Appalachian Community Histories – Newhall, McDowell County: Nos. 6, 7, and 8 and the Coal Camp Built Along Jacobs Fork
Newhall is one of those McDowell County communities that can look small on a modern map while leaving an unexpectedly large trail in the historical record. Its name appears in coal-company maps, Norfolk and Western Railway plans, state mine reports, census schedules, federal mining studies, newspapers, post office records, company scrip, and the memories of people who grew up there. Those records reveal a community that was not simply a row of houses beside a mine. Newhall was part of a larger industrial corridor stretching through Berwind, Cucumber, Squire, Hartwell, and the upper reaches of Jacobs Fork, where coal companies and railroads transformed narrow mountain valleys into one of the most productive mining landscapes in Appalachia.
At the center of Newhall’s story were three mines, Newhall Nos. 6, 7, and 8, operated by the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company. Around them grew company housing, stores, railroad sidings, roads, schools, churches, and neighborhoods remembered by residents as the different “bottoms” of Newhall.
The mines did not all last for the same length of time. Newhall No. 6 in particular survived several changes in ownership and operation, carrying the Newhall name deep into the postwar era. By 1973, nearly sixty years after the community first took shape, the United States Bureau of Mines was still listing Newhall No. 6 among the operating mines of the Pocahontas No. 3 coalbed.
A Coal Camp Takes Shape in Big Creek District
The exact moment when Newhall became Newhall is not as simple as it might first appear.
Later coal-camp histories place the opening of the community around 1915, when the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company began developing the mines that became Newhall Nos. 6, 7, and 8. The surviving archival evidence supports a development date in the middle of the 1910s, although it leaves some uncertainty over precisely which event should be considered the community’s beginning.
Railroad records are especially important. Norfolk and Western archival material includes a plan identified as C-1697 showing a proposed siding for the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company at Newhall. The same group of records includes Jacobs Fork Branch right-of-way documents associated with the coal company in 1916. These were not merely lines drawn on paper. A siding meant that a mine could load coal directly into railroad cars and move it into the enormous Norfolk and Western transportation system serving the Pocahontas coalfield.
Postal and place-name records are slightly less clear. The West Virginia State Archives place-name register dates Newhall in McDowell County to 1918, while other postal research has suggested that a Newhall post office may have existed by 1916. The safest conclusion is that Newhall developed as an industrial community during the middle 1910s and had acquired a recognized place-name and postal identity by the closing years of World War I. The original Post Office Department appointment records could eventually settle the discrepancy.
That timing places Newhall in the great period of coalfield expansion that reshaped southern McDowell County. The New River and Pocahontas company was already developing neighboring communities such as Berwind and Canebrake, and its holdings stretched across a landscape where a company might control the mines, houses, store, land, and railroad loading facilities used by hundreds of families.
Newhall became another piece of that system.
Newhall Nos. 6, 7, and 8
The three numbered mines provide the clearest framework for understanding early Newhall.
West Virginia Department of Mines records identify Newhall Nos. 6, 7, and 8 as operations of the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company. A surviving annual report lists all three mines together under the company, showing that Newhall had developed into a multi-mine operation rather than a settlement dependent upon a single opening in the hillside.
Later compiled mine histories place Newhall No. 7 in operation from about 1916 until 1933 and Newhall No. 8 from about 1917 until 1931. No. 7 worked the valuable Pocahontas No. 3 seam, while No. 8 developed farther into the surrounding coal property. The chronology should continue to be checked year by year against the original Department of Mines reports, but it fits closely with the railroad and place-name evidence showing Newhall emerging during the same period.
The mine reports also remind us that these numbers represented dangerous workplaces filled with real people. A historical transcription from West Virginia mine records identifies miner John B. Fletcher as having been killed by a fall of slate at Newhall No. 7 while working for the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company. Mine fatalities of this kind were part of the ordinary danger of underground coal work, where roof falls, machinery, haulage, gas, explosions, and electrical accidents could transform an otherwise routine shift into a family tragedy.
For every entry naming a dead miner, many more men spent years underground and returned home after their shifts. Their wages supported the households that filled Newhall’s rows of company houses and helped create a community larger than the mines themselves.
The Railroad That Made Newhall Possible
Coal camps in southern McDowell County could not survive on coal alone. A mine without transportation had little commercial value, which makes the Norfolk and Western Railway almost as important to Newhall’s history as the coal company itself.
The railway’s Newhall siding plan ties the community directly to the Jacobs Fork Branch and the growing network that penetrated the mountains south and east of the older Dry Fork operations. As additional mines opened farther up the valleys, Newhall became part of a transportation corridor rather than an isolated endpoint.
A striking example appeared in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph in March 1930. The newspaper reported a contract valued at approximately one million dollars for construction of about five and a half miles of Norfolk and Western branch line extending from Newhall toward Crockett’s Cove. The project was connected with the continued development of the Jacobs Fork corridor toward the Virginia line.
That railroad expansion changed the meaning of Newhall.
The community had begun as a place where the New River and Pocahontas company mined coal, but the railway helped turn the surrounding valley into a continuous industrial landscape. Coal from Newhall could move outward toward the national market while railroad construction pushed farther into the mountains toward Squire and Bishop. Supplies, workers, machinery, and merchandise moved in the opposite direction.
Decades later, the corridor remained active. Norfolk and Western operating records from the 1970s still identified a Pocahontas Fuel operation at Newhall and a Newhall Storage Siding along the Jacobs Fork Branch. The industrial geography created during the early coal boom had survived long after some of the original mines and company institutions disappeared.
The Company Store and the Newhall Economy
Like many coal camps, Newhall developed around an economy in which the company could touch nearly every part of family life.
Surviving company scrip bears the name of the New River and Pocahontas Stores operation at Newhall, physical evidence that the company-store system existed specifically within the community. The wider New River and Pocahontas Stores organization had been incorporated during the same period that Newhall was developing and operated stores in communities connected with the coal company.
Scrip could be exchanged for merchandise at company stores, where mining families bought food, clothing, household goods, and other necessities. To outsiders, the pieces of metal now collected as coalfield artifacts may appear almost like tokens from another world. For the families living in places like Newhall, they were tied to weekly household survival.
A later oral-history interview with Ronald Hicks gives this system a human voice. Hicks remembered growing up in company towns where his family rarely handled cash because purchases were made through company stores using scrip. When his family moved from Caretta to Newhall, the move meant entering another community constructed around coal employment and company property.
The company-town relationship was complicated. The mine provided work, the houses provided shelter, and the store provided access to goods in a remote mountain valley. At the same time, those institutions concentrated enormous economic power in the hands of the employer. A mining family could owe its paycheck, house, store account, and sometimes even utilities or medical arrangements to different branches of the same corporate system.
Newhall was not unique in that respect. What makes it valuable historically is how much evidence of that system survives.
First Bottom, Second Bottom, and Third Bottom
Ronald Hicks’s recollections provide one of the most revealing descriptions of the physical and social geography of Newhall.
He remembered the community as divided into areas called First Bottom, Second Bottom, and Third Bottom. His family lived in Second Bottom, with relatives living nearby, while he remembered Black residents as being concentrated in Third Bottom.
That recollection places Newhall within a larger pattern found throughout the southern Appalachian coalfields. Coal companies recruited workers from the surrounding mountains, other states, immigrant communities, and the African American population of the South. Their labor forces could therefore be unusually diverse for isolated rural areas, but the communities that housed them frequently reflected the racial segregation of the era.
The company might bring different groups into the same valley to work the same coal seam while assigning housing according to race, occupation, or status.
Hicks’s memory is especially valuable because official maps alone cannot explain how residents experienced those boundaries. An engineering drawing might show lots and roads. A census might record race and occupation. An oral history tells us what people called different sections of town and how those divisions were understood by children growing up there.
Virginia Tech’s Pocahontas Mines Collection preserves a remarkable companion to that memory. A company map dated August 31, 1954, is titled “Newhall subdivision made by New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Co. situated in Big Creek District, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Although the map itself has not been digitized for general online viewing, its archival description establishes that the company formally mapped the Newhall subdivision, providing a potential key to reconstructing the streets, lots, housing pattern, and neighborhoods remembered by former residents.
Berwind-Newhall in the Federal Census
Government records sometimes blur the boundaries between Newhall and neighboring Berwind, which tells us something important about the way these communities actually developed.
The official 1940 census enumeration district descriptions used the combined name “Berwind-Newhall.” Enumeration District 24-21 included part of Berwind-Newhall and Hartwell, while District 24-22 included another part of Berwind-Newhall along with Hartwell and Squire.
That does not mean Newhall and Berwind lacked separate identities. Instead, it reflects how closely the settlements had grown together within the same company and transportation landscape.
Individual census schedules reveal the lives hidden beneath that combined label. Families included miners, tipple workers, electricians, check weighmen, children attending school, and women managing households. One documented Berwind-Newhall household included Henry Waldron, a coal-mine check weighman, while another member of the family worked at the tipple. The census recorded education, employment, rent, residence in 1935, wages, and other details that allow the coal camp to be reconstructed household by household.
The political record also recognized Newhall individually. In May 1938, the McDowell Times published the names of election registrars throughout Big Creek District. Newhall received its own entry, with Taylor Applegate and R. R. McCall identified among those handling registration there. The notice may seem like a minor newspaper item, but it shows Newhall functioning as a recognized community within the district rather than simply as the name of a mine.
People worked there, voted there, raised children there, worshiped there, and identified themselves as being from Newhall.
Depression, Fire, and the Changing No. 6 Mine
The 1930s brought severe pressures to coal communities throughout McDowell County. Demand collapsed during the Great Depression, mines reduced production or closed, and families who had come to the coalfields during earlier boom years suddenly faced uncertainty.
Newhall’s mines were not immune.
Later coalfield histories report that the No. 6 tipple burned in 1935 and that the mine closed afterward. That event deserves further confirmation through contemporary Welch or Bluefield newspaper coverage and Department of Mines reports before every detail is treated as settled, but the broader chronology is consistent with No. 6 entering a period of interruption before returning under a different arrangement.
By the early 1940s, Jean Pocahontas Coal Company was associated with mining at Newhall. A 1941 Federal Register entry identifies W. T. Williams of the Jean Pocahontas Coal Company, lists the Pioneer mine, identifies the Pocahontas No. 3 seam, and gives Newhall, West Virginia, as the shipping point. This federal record provides direct contemporary evidence that Jean Pocahontas was operating within Newhall’s coal economy by that time.
Later accounts indicate that New River and Pocahontas regained control of No. 6 in 1949 and operated it into the 1950s. Whatever corporate names appeared over the years, the old No. 6 workings continued to make Newhall an active mining place long after Nos. 7 and 8 had passed out of the original production story.
Newhall at Mid-Century
The 1950 federal census gives one of the best measures of Newhall at the height of the postwar coalfield.
The Census Bureau did not publish a separate population for Newhall. Instead, it combined Newhall with neighboring Cucumber as the unincorporated place of “Cucumber-Newhall.” The combined community contained 1,098 residents in 1950.
That figure should not be mistaken for the population of Newhall alone, but it shows that the two connected settlements formed a substantial community. More than a thousand people were living along this section of Big Creek District at a time when McDowell County itself was near the height of its population and industrial importance.
The company was still mapping Newhall during these years. Virginia Tech’s 1954 subdivision map demonstrates continuing attention to property and housing arrangements, while the Pocahontas Mines Collection contains additional material connecting Newhall with Berwind, Canebrake, Hartwell, and the wider New River and Pocahontas holdings.
The people raised in Newhall during this period often attended Big Creek High School in War. Later biographical records repeatedly connect Newhall residents with the school, showing how education tied the smaller camps into the commercial and civic center of the district.
One such resident was Ruth Belcher Goad, born at Newhall in 1924. She graduated from Big Creek High School in 1942 and later worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation during World War II before becoming a licensed practical nurse. She eventually returned to a life connected with Newhall, including membership in the Newhall Advent Christian Church. Her story illustrates something that mine statistics cannot. Children born in a coal camp grew into adults whose lives carried them far beyond the mine portal, even when Newhall remained home.
The Return of Newhall No. 6
By the 1960s, much of the original company-town world was changing. Mechanization allowed mines to produce more coal with fewer workers, older company housing systems were breaking apart, and corporate consolidation altered ownership throughout the coalfield.
Newhall No. 6 survived.
Virginia Tech holds an engineering drawing dated August 18, 1964, titled “Pocahontas Fuel Co., Inc., No. 6 Mine, Outside Operating Facilities, Newhall, West Virginia.” The existence of such a detailed company drawing on the eve of the mine’s later operating period shows that Newhall remained an industrial site worthy of substantial engineering documentation nearly half a century after the camp first developed.
Federal records take the story even farther.
On July 19, 1966, a fire occurred underground at Newhall No. 6, then identified as a Pocahontas Fuel Company operation. Federal mine-fire records state that a short circuit in a temporary cable splice ignited cable, hose, and a tire. Workers extinguished the fire with water, rock dust, and carbon dioxide. No one was killed or injured.
The incident is minor compared with the disasters that scarred other McDowell County communities, but historically it is important. It places active underground work at Newhall in the middle of the 1960s and preserves a moment from the daily hazards of a modernizing mine.
The operation continued into the next decade under Consolidation Coal Company. In a federal Bureau of Mines study based on 1973 inspection information, Newhall No. 6 appears among mines working the Pocahontas No. 3 coalbed. The survey identified Consolidation Coal Company as the operator and measured substantial methane emissions from the mine.
Newhall’s coal history, then, did not end with the first generation of company houses or with the Depression. The No. 6 operation connected the community’s original 1910s development to the mechanized coal industry of the 1970s.
Who Was Newhall Named For?
One of the most intriguing parts of Newhall’s history remains unresolved.
The West Virginia State Archives place-name register gives the community’s name and date but does not explain whom, if anyone, it commemorated. The research trail contains one tantalizing possibility. McDowell County Circuit Court records include a 1912 application involving a man named Dan A. Newhall, only a few years before the coal camp appeared.
That coincidence is worth investigating, but it is not enough to conclude that the community was named for him.
If Dan A. Newhall can be connected through corporate correspondence, deeds, railroad records, engineering files, or New River and Pocahontas company papers to the property on which the camp developed, the mystery may eventually be solved. Until then, identifying him as the namesake would go beyond the evidence.
It is the sort of small unanswered question that illustrates why community history is never truly finished. One deed, company letter, or old newspaper announcement could change what we know.
What Newhall Tells Us About the McDowell Coalfields
Newhall’s history is valuable because it captures so many pieces of the McDowell County coal story in one small place.
It began during the extraordinary expansion of the Pocahontas coalfield, when corporations, railroads, and workers pushed industrial development farther into narrow mountain valleys. Three numbered mines created the economic foundation. The Norfolk and Western connected them to national markets. Company housing and stores transformed the valley into a permanent settlement. Families divided the community into locally understood neighborhoods such as First Bottom, Second Bottom, and Third Bottom. Federal census takers eventually treated Berwind and Newhall as parts of a connected settlement, while residents continued to understand Newhall as a place of its own.
The mines changed, closed, reopened, and changed owners. No. 6 outlasted its sister operations and continued into the age of federal mine inspection and mechanized coal production. By the time a Bureau of Mines survey listed the operation in 1973, Newhall had already existed for close to six decades.
Coal production eventually declined, but the community did not disappear from memory.
Newhall survives in the names on census schedules, the lines of a 1954 subdivision map, an old railroad siding plan, pieces of company scrip, church records, mine reports, obituaries, and oral histories. It survives in the recollections of children who knew which bottom they lived in and which relatives lived across the creek. It survives in families who still describe parents and grandparents as being from Newhall even when later generations scattered across Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Florida, and elsewhere.
That may be the most important lesson contained in the records. A coal camp was never only a mine.
For the company, Newhall could be Nos. 6, 7, and 8. For the Norfolk and Western, it could be a siding or a point along the Jacobs Fork Branch. For the Census Bureau, it could become Berwind-Newhall or Cucumber-Newhall.
For the people who lived there, it was home.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Newhall Subdivision Made by New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Co. Situated in Big Creek District, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 31, 1954. Pocahontas Mines Collection, Ms.2004.002-a, box 578. https://aspace-dev.cloud.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/109252
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Pocahontas Fuel Co., Inc., No. 6 Mine, Outside Operating Facilities, Newhall, West Virginia, No Mine Workings.” August 18, 1964. Pocahontas Mines Collection, box 436. https://aspace-dev.cloud.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/top_containers/25720
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Pocahontas Mines Collection, 1883–1997. Ms.2004.002. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3408
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Plan Showing Proposed Siding for the New River & Pocahontas Consolidated Co., Newhall, W.Va.” Drawing C-1697. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=133738
Norfolk & Western Railway. Jacobs Fork Branch Right-of-Way Records, including New River & Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company property and Cucumber Branch materials. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=133738
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1929. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1929. 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 Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Charleston, WV. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population: Volume I, Number of Inhabitants. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952. Includes Cucumber-Newhall, McDowell County, population 1,098. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-1/vol-01-51.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population: Characteristics of the Population, West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-2/15191523v2p48ch1.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population: Characteristics of the Population, West Virginia. Detailed population tables for Cucumber-Newhall. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-2/15191523v2p48ch2.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. Records of Appointments of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M841. Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Newhall.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamn.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia: McDowell County, Big Creek District.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia State Archives. McDowell County Circuit Court Case Files. Includes Dan A. Newhall’s 1912 application to carry a pistol and litigation involving the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
The McDowell Times (Keystone, WV). “Registrars Are Named for Coming Election.” May 6, 1938, 3. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/1938-05-06/ed-1/seq-3/
The McDowell Times. Keystone, WV, 1904–1941. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County History Sources.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. West Virginia Geological Survey County Geologic Report 30. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10446.htm
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Publications, Maps, & Data Catalog. Entry for Ray V. Hennen and Robert M. Gawthrop, Wyoming and McDowell Counties, 1915. https://downloads.wvgs.wvnet.edu/pubcat/docs/WVGES_Publication_Catalog.pdf
Hicks, Ronald. Interview by Mary Martinez. October 28, 2018. WCU Oral History Collection, Western Carolina University Hunter Library. Southern Appalachian Digital Collections. https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/search/interview-with-ronald-hicks-36070
United States Bureau of Mines. Coal Mines, Underground Mine Fires, 1950–1977. Entry for Newhall No. 6, Pocahontas Fuel Company, July 19, 1966. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/234371/cdc_234371_DS1.pdf
United States Bureau of Mines. Methane Emission from U.S. Coal Mines in 1973: A Survey. Information Circular 8659. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1974. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/8911/cdc_8911_DS1.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Legislative Hand Book and Manual and Official Register, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_select.aspx/
PostalHistory.com. “West Virginia Post Offices: McDowell County.” Lists Newhall from 1916. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=McDowell&pagenum=4&searchtext=&state=WV&task=display
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://search.worldcat.org/title/666823075
Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. 1963. Reprint, Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2002. https://wvupressonline.com/node/35
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/
Lewis, Ronald L. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813192741/black-coal-miners-in-america/
Friedl, Joseph. A History of Education in McDowell County, West Virginia, 1858–1976. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1975. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
McDowell County Centennial, 1858–1958. 1958. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. William Archer, Journalist, Research Papers Regarding McDowell and Mercer Counties. A&M 4388. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/agents/people/10614
Author Note: Newhall’s story is a reminder that even the smallest coal communities can leave behind a rich historical record of work, family, industry, and everyday life. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of the miners and families who called Newhall home while encouraging further research into the people and places that shaped McDowell County.