Appalachian Community Histories – Thorpe, McDowell County: U.S. Steel, Gary Nos. 4, 5, and 11, and Life Along the Tug Fork
Along the Tug Fork east of Gary, the houses of Thorpe still occupy the narrow pieces of usable ground between river, road, railroad, and mountain. Much of the industrial machinery that once defined the community has disappeared, but the shape of the old coal town remains visible. Company houses stand where generations of mining families lived, wooded hills rise almost immediately behind them, and fragments of coke ovens survive as reminders that Thorpe once belonged to one of the largest corporate coal operations in Appalachia.
Thorpe was not built gradually around a courthouse, crossroads, or agricultural settlement. It was created during the rapid expansion of the United States Coal & Coke Company, the U.S. Steel subsidiary that transformed Gary Hollow during the opening years of the twentieth century. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey identifies Thorpe with three U.S. Coal & Coke operations, Gary Nos. 4, 5, and 11, and records a company store, schools, churches, barbershops, and a theater within the community.
That description only hints at Thorpe’s larger importance. Coal dug beneath these mountains entered a national industrial system stretching from McDowell County to northern steel mills. At the same time, Appalachian families, African American miners, and immigrants from Europe created lives in a place that had been planned primarily to produce coal.
Thorpe began as a company town, but the people who lived there made it a community.
U.S. Steel Comes to McDowell County
Thorpe’s story begins before the town had a name.
United States Steel was formed in 1901 at a moment when American industrial corporations were becoming larger and more vertically integrated. Producing steel required enormous quantities of coal, coke, iron ore, limestone, transportation, and labor, and control over those resources offered a major advantage.
In McDowell County, U.S. Steel found some of the finest metallurgical coal in the country.
Development by the United States Coal & Coke Company began in 1902. A contemporary technical account published in the Engineering and Mining Journal in 1909 explained that the company had leased approximately 50,000 acres in McDowell County and had begun prospecting and development seven years earlier. By 1909, twelve mines were operating, working Pocahontas coal seams ranging from roughly four and a half to eight feet thick. Production during April of that year averaged about 9,000 tons per day.
The transformation occurred with remarkable speed. The Historic American Landscapes Survey later summarized the development by noting that Gary Hollow went from farmland to twelve operating coal mines in ten communities within eight years. During those first eight years, the Gary mines produced more than nine million tons of coal and employed more than 3,000 people.
Thorpe emerged within that industrial expansion.
Jared, Robinson, and the Name Thorpe
Even the town’s name presents a small historical mystery.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey states that the settlement was established in 1905 and originally called Jared. According to the survey, the post office was renamed Robinson in 1907 and then Thorpe in 1910.
The West Virginia State Archives preserves a slightly different trail. Its historical place-name index lists Jared in McDowell County for 1906 through 1920 and associates the name with Thorpe, while the separate Thorpe entry appears in 1911 and describes the place simply as “Former Jared.”
The two records do not fit together perfectly. The survey’s intermediate Robinson name may ultimately prove correct, but the surviving state index does not establish the same sequence clearly enough to treat every date as unquestioned fact. Post Office Department site reports and postmaster appointment records held by the National Archives would be the strongest sources for settling the chronology.
What is certain is that Jared gave way to Thorpe during the first decade of U.S. Coal & Coke’s development, and by the 1910s Thorpe was firmly tied to the company’s numbered mine system.
Gary Nos. 4, 5, and 11
Unlike some coal camps that revolved around one opening, Thorpe served several mining operations.
The Coal Heritage Survey identifies Gary Nos. 4, 5, and 11 with the community. Mine development in this section of the Tug Fork valley began during the first years of U.S. Coal & Coke’s expansion, when new openings, tipples, coke ovens, railroad sidings, and houses appeared almost simultaneously.
A 1915 paper by United States Coal & Coke engineer Howard N. Eavenson helps show how rapidly the larger system developed. Eavenson reported that construction began in 1902, followed by another plant in 1903, two in 1904, two in 1905, two in 1907, and two more in 1908. By 1915 the company had twelve plants serving eighteen mine openings, although an industrial downturn had temporarily left several idle.
Thorpe’s identification with No. 4 is especially well documented by an unusual primary source.
In 1917, the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia heard Cox v. United States Coal & Coke Company, a lawsuit arising from an accident near the company’s No. 11 tipple. The court’s statement of facts explained that the injured worker had walked upriver to “mine No. 4, or Thorpe” to purchase a cap. The opinion placed No. 11 about a mile from No. 4 and described the railroad, company siding, tipple, county road, and nearby mine settlements in remarkable detail.
For historians, the case does more than document an accident. It fixes Thorpe directly to Mine No. 4 in a contemporary legal record and gives a glimpse of how closely the mining communities were connected.
A worker might sleep near one mine, work at another, walk to Thorpe for a purchase, and follow the railroad tracks home.
Coal, Coke, and the Steel Mills
Coal was only the beginning of the industrial process.
Much of Gary Hollow’s coal was valuable because it could be converted into coke, the carbon-rich fuel essential to blast-furnace steelmaking. The 1909 Engineering and Mining Journal reported that U.S. Coal & Coke had large blocks of beehive coke ovens at eight of its mines, totaling 2,151 ovens. About half of Gary’s coal was being converted into coke locally, while the remainder was shipped as raw coal and could be coked elsewhere. The article specifically noted shipments connected with steel works at Joliet and South Chicago, Illinois, and Sharon, Pennsylvania.
Thorpe participated directly in that landscape.
Remnants of its beehive ovens survived long after active coking ended, and the Historic American Landscapes Survey later identified surviving coke ovens at Thorpe and Elbert as among the relatively few important industrial remnants left in Gary Hollow.
During the boom years, however, the scene would have been entirely different. Loaded coal cars moved along the railroad. Smoke rose from industrial plants and ovens. Miners traveled between houses and mine portals while coke workers tended rows of glowing ovens beside the tracks.
By 1916, the larger Gary system was operating on a scale that would have been difficult to imagine only fifteen years earlier. A United States Coal & Coke Company advertisement in the McDowell Times announced eleven mines and 2,000 coke ovens working six days each week while the company sought another thousand miners and coke drawers.
Thorpe was one part of that enormous machine.
A Company Town Along the Tug Fork
The physical form of Thorpe was dictated by both corporate planning and mountain geography.
The Tug Fork passes through the community, joined nearby by Turnhole Branch, Harmon Branch, and Leslie Branch. Steep forested slopes rise around the narrow valley, leaving limited space for houses, mine facilities, railroad tracks, and roads. The Coal Heritage Survey found a mixture of single-family houses and duplexes with a smaller number of commercial buildings still occupying the settlement.
During the company period, nearly every part of daily life was influenced by U.S. Coal & Coke.
The company did not simply open a mine and wait for workers to arrive. Remote coal operations required housing and services if they were going to maintain a permanent labor force. Across Gary Hollow, U.S. Coal & Coke constructed houses, churches, schools, roads, recreational facilities, and other community buildings. The Historic American Landscapes Survey describes Thorpe and the neighboring Gary communities as model company towns occupied by a diverse but segregated workforce. Their landscapes included houses, churches, schools, gardens, privies, fences, sidewalks, streets, cemeteries, and recreational grounds.
Thorpe had a company store, barbershops, schools, churches, and a theater. Those places created a social world beyond the mine portal. A miner could finish a shift underground and return to streets where children were walking home from school, families were buying necessities, church congregations were gathering, and neighbors were exchanging news.
Yet the same system that provided these institutions gave the corporation unusual authority over everyday life.
Employment, housing, and community services were deeply connected. Losing a job could affect far more than a paycheck when the employer had also shaped the town in which a worker lived.
Walking the Railroad to Thorpe
The 1917 Cox case preserves one of the clearest snapshots of ordinary movement through the community.
The court recorded that a public county road ran along the opposite side of the river from the railroad between Thorpe and the nearby mines. During winter, however, the road was generally muddy. Pedestrians frequently used the Norfolk & Western tracks instead, a practice company officials knew about.
That small detail brings the early town to life.
The railroad was the economic artery that allowed Thorpe to exist, carrying coal and coke away from the mines, but it also became part of the pedestrian landscape used by the people who lived there. Workers walked beside loaded cars and industrial sidings because the railroad offered a more practical route than the muddy road.
The court also described the No. 11 tipple as standing partly on company land and partly on railroad property, with the company siding elevated above the main line. Coal was being cleaned as cars stood beneath the tipple when a piece of rock discarded by a worker struck the plaintiff below.
Thorpe was therefore not divided neatly into residential and industrial zones. Houses, tracks, roads, tipples, mine openings, streams, and workplaces were squeezed into the same narrow valley.
Industry surrounded daily life.
The People of Thorpe
Coal companies could construct houses, but they could not manufacture communities.
Those came with the workers.
Gary Hollow drew people from the surrounding Appalachian states, from the American South, and from across the Atlantic. The Historic American Landscapes Survey describes the workforce as diverse and segregated, reflecting a coalfield society in which white Appalachian workers, African Americans, and European immigrants could labor within the same industrial system while living in communities divided by race, ethnicity, job classification, and company policy.
Thorpe participated in that diversity.
The 1920 federal census identified households under the place designation “Thorpe Mining Town,” and surviving census citations show miners and their families living there during the postwar coal boom.
African American miners were also part of Thorpe’s workforce. One grim piece of evidence survives in the newspaper record. A June 12, 1929 article in the McDowell Recorder carried the headline “Negro Miner is Killed at Thorpe.” The article has been identified in later scholarly work examining race and ethnicity in the American coal industry, where it appears among numerous reports of Black miners injured or killed in McDowell County mines.
Such reports are important because production statistics can easily hide the people behind the tonnage. Every mine fatality represented a family, household, church congregation, neighborhood, and set of relationships affected by the risks of underground work.
Thorpe’s Hungarian Community
One of the strongest surviving pieces of Thorpe’s social history lies in its cemetery.
Hungarian immigration became an important part of the southern West Virginia coalfields during the industrial boom. Men recruited or drawn into mining communities established families, churches, mutual-aid organizations, and cultural networks far from the European villages where many had been born.
West Virginia University’s Appalachian Hungarian Heritage Project identifies Thorpe as the location of one of the largest Catholic Hungarian graveyards in Appalachia.
The cemetery turns immigration history into something tangible.
Names carved into gravestones preserve families who might otherwise appear only briefly in payroll books or census schedules. Birthplaces, dates, religious symbols, and family groupings document a community that was both Appalachian and international.
The Hungarian language also reached Thorpe through a wider network of coalfield newspapers and organizations. A surviving 1933 issue of the Magyar Bányászlap, or Hungarian Miners’ Journal, includes a Thorpe mailing address in its organizational notices, evidence that residents remained connected to Hungarian institutions extending beyond McDowell County.
This immigrant history makes Thorpe more than a story about U.S. Steel.
It is also a story about the people who crossed an ocean, entered the coalfields, and planted family roots in southern West Virginia.
Work, Danger, and Corporate Safety
Mining at Thorpe took place during an era when roof falls, explosions, machinery, haulage accidents, electricity, and falling material could kill or disable a worker with little warning.
U.S. Coal & Coke developed an elaborate safety program and promoted its mines as unusually well managed. Eavenson’s 1915 paper described company efforts to reduce accidents through training, supervision, safety rules, and organization. He acknowledged, however, that the early workforce was often transient and that rapid expansion forced the company to hire large numbers of inexperienced workers and officials.
Even the 1909 Engineering and Mining Journal, which presented Gary’s mines very favorably, described an immense underground operation dependent upon roof supports, ventilation systems, machinery, explosives, haulage, and constant human judgment.
The danger could never be eliminated.
Thorpe’s history therefore belongs not only to corporate engineers and production totals but to the miners who entered Nos. 4, 5, and 11 each working day, knowing that the mountains providing their wages could also take their lives.
From Coal Camp to Part of Gary
Mining remained especially important at Thorpe through the 1940s, according to the Coal Heritage Survey. By then the community had already experienced several decades of boom, recession, recovery, technological change, and shifting demand for steel and coal.
The old company-town system eventually began to unravel.
Mechanization reduced the number of workers necessary to produce coal. Families left McDowell County as employment opportunities disappeared. Company buildings were sold, demolished, or abandoned, and communities that once depended upon hundreds of miners faced shrinking populations.
Thorpe’s political identity changed as well.
On July 1, 1971, Gary became an incorporated municipality following a vote by local residents. The West Virginia Blue Book records that the new city included five formerly separate communities: Gary, Elbert, Filbert, Thorpe, and Wilcoe.
The incorporation marked a profound transition. Places constructed under corporate ownership were becoming a municipal community expected to maintain roads, services, and public institutions outside the old paternalistic company structure.
Coal remained important, but the industrial world that had created Thorpe was disappearing.
The Historic American Landscapes Survey dates the final cessation of United States Coal & Coke mining in the Gary area to 1986. By then, U.S. Steel’s great McDowell County experiment had run for more than eighty years.
What Remains at Thorpe
The disappearance of the mines did not erase the town.
In 2018, preservation historians evaluating McDowell County recommended the creation of a Thorpe Historic District with a period of significance extending from 1905 to 1968. They identified twenty-seven contributing resources and found the community significant for the coal industry, its association with United States Coal & Coke, and its company-town architecture.
That recommendation matters because so much of McDowell County’s industrial landscape has already vanished.
Tipples can be dismantled. Mine portals collapse or disappear beneath vegetation. Railroad structures are removed. Company stores burn or are torn down. Coke ovens crumble stone by stone.
At Thorpe, however, enough survives to make the old town readable.
Company houses still show the repeated architectural patterns imposed by U.S. Coal & Coke. The narrow valley still explains why buildings, road, river, and railroad had to occupy such close quarters. The remains of coke ovens preserve an industrial process that once connected Thorpe directly to U.S. Steel’s furnaces. The cemetery preserves the names of immigrant families who helped work the mines.
The surviving landscape is not complete, but it is enough.
Why Thorpe Matters
Thorpe could easily be reduced to a few lines in a coal-company ledger: Gary No. 4, Gary No. 5, Gary No. 11, United States Coal & Coke Company, McDowell County.
Its history is much larger than that.
Thorpe was one part of an industrial system that linked a narrow West Virginia valley to some of the largest steel works in the United States. Coal left the mountains by rail, became coke and steel, and entered an economy stretching far beyond Appalachia.
People traveled the other direction.
White families came from Appalachian farms and nearby mining counties. African American workers entered McDowell County as part of a much larger movement into industrial employment. Hungarian and other European immigrants crossed national borders and oceans before reaching towns like Thorpe.
They entered a landscape created by a corporation, but they did not live corporate lives.
They raised children, attended church, walked railroad tracks, visited stores, buried relatives, argued with neighbors, endured accidents, celebrated marriages, survived layoffs, and remembered the place long after the coke ovens went cold.
Thorpe began because U.S. Steel needed coal.
It endured because people made a home there.
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, November 15, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Orr, Elisabeth, Stefania Staniscia, and Charles Yuill. Gary Hollow, 38 Church Street, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia. Historic American Landscapes Survey No. WV-6. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0557/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: Thorpe.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamt.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: Jared.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamj.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Record Group 28, Records of the Post Office Department, Microfilm Publication M1126. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Reports of the Department of Mines. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Department of Mines, various years. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=annrepdepminwv
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. County Geologic Report 30. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10446.htm
“Coal Mining Methods at Gary, West Virginia.” Engineering and Mining Journal 88, no. 1 (July 3, 1909). 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.” 1915. OneMine. https://www.onetunnel.org/documents/safety-methods-and-organization-of-united-states-coal-coke-co-
O’Toole, Edward. “Pocahontas Coal Field, and Operating Methods of the United States Coal and Coke Co.” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. https://aimehq.org/themes/custom/aime/doclibrary/transactions/vol072.html
Library of Congress. The McDowell Times (Keystone, W. Va.), 1904–1941. Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092050/
Library of Congress. McDowell Recorder (Welch, W. Va.), 1890–1943. Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092048/
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “United States Coal & Coke Company Records, USX Collection, Accession 89-100.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Mike Hornick Collection, Accession 88-54.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Norfolk & Western Railway Materials, Accession 88-66.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Smokeless Coal Operators Association Records.” A&M 1830. Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5450
West Virginia University. Appalachian Hungarian Heritage Project. “Maps Data in Table Format.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://appalachianhungarians.wvu.edu/resources/maps/maps-data-in-table-format
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://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/appalachian-collection/appalachian-studies-bibliography/appalachian-studies-bibliography-1994-2012/coal-industry-labor-railroads-transportation
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/Billion-dollar-coalfield-%3A-West-Virginia%27s-McDowell-County-and-the-industrialization-of-America/oclc/666823075
Carter, Alice E. “Segregation and Integration in the Appalachian Coalfields: McDowell County Responds to the Brown Decision.” West Virginia History 54 (1995): 78–104. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh54-5.html
Gillenwater, Mack H. “Company Towns.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1440
Gillenwater, Mack H. “Cultural and Historical Geography of Mining Settlements in the Pocahontas Coal Field of Southern West Virginia, 1880–1930.” PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1972. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1440
Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p009407
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p007669
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. https://utpress.org/9780870498855/coal-towns/
Tams, William Purviance, Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Reprint ed. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2001. Originally published 1963. https://wvupress.com/9780937058558/smokeless-coal-fields-of-west-virginia/
Lee, Russell. “Houses, Coal Cars, and Church, U.S. Coal and Coke Company, Gary Mines, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Photograph, August 17, 1946. Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War, National Archives. https://docsteach.org/document/houses-coal-cars-and-church-note-that-roofs-are-asbestos-and-are-in-good-condition-us-coal-and-coke-company-gary-mines-gary-mcdowell-county-west-virginia/
Author Note: Thorpe’s history shows how one small community could connect the mountains of McDowell County to U.S. Steel’s enormous national industrial system. I hope this article also helps preserve the stories of the miners, immigrant families, African American residents, and generations who made Thorpe a community rather than simply a collection of numbered mines.