Appalachian Community Histories – Wilcoe, McDowell County: Tug River, the First Courthouse, U.S. Steel, and Gary No. 1
The narrow valley at Wilcoe carries more layers of McDowell County history than its size might suggest. Long before coke ovens burned beside the railroad and United States Steel miners disappeared into the mountains at Gary No. 1, this place along the Tug Fork had already served as a settlement, a postal community, and, for a brief period, the seat of county government.
Then industry arrived with astonishing speed.
Railroad tracks were laid beside the river. A sprawling yard appeared. Mines opened. Coke ovens, company houses, stores, churches, and a school followed. The old community known as Tug River acquired a new name, Wilcoe, while becoming the northern entrance to one of the largest coal-mining systems ever developed in Appalachia.
Wilcoe’s surviving records are unusually rich for a small McDowell County community, but they are scattered beneath different names. Nineteenth-century sources may call the place Tug River or refer to the mouth of Mill Creek, while industrial records can identify Wilcoe Yard, Gary No. 1, Operation No. 1, or the larger United States Coal & Coke operation.
Taken together, those records tell the story of a place that passed from courthouse country to coal country within little more than a generation.
A County Seat Before the Coal Boom
McDowell County was created by the Virginia General Assembly in 1858, five years before West Virginia became a state. In its earliest years, county government was remarkably unsettled. Roads were poor, communities were small, and rival sections of the county competed for the courthouse and the political influence that came with it.
After the Civil War, the present Wilcoe area briefly won that contest.
The McDowell County Commission’s official history states that in 1866 the West Virginia Legislature fixed the county seat near the mouth of Mill Creek at what is now Wilcoe. A log building was constructed there and became the county courthouse. The West Virginia State Archives likewise records that a log courthouse was built in 1866 when Wilcoe was designated the county seat.
It did not remain there long.
According to the State Archives chronology, the court moved again in 1867. Other historical accounts give slightly different dates for the transfers among Wilcoe, Perryville, and the sites used during McDowell County’s early courthouse disputes. A state history of the “Courthouse Wars,” for example, places the removal toward the Wilcoe area during the Civil War and the return to Perryville in 1872. Such disagreements are one reason the earliest courthouse history should be described cautiously rather than forced into a perfectly neat timeline.
What is certain is more important than the disputed details. Before Welch existed as McDowell County’s industrial and governmental center, the valley later called Wilcoe briefly contained the county courthouse.
The State Archives notes that the Wilcoe courthouse building itself reportedly survived until 1901, decades after county government had left it behind. By then, another transformation was beginning that would overwhelm nearly every trace of the earlier settlement.
Tug River Before Wilcoe
The community was not originally called Wilcoe.
West Virginia State Archives place-name records identify Tug River in McDowell County as the community that became Wilcoe. The archive separately lists Wilcoe, sometimes rendered historically as Wilco, as the former Tug River post office.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report provides a more precise chronology. According to that state-sponsored historical survey, a post office was established at Tug River in 1848. The settlement therefore possessed an official identity decades before the coal boom reached the valley.
For most of the nineteenth century, Tug River belonged to an isolated mountain county where agriculture and small-scale local exchange remained more important than industrial mining. The Tug Fork and its tributaries shaped travel and settlement. Level land was scarce, and the steep ridges rising above the river limited where buildings and roads could go.
That geography would later dictate the shape of the coal town as well.
The Historic American Landscapes Survey describes the mountains around the Wilcoe end of Gary Hollow as rising to roughly 2,000 feet and notes how settlements, transportation routes, houses, and industrial facilities were squeezed into the valley floors. The landscape that made nineteenth-century transportation difficult would become the same landscape engineers had to reshape for railroad tracks, mine facilities, coke ovens, and company houses.
U.S. Steel Comes to the Tug Fork
The quiet world of Tug River changed at the beginning of the twentieth century.
United States Steel had been created in 1901 as an industrial corporation of extraordinary scale. Steelmaking required enormous quantities of coal and coke, and U.S. Steel wanted dependable supplies under its own corporate control. In 1902, its United States Coal & Coke Company began developing approximately 50,000 acres of coal-bearing property in McDowell County along the Tug Fork and its tributaries.
The speed of development was remarkable.
A professional mining paper published by Howard N. Eavenson in 1915 stated that construction began in 1902 and that coal from the first three plants was already being shipped by December of that year. Additional plants opened in 1903, 1904, 1905, 1907, and 1908. Eventually twelve plants served eighteen mines within the larger United States Coal & Coke system.
An even earlier account appeared in the Engineering and Mining Journal on July 3, 1909. It described twelve mines already operating at Gary, working Pocahontas coal seams roughly four and a half to eight feet thick. During April 1909, the mines averaged approximately 9,000 tons of coal per day, and the company had erected more than 2,100 coke ovens. Most of the mines were drift operations, but Mine No. 1 was different. It was reached through a shaft approximately 180 feet deep.
That No. 1 operation belonged to Wilcoe.
The former courthouse settlement was becoming the beginning of an industrial empire.
Wilcoe Yard Gives the Community a New Name
Coal production on that scale required a railroad capable of moving enormous numbers of loaded cars.
The Norfolk & Western Railway supplied it.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey dates construction of Wilcoe Yard to 1902 and 1903, placing it approximately a mile from the old Tug River settlement. The yard served mines along the Norfolk & Western’s Tug Fork Branch, whose main line was constructed through communities including Havaco, Wilcoe, Gary, Venus, Thorpe, Pageton, Anawalt, and Leckie between 1902 and 1909.
Norfolk & Western engineering records preserve the physical scale of this railroad landscape. One surviving company drawing covers the south end of Wilcoe Yard toward Gary Wye and shows proposed additional tracks. Related drawings document retaining work, bridge alterations, and siding facilities associated with United States Coal & Coke’s industrial plants.
Eventually the railroad identity overtook the older one.
On April 1, 1910, according to the Coal Heritage Survey, the Tug River post office was renamed Wilcoe after Wilcoe Yard. The settlement that had existed for decades as Tug River was now officially tied by name to the railroad infrastructure of the coal boom.
It was a fitting change. The railroad had not merely arrived in the community. It had changed the reason the community mattered.
Gary No. 1 and the Making of Wilcoe
Wilcoe became associated with Gary Operation No. 1, the first numbered operation in the great U.S. Steel development.
By 1912, Wilcoe had become a recognizable company coal town. The Coal Heritage Survey, drawing in part from contemporary Sanborn fire-insurance maps, records coke ovens, houses, churches, a school, a drug store, and a company store.
A remarkable Norfolk & Western archival photograph dated around 1913 makes the industrial connection even more direct. Its catalog description identifies the scene as “Wilcoe, WV USS Operation No. 1 coke ovens on Tug Fork Branch.” The image preserves Wilcoe only a few years after the postal name change, when rows of coke ovens still formed part of the active industrial landscape.
The surrounding Gary Hollow operation grew almost beyond comparison.
The Library of Congress Historic American Landscapes Survey identifies fourteen historic underground mines within the broader Gary landscape and describes the United States Coal & Coke development as what had been the largest coal-mining operation in the world. During its first eight years, the Gary mines produced more than nine million tons of coal and employed more than 3,000 people.
Wilcoe stood at the northern edge of this enormous system, where the old Tug River settlement, Gary No. 1, Wilcoe Yard, the Tug Fork, company housing, coke ovens, and the road south toward Gary all converged.
The 1905 Mine Explosion
Industrial development brought wages, rail connections, stores, and rapid population growth, but it also brought the dangers of underground mining.
On February 26, 1905, an explosion occurred at a mine identified in later government records as the Grapevine Mine at Wilcoe.
The modern West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training lists the operator as Grapevine Coal Company and records seven fatalities. A later United States Bureau of Mines publication also indexed the “Grapevine mine, Wilcoe, W. Va., explosion” among major historical mine accidents.
Contemporary newspapers created a much more confused picture.
The West Virginia State Archives groups the incident under “WILCOE/GRAPEVINE” and identifies three contemporary newspaper reports. The Wheeling Intelligencer announced on February 27 that fifteen bodies had already been removed. The Huntington Advertiser carried the headline “23 Miners Entombed.” The following day’s Intelligencer reported that no additional bodies had been recovered.
Some nationally circulated reports even identified the mine as a United States Coal & Coke shaft and predicted twenty-three deaths. Those early accounts clearly conflict with the later official state disaster table, which names Grapevine Coal Company and records seven victims.
The contradiction is worth preserving rather than smoothing away. Mine disasters generated rumors almost immediately. Reporters worked from incomplete lists, rescue operations were still underway, and wire-service dispatches repeated information before anyone had established a final casualty count or even the correct corporate identity.
For Wilcoe, the 1905 explosion is therefore both a story of mining danger and a reminder that primary sources must sometimes be read against one another.
A Town Built Around Work and Family
Industrial records can make Wilcoe seem like little more than Mine No. 1, railroad tracks, coke ovens, and production statistics.
People made it something more.
The larger Gary Hollow workforce included Appalachian whites, African Americans, and immigrants from several European countries. The Historic American Landscapes Survey describes Wilcoe and the neighboring company towns as home to a diverse but segregated workforce. Company planners provided houses, churches, schools, streets, gardens, cemeteries, recreation areas, and other facilities necessary for permanent communities.
That did not mean everyone occupied the community equally.
Housing reflected status within the industrial hierarchy, while race influenced where families lived, worshiped, attended school, and used recreational facilities. Even into the 1950s, the larger Gary operation remained heavily segregated. The federal landscape study notes that housing was mostly segregated and that churches and recreational facilities remained strictly divided by race.
At the same time, surviving photographs show that Wilcoe developed a commercial life of its own. The Hal Scrugham collection at West Virginia University, dating principally from the 1920s, includes a photograph specifically cataloged as a “View of commercial area in Wilcoe, W. Va.” It survives among photographs of mine entrances, tipples, industrial plants, and other portions of the U.S. Coal & Coke landscape.
These records help restore a town that engineering drawings alone cannot show. Wilcoe had clerks and teachers as well as miners, women shopping and working in stores, children walking to school, congregations meeting in churches, railroad employees changing shifts, and families building ordinary lives beside an extraordinary concentration of heavy industry.
The Wilcoe Boycott of 1940
One of the most revealing surviving glimpses of community life appeared in The McDowell Times on December 20, 1940.
The newspaper, which served Black readers in the McDowell County coalfield, reported that many Black residents had begun boycotting a Wilcoe beer garden operated by Steve and Pauline Colipiche. The dispute began after Pauline Colipiche accused Alberta Henderson, a Black woman employed as her maid, of stealing $300 from a safe.
According to the newspaper, Henderson had already spent more than two weeks in the county jail by the time the article appeared. At a preliminary hearing, the paper reported, no evidence was presented showing that she had taken the money. Nevertheless, a Wilcoe justice of the peace held Henderson for action by the grand jury because she supposedly had the best opportunity to commit the theft. Bond was set at $500.
The reaction within Wilcoe was economic.
Black patrons who had previously frequented the establishment said they would stop going there and urged others to do the same. The newspaper reported that on a Saturday when the beer garden would ordinarily have been busy, relatively few customers appeared and nearly all were white.
The story reveals a side of coal-town history easily lost when the focus remains entirely on mines and corporate management. Wilcoe’s Black residents were not simply a labor category recorded in company employment tables. They created community networks, made judgments about local injustice, and used collective economic action in response.
A boycott in a small McDowell County coal town might not have entered national civil-rights histories, but to the people involved it was immediate, organized, and local.
Wilcoe Yard and the Railroad Community
Mining could not have created Wilcoe without the Norfolk & Western.
Coal had to move constantly. Empty cars had to be delivered, loaded cars gathered, trains assembled, switches maintained, and traffic coordinated through a railroad network serving mine after mine along the Tug Fork.
Wilcoe Yard became part of that machinery.
Norfolk & Western drawings preserve proposed tracks running from the south end of the yard toward Gary Wye, while other plans document sidings connected with U.S. Coal & Coke facilities. A 1912 railroad diagram of the Pocahontas and Flat Top coalfields also identifies Wilcoe within the gathering-point system that connected branch mines to the larger railroad.
This made Wilcoe home not only to miners but to railroad labor.
Conductors, brakemen, switchmen, engineers, firemen, yard crews, track workers, clerks, and supervisors became part of the community created by coal. Their work connected a small Appalachian valley directly to furnaces and mills hundreds of miles away.
The railroad and the mine were therefore two halves of the same industrial system. One removed coal from beneath McDowell County. The other made that coal valuable by carrying it to market.
Wilcoe in the Mature U.S. Steel Era
By the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Wilcoe was no longer a new coal camp.
Families had lived there for decades. Children born after the first mines opened were raising children of their own. Churches, schools, businesses, company facilities, and the railroad had become part of a settled community landscape.
The larger Gary operation continued to change around it.
During the 1940s, the coalfield prospered under wartime demand. In 1947, U.S. Coal & Coke opened an enormous cleaning and preparation plant at Alpheus, between Gary and Wilcoe. In 1950, corporate restructuring replaced the United States Coal & Coke name with United States Steel’s Gary District.
Mechanization increased as well.
Machines could cut and load more coal with fewer men. Production might remain high even while employment declined, weakening the connection between tonnage and population that had built the coal towns in the first place.
Wilcoe was entering a period in which the industrial system could become more productive while the human community supporting it became smaller.
From Company Town to the City of Gary
By the 1960s, the relationship between U.S. Steel and Gary Hollow was changing dramatically.
Families began leaving as employment became less secure. According to the Historic American Landscapes Survey, the population of Gary Hollow fell from approximately 8,400 in 1960 to about 3,000 in 1970. U.S. Steel began transferring houses to private ownership, donating some buildings, and demolishing others.
The company also helped begin the process of municipal incorporation.
Gary officially incorporated on July 1, 1971, following a popular vote. West Virginia Blue Book records specifically state that the new municipality included Wilcoe along with Gary, Thorpe, Elbert, and Filbert.
For Wilcoe, this represented another change of identity.
The nineteenth-century Tug River settlement had become Wilcoe. The independent Wilcoe company town had now become a section of the incorporated city of Gary.
Coal remained economically essential, but the corporate town system itself was ending.
The End of the U.S. Steel System
The decline did not arrive on a single day.
Changing steel markets, mechanization, competition, corporate restructuring, mine economics, and decades of population loss gradually weakened Gary Hollow. Shops closed. Houses disappeared. Mine facilities were dismantled or abandoned. The neighborhoods that had once existed because thousands of workers needed to live near their jobs became increasingly difficult to sustain.
The Coal Heritage Survey identifies 1986 as the final closing year for the Gary Hollow mines after a prolonged series of layoffs and shutdowns. The Library of Congress landscape study likewise places the end of United States Steel’s mining operations in the area in 1986, although other operators continued some mining afterward.
By then, Wilcoe Yard no longer occupied the place in the coal transportation network it once had. Many industrial structures were gone, and nature began reclaiming former work sites and residential ground.
The town U.S. Steel had helped build was becoming a postindustrial community.
What Remains of Wilcoe
Wilcoe did not disappear.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey still identified historic resources in the community. Its property inventory includes the Wilcoe School, dated to about 1925, along Riverside Drive, along with other surviving early twentieth-century structures.
The larger Gary Hollow survey found hundreds of historic residential and community buildings still standing, even though most of the mine and processing infrastructure had vanished. Roads, houses, retaining walls, railroad grades, industrial ruins, altered hillsides, and scattered foundations continue to show how thoroughly the valley was transformed.
Photographs preserve still more.
West Virginia University retains the old view of Wilcoe’s commercial district. Norfolk & Western archives preserve the No. 1 coke ovens and engineering drawings of the yard. Sanborn maps record buildings that have disappeared. Census schedules can restore the names of the families who lived inside the houses. Mine reports preserve workers, accidents, and production. Newspapers preserve weddings, court cases, businesses, deaths, community arguments, and moments like the 1940 boycott that corporate records might never mention.
There is even a dedicated Goldenseal archival collection titled “Wilcoe – a McDowell County Coal Town,” evidence that historians and former residents recognized the importance of preserving the community’s social history as well as its industrial one.
Why Wilcoe Matters
Wilcoe tells the history of McDowell County in miniature.
It began as Tug River, a small settlement in an isolated mountain county. For a short period, a log courthouse made the area a center of county government. Then the railroad arrived and transformed the meaning of the valley.
United States Coal & Coke opened Gary No. 1. Wilcoe Yard filled with railroad cars. Coke ovens burned beside the Tug Fork. Company houses, stores, churches, and a school appeared. Miners from Appalachia, Black families from elsewhere in the South, European immigrants, railroad workers, merchants, teachers, and company officials built lives around the industrial system.
The community became part of something enormous. Coal leaving Wilcoe entered a national steel economy that helped build railroads, factories, cities, ships, bridges, and the industrial machinery of two world wars.
Yet Wilcoe’s most important history may not be measured in tons of coal.
It survives in the courthouse that once stood near Mill Creek, in the change from Tug River to Wilcoe, in families who remained for generations, in miners entering No. 1, in railroad crews working the yard, in schoolchildren and church congregations, and in Black residents who could organize a boycott when they believed one of their neighbors had been treated unjustly.
Wilcoe was never simply a mine camp.
It was a place that existed before U.S. Steel, was remade by U.S. Steel, and survived the industrial world that U.S. Steel eventually left behind.
That makes its history larger than the ruins of Gary No. 1. Wilcoe connects the rural McDowell County of the nineteenth century with the industrial coalfield of the twentieth, preserving both histories in the same narrow valley along the Tug Fork.
Sources & Further Reading
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
West Virginia Division of Culture and History. “Wilcoe.” West Virginia Historic Property Inventory, Form MD-0995. 1991. Reproduced and cited in Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Sanborn Map Company. Fire Insurance Maps of Gary and Wilcoe, McDowell County, West Virginia. New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1912. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/
Sanborn Map Company. Fire Insurance Maps of Gary and Wilcoe, McDowell County, West Virginia. New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1924. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/
Historic American Landscapes Survey. Gary Hollow, 38 Church Street, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia. HALS No. WV-6. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0557/
Historic American Landscapes Survey. Gary Hollow. HALS No. WV-6. Washington, DC: National Park Service and Library of Congress, 2020. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/habshaer/wv/wv0500/wv0557/data/wv0557data.pdf
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Wilcoe, WV USS Operation No. 1 Coke Ovens on Tug Fork Branch.” Photograph, ca. 1913. DS00425. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=94454
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Partial Map Copy Covering South End of Wilcoe Yard to North End of Gary Wye Showing Additional Proposed Tracks.” Drawing 13140-D. HS-E00819. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=136037
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Diagram of Pocahontas-Flat Top Coal Fields Showing Distances from Branch Line Mines to Gathering Points.” Drawing 8933-B, June 24, 1912. HS-H10090. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=114604
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. Hal Scrugham, Collector, Photographs of Town of Gary and of Local Coal and Coke Plant. A&M 4306. Morgantown: West Virginia University. Includes “View of Commercial Area in Wilcoe, W. Va.” https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6376
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Tug River.” West Virginia Archives and History. Lists Tug River in McDowell County as the community that became Wilcoe. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamt.html
McDowell County Commission. “History of McDowell County, West Virginia.” McDowell County Commission. https://mcdowellcountycommission.com/history/
Carnes, Eva Margaret. “The Courthouse Wars.” West Virginia Review, 1944. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/counties/courthousewars.html
National Park Service. McDowell County Courthouse. National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form. Washington, DC: National Park Service. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Mcdowell-county-courthouse.pdf
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “WV Mine Disasters 1884 to Present.” Charleston: State of West Virginia. Entry for the February 26, 1905 Grapevine Mine explosion at Wilcoe. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” West Virginia State Archives. Includes contemporary newspaper references for the Wilcoe and Grapevine explosion of February 26, 1905. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“Explosion in Mine: Fifteen Dead Bodies Have Already Been Taken from the Shaft.” Wheeling Intelligencer, February 27, 1905. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“23 Miners Entombed.” Huntington Advertiser, February 27, 1905. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
“No More Bodies Taken from Mine.” Wheeling Intelligencer, February 28, 1905. Indexed by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
The McDowell Times. “Wilcoe Beer Garden Boycotted by Negroes in Theft Accusation.” December 20, 1940. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/1940-12-20/ed-1/seq-1/
The McDowell Times. May 19, 1916. Advertisement for United States Coal & Coke Company miners and coke workers at Gary. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/1916-05-19/ed-1/seq-2/
Walker. “Coal Mining Methods at Gary, West Virginia.” Engineering and Mining Journal 88, no. 1 (July 3, 1909): 6–9. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1909-07-03-Vol_88_Iss_1%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1909-07-03_88_1%29.pdf
Eavenson, Howard N. “Safety Methods and Organization of United States Coal & Coke Co.” American Institute of Mining Engineers, 1915. https://www.onetunnel.org/documents/safety-methods-and-organization-of-united-states-coal-coke-co-
West Virginia State Archives. McDowell County Circuit Court Case Files. Charleston: West Virginia State Archives. Includes numerous cases involving United States Coal and Coke Company and Norfolk & Western Railway. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
Alexander, Irving. “Wilcoe: The People of a Coal Town.” Goldenseal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 28–33. https://archive.wvculture.org/goldenseal/gsauthor.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Wilcoe: A McDowell County Coal Town.” Goldenseal Magazine Collection, box 17, folder 1. Charleston: West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2055.html
Garay, Ronald G. U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. https://utpress.org/9781572337978/u-s-steel-and-gary-west-virginia/
Schust, Alex P. Gary Hollow: A History of the Largest Coal Mining Operation in the World. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2005. https://www.worldcat.org/title/61443211
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
Schust, Alex P., and Mason Y. Cooper. Tug Fork: Norfolk & Western Branch Line. Roanoke, VA: Norfolk & Western Historical Society. https://www.nwhs.org/commissary/books-nwhs.html
Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2001. Originally published 1963. https://wvupressonline.com/node/35
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/
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/
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://books.google.com/books/about/Wyoming_and_McDowell_Counties.html?id=MsgbAAAAMAAJ
National Park Service. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County, West Virginia. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. Washington, DC: National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500726_text
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department. Washington, DC: National Archives. Search under both Tug River and Wilcoe, McDowell County. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
United States Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Population, West Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41033935v47-52ch1.pdf
Appalachian Regional Commission. “McDowell County, West Virginia.” Washington, DC: Appalachian Regional Commission. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/mcdowell-west-virginia/
Author Note: Wilcoe’s history reaches much farther back than its better-known years as a U.S. Steel coal community, beginning with Tug River and McDowell County’s unsettled courthouse era. I hope this history helps preserve both sides of Wilcoe’s story, from the families who called the valley home to the mines, coke ovens, and railroad yard that transformed it.