the confident industrial world that had brought railroad tracks, coal mines, company property, and workers into the hollow only a generation earlier.
Her camera found an old company store being used as housing. She photographed miners’ wives and children, unemployed workers’ families, people carrying water, sickness, tuberculosis, crowded porches, and households trying to continue after the economy that had created their town had largely disappeared. Her original federal captions repeatedly called Marine an “abandoned mining town” or an “abandoned mining community.” The photographs survive today in the Library of Congress, giving Marine something many small Appalachian coal communities never received: an extensive visual record made while people were still living among the remains of the company town.
Yet Marine’s history did not begin with abandonment.
Twenty years earlier, the Norfolk & Western Railway was extending a branch toward the Marine Smokeless Coal Company. During the early 1920s, West Virginia mine reports recorded Marine Smokeless operations at Juverna and nearby Yerba. In 1923, railroad engineers were drawing plans involving company land at Marine. In 1924, a dispute between Marine Smokeless and the Norfolk & Western reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
The surviving records tell the story of a community created by coal, connected to the outside world by railroad, and left vulnerable when the industry around which it had been organized could no longer support it.
Marine and Juverna
Researching Marine begins with a problem that has probably hidden much of its history from anyone searching under one place-name.
Marine was also Juverna.
The West Virginia State Archives place-name index lists Marine in McDowell County for the period 1920 to 1935 and adds the notation “Also Juverna.” The archives make the same connection in reverse, listing Juverna in McDowell County and identifying it as Marine.
The surviving source does not explain why both names were used or whether one belonged more closely to a post office, mining operation, railroad location, or particular section of the settlement. It would therefore be risky to invent a neat explanation that the records themselves do not provide. What the evidence does establish is that Marine and Juverna must be researched together.
That becomes especially important when Marine Smokeless Coal Company enters the record.
The West Virginia Department of Mines reported in 1921 that Marine Smokeless operated Marine No. 1 at Juverna and another operation called Ocean at Yerba. The report credited Marine Smokeless Coal Company with 56,000 tons of production that year. By 1923, the company’s operations were being identified somewhat differently. Marine Nos. 1 and 3 were listed at Juverna, while Marine No. 2 was associated with Yerba.
Those government records connect Marine, Juverna, Yerba, and Marine Smokeless into one small industrial geography. Marine was not an isolated dot on a map. It belonged to a system of mines and settlements spreading along the railroad branches and narrow valleys around Davy.
The Railroad Reaches Marine Smokeless
Coal in the mountains meant little commercially unless it could be moved.
Throughout southern West Virginia, the arrival of railroads transformed isolated valleys into industrial communities. Mine openings were cut into hillsides, tipples and sidings appeared beside the tracks, company houses climbed narrow strips of usable land, and settlements that had hardly existed a few years earlier suddenly contained hundreds of residents.
Marine’s emergence followed that pattern.
In its report for the year ending December 31, 1917, the Norfolk & Western Railway recorded an extension of its Superior Branch. Contemporary railroad reporting stated that the extension ran 1.79 miles to the operation of the Marine Smokeless Coal Company.
That places Marine Smokeless firmly within the industrial expansion of the First World War era. The railroad did not merely pass somewhere nearby. It extended infrastructure toward the company’s operation, giving Marine Smokeless a connection to the enormous transportation network that carried southern West Virginia coal toward industrial consumers far beyond McDowell County.
Railroad and coal company were consequently dependent on one another. The company needed tracks and cars to move coal out of the mountains. The railroad needed productive mines to generate freight.
Marine existed within that relationship.
Marine Nos. 1 and 3
By the early 1920s, the state’s mining records allow the community to come into clearer focus.
The 1921 Department of Mines report identified Marine No. 1 with Juverna. Two years later, the department listed Marine Nos. 1 and 3 together at Juverna, while Marine No. 2 appeared separately at Yerba. The 1923 report credited Marine Smokeless Coal Company with 68,934 tons in its company production totals.
The figure covered the company’s operations rather than proving how much coal came from any one numbered mine, but it places Marine Smokeless among the active commercial producers operating during one of McDowell County’s great coal-boom periods.
Marine was surrounded by an extraordinary industrial landscape. Coal companies across the county were developing seams, building camps, opening stores, constructing houses, and competing for labor. The railroad branches connecting those operations made places that had once been difficult to reach part of a national industrial system.
The basic arrangement of communities like Marine was shaped by necessity. There was rarely much level land. A creek might occupy the bottom of a hollow, with a road and railroad squeezed beside it. Houses were fitted wherever terrain allowed. The mine, tipple, company store, railroad, and workers’ homes became pieces of the same narrow settlement.
Company towns came to dominate the southern West Virginia coalfields. The West Virginia Encyclopedia estimates that by 1930 there were roughly 465 coal company towns in the state, concentrated heavily in southern counties including McDowell. Such communities commonly included company-owned housing and stores surrounding the mine that gave the settlement its economic reason for existing.
Marine belonged to this world.
A Company Store at the Center of Community Life
Of all the structures once associated with Marine, the company store is the one that later received the most extraordinary documentation.
Company stores occupied a complicated place in Appalachian coal history. They sold food, clothing, household goods, mining necessities, and countless other items in communities where independent merchants could be miles away. They could also serve as informal gathering places, post offices, and social centers.
At the same time, the store represented another layer of company influence over miners and their families. Housing, employment, and commerce could all be tied to the same corporation.
Across West Virginia, that arrangement was widespread. A history of company stores published through the West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that by 1922 almost 80 percent of the state’s miners lived in company houses and shopped in company stores.
Marine’s store therefore would have been more than another commercial building during the town’s productive years. It stood at the center of the economic relationship between employer and community.
What makes Marine unusual is that the story of the building continued after its original purpose had faded.
By 1938, people were living inside it.
Coal, Electricity, and Marine in 1923
Another rare glimpse of Marine survives through an engineering drawing rather than a photograph.
On October 26, 1923, the Norfolk & Western Railway prepared drawing N-8010, described by the Norfolk & Western Historical Society as a sketch showing desired locations for guy anchors on lands of Marine Smokeless Coal Company at Marine, West Virginia.
The record was connected with Norfolk & Western electrification infrastructure and identifies Marine Smokeless directly as the landowner. The surviving archive entry places the location on the Pocahontas Division and associates the drawing with railroad catenary electrification.
It is a small document in the enormous surviving paper trail of the Norfolk & Western, but for Marine it is important.
The drawing establishes that in 1923 the railroad was dealing directly with Marine Smokeless over physical infrastructure on company property. It also reminds us that a coal camp was tied into a much larger industrial machine. Above and around the miners’ houses were railroad rights-of-way, bridges, power systems, sidings, mine workings, loading facilities, roads, and company-owned land.
Marine was part of that landscape during the prosperous years of the coalfield.
Only fifteen years later, Wolcott’s photographs would show a very different place.
Marine Smokeless Goes to Court
Relations between Marine Smokeless Coal Company and the Norfolk & Western were not confined to mine sidings and engineering plans.
They also ended up in court.
On October 6, 1924, the Journal of the Supreme Court of the United States recorded a petition for a writ of certiorari in Marine Smokeless Coal Company v. Norfolk & Western Railway Company. The case had come from the Circuit Court of McDowell County, West Virginia, and attorney Thomas W. Shelton appeared for Marine Smokeless.
The company was asking the nation’s highest court to review the lower-court proceeding.
It did not succeed.
On November 17, 1924, the Supreme Court denied the petition. The official United States Reports identifies the case as No. 582 and again states that it came from the Circuit Court of McDowell County.
The published Supreme Court material does not explain enough about the underlying controversy to justify guessing what caused the dispute. The original McDowell County case file, if it survives, would be the place to answer that question. County court collections preserved by the West Virginia State Archives contain extensive records involving coal companies, railroads, property, and commercial disputes, making the Marine Smokeless file an especially promising target for future research.
Even without the lower-court papers, the case is significant. A relatively small McDowell County coal company had become entangled in litigation with one of the most powerful railroads serving the Appalachian coalfields, and the dispute traveled far enough through the legal system to reach the Supreme Court docket.
It is another reminder of how closely Marine’s fortunes were connected to the Norfolk & Western.
The Boom Does Not Last
The surviving records leave important gaps in the chronology of Marine’s decline.
There is no single document among the sources examined here that provides a convenient date on which the town’s productive life ended. It would therefore be misleading to assign a specific closing year without the mine maps, corporate papers, later Department of Mines reports, deed records, or additional newspapers needed to prove it.
What can be established is more powerful.
By September 1938, federal captions were calling Marine abandoned.
That meant a transformation had taken place within roughly two decades of the railroad expansion that had helped create the community.
The mine-centered economy upon which Marine depended had diminished severely enough that the town could be described by a federal photographer not simply as poor, but as an abandoned mining community. Yet “abandoned” did not mean empty.
People remained.
They lived in the physical shell left behind by the coal economy.
Marion Post Wolcott Comes to Marine
Marion Post Wolcott was working for the Farm Security Administration when she entered Marine in September 1938.
The FSA photography project produced one of the great documentary records of Depression-era America. Its photographers traveled through cities, farms, migrant camps, mining regions, and rural communities recording how Americans were living during economic crisis.
At Marine, Wolcott did not photograph a mine running at full production or rows of men changing shifts.
She photographed the aftermath.
One image is captioned, “Old company store in abandoned coal mining town. Marine, West Virginia. The store is occupied by three families.” The Library of Congress identifies the photograph with Marine and McDowell County and dates it to September 1938.
Other negatives move closer to the people living there.
One shows the wife of an unemployed miner with her mother and two children. Another shows the wife and children of a coal miner, with Wolcott’s caption noting that the mother was sick and had five other children.
In another photograph, the wife of an unemployed coal miner suffering from tuberculosis was living inside the old company store.
Another image records the family of a man dying from tuberculosis gathered on a porch in what Wolcott again described as the abandoned mining town of Marine.
These were not photographs made decades afterward by historians attempting to reconstruct a lost town. They were taken while families were still there.
Families Living in the Old Company Store
Perhaps no part of Marine’s surviving record better illustrates the collapse of the company-town system than the reuse of its store.
The building had once represented the presence and authority of the coal company. During the active years, miners and their families would have entered such a place to purchase necessities, conduct business, and participate in the commercial life of the camp.
By 1938, the commercial purpose had largely disappeared.
The store itself had become shelter.
The surviving FSA captions are not perfectly consistent about the number of households living there. One describes the old store as occupied by three families, while a related caption describes a family as one of five living in the abandoned company store. Rather than force those records into agreement, the safest conclusion is that multiple families were using the former commercial building as housing at the time Wolcott visited.
The contrast is difficult to miss.
A structure built for the coal economy remained after that economy had retreated, and families with connections to mining occupied the leftover space.
The building became, almost accidentally, a monument to the vulnerability of the company-town system. When a community depended heavily upon a single industrial operation, the mine’s decline could affect employment, housing, retail life, transportation, and the value of nearly everything the company had built around it.
Marine’s store survived, but its purpose had changed completely.
Water, Illness, and the Reality of 1938
Wolcott’s photographs also show why Marine’s history should not be told only through production figures and railroad mileage.
Numbers can establish that Marine Smokeless produced coal. Railroad records can establish when the tracks arrived. Court files can reconstruct disputes between corporations.
The photographs tell us what happened to people.
One negative in the Library of Congress is associated with the caption “Carrying water to one of the houses in abandoned mining community, Marine, West Virginia.” The Library notes that the image itself reached the collection without a caption and that the title was assigned from a possibly related negative, an important qualification when using it as evidence.
Other photographs require no such qualification. Wolcott’s captions identify tuberculosis, unemployment, illness, children, crowded housing, and the reuse of the company store.
Her photographs do not tell us everything about Marine. They capture one photographer’s visit during one difficult moment, and they should not be used to imply that every year of life in the community looked like September 1938.
But that moment matters.
Coal towns were built because the industry needed workers close to the mines. Marine’s photographs show what could happen when workers and families remained after the economic foundation beneath the settlement weakened.
The People Behind the Coal Statistics
One of the dangers in writing the history of a small coal town is allowing the company to become the main character.
Marine Smokeless Coal Company left records because governments counted its production, railroads served its property, engineers drew its infrastructure, and courts recorded its disputes.
The miners and their families left a much thinner institutional trail.
That imbalance does not mean they were less important. It means researchers must look elsewhere to find them.
Federal census schedules can potentially identify the households that lived at Marine or Juverna, giving names, ages, occupations, birthplaces, family relationships, immigration information, rent or ownership status, and other details. County birth, marriage, death, deed, and probate records can add another layer. Newspapers such as the Bluefield Daily Telegraph and the McDowell Times can recover mine accidents, deaths, marriages, employment notices, church events, school activities, and ordinary community news.
The McDowell Times is particularly significant because it was an important African American newspaper published in Keystone. At a time when McDowell County’s mines drew workers from the American South, Europe, and other parts of Appalachia, newspapers like it provide a path toward recovering residents who can disappear when a town is described only through corporate documents.
Marine’s history ultimately belongs to those people.
The coal company explains why the town grew.
The residents explain what the town was.
Marine, Juverna, and Yerba
Marine also reminds us that historic Appalachian communities do not always fit neatly within modern place names.
The state archives connect Marine with Juverna. Mine reports connect Marine Smokeless with both Juverna and Yerba. Marine Nos. 1 and 3 were associated with Juverna in 1923, while Marine No. 2 was associated with Yerba.
The company’s geography therefore stretched beyond a single name.
That relationship matters when trying to recover families, mine locations, railroad facilities, and newspaper references. A person who said he worked for Marine Smokeless might appear in a record under Juverna. Another operation belonging to the same company might appear under Yerba. A railroad engineer might simply write Marine.
Historical research often depends on knowing all of those names.
Searching only for “Marine, West Virginia” would leave much of the story undiscovered.
What Happened to Marine
The most revealing answer to what happened to Marine may be found by placing two surviving records side by side.
In October 1923, a Norfolk & Western engineer prepared a drawing concerning railroad electrification equipment on Marine Smokeless Coal Company land at Marine. The document belonged to a world of investment, infrastructure, engineering, coal shipments, and industrial expansion.
In September 1938, Marion Post Wolcott photographed families living in the old company store of what her federal caption called an abandoned coal mining town.
Only about fifteen years separated those records.
That is the history of Marine in miniature.
One document shows an industrial community important enough for railroad engineers to map company property and electrical infrastructure.
The other shows what remained after the industrial purpose that had created the place could no longer sustain it in the same way.
Why Marine Matters
Marine was never Welch, Keystone, Gary, or one of the coalfield communities whose names became known far outside McDowell County.
That makes its story more representative, not less.
The southern West Virginia coal boom was made from hundreds of places like Marine. Railroad tracks entered narrow valleys. Companies opened mines and built settlements. Families arrived in search of wages. Stores, houses, schools, churches, and social networks turned industrial camps into communities.
Then conditions changed.
Mines exhausted workable sections, markets rose and fell, companies reorganized, machinery reduced the demand for labor, operations closed, and families moved or struggled to remain.
Marine allows that larger history to be seen at human scale.
The Department of Mines recorded the company and its production. The Norfolk & Western documented the railroad connection and company property. The Supreme Court preserved evidence of a corporate dispute. The West Virginia State Archives preserved the confusing but essential connection between Marine and Juverna.
Then Marion Post Wolcott arrived with a camera.
Her photographs captured something the industrial reports could not: the people still living among the remains.
A mother with her children.
An unemployed miner’s family.
A woman suffering from tuberculosis.
A family gathered on a porch while a man inside was dying.
People carrying on in a community officially described as abandoned.
Marine’s mines helped feed the industrial economy that transformed McDowell County and connected the Appalachian coalfields to the wider nation. Its abandoned store and the families who occupied it reveal the other side of that transformation.
Coal companies could build towns remarkably quickly.
When the coal economy moved on, the people who had made those towns home could not always do the same.
That is why Marine deserves to be remembered.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: West Virginia 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
Norfolk & Western Railway Company. “Annual Report of the Norfolk & Western Railway Company.” Reprinted in Commercial and Financial Chronicle, March 23, 1918. Includes the statement that the Superior Branch had been extended 1.79 miles to the Marine Smokeless Coal Company operation. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/cfc/cfc_19180323.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Marine.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. Identifies Marine, McDowell County, as “Also Juverna.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamm.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Juverna.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. Identifies Juverna, McDowell County, with Marine. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamj.html
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Sketch Showing Desired Location of Guy Anchors on Lands of Marine Smokeless Coal Co. Marine W.Va.” Drawing N-8010, October 26, 1923. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives, HS-B32253. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=256371
Supreme Court of the United States. Journal of the Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1924. No. 582, Marine Smokeless Coal Company v. Norfolk & Western Railway Company. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924. https://www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/journals/scannedjournals/1924_journal.pdf
Marine Smokeless Coal Company v. Norfolk & Western Railway Company, 266 U.S. 601, 623 (1924). United States Reports. Petition for writ of certiorari denied November 17, 1924. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep266/usrep266certioraridenied/usrep266certioraridenied.pdf
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Old Company Store in Abandoned Coal Mining Town. Marine, West Virginia. The Store Is Occupied by Three Families.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017799384/
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Wife and Two Children of Coal Miner. She Is Sick, Has Five Other Children. Marine, West Virginia.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/item/2017799368/
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Wife of Unemployed Miner with Her Mother and Two Children. Marine, West Virginia.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017799504/
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Wife of Unemployed Coal Miner, Suffering from T.B., Living in Old Company Store. Abandoned Mining Town of Marine, West Virginia.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017799503/
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Family of Man Dying of T.B. Gather around on Front Porch. Abandoned Mining Town, Marine, West Virginia.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017799529/
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Mother and Grandchild of Unemployed Coal Miner. Marine, West Virginia.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017799510/
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Untitled Photo, Possibly Related to: Carrying Water to One of the Houses in Abandoned Mining Community, Marine, West Virginia.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017752368/
Wolcott, Marion Post. “Untitled Photo, Possibly Related to: Wife and Two Children of Unemployed Mine Worker.” Photograph, September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017799370/
The McDowell Times. Keystone, WV, 1904–1941. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. An important contemporary McDowell County newspaper, especially for African American community, labor, political, and coalfield history. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092050/
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126, Record Group 28. McDowell County, West Virginia, Roll 645. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “1930 Census Indexes and Other Finding Aids.” Accessed October 16, 2026. Includes the surviving Soundex index for McDowell County, West Virginia. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930/finding-aids
National Archives and Records Administration. “1930 Census Enumeration District Maps.” Fifteenth Census of the United States. West Virginia maps, Microfilm Publication M1930, Roll 35. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930/enumeration-districts-maps.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Geographic Descriptions of 1930 Census Enumeration Districts.” Microfilm Publication T1224. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930/enumeration-districts-descriptions.html
National Park Service. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1992. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500726_text
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. Smokeless Coal Operators Association Historical Records, 1886–1961. A&M 0049. Morgantown: West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2381
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. Justus Collins (1857–1934) Papers. A&M 1824. Morgantown: West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5444
Gillenwater, Mack H. “Company Towns.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised April 24, 2024. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1440
Athey, Lou. “Company Stores.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised February 19, 2024. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1425
U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. “National Mine Map Repository.” Accessed October 16, 2026. Useful for locating surviving maps under Marine Smokeless Coal Company, Marine, Juverna, and the numbered Marine mines. https://mmr.osmre.gov/
U.S. Geological Survey. “topoView: Historical Topographic Map Collection.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview
Author Note: Marine’s story survives through scattered mine reports, railroad records, court documents, and Marion Post Wolcott’s powerful 1938 photographs of the abandoned community. By bringing those sources together, this article seeks to preserve the history of a McDowell County coal town whose people and industrial past might otherwise be forgotten.