Appalachian Community Histories – Switchback, McDowell County: Lick Branch, the Mine Disasters, and Life in a Pocahontas Coal Town
Along the main line of the Norfolk and Western Railway in eastern McDowell County, Switchback grew from a narrow mountain settlement into one of the important industrial communities of the Pocahontas coalfield. Coal mines tunneled through the surrounding mountains, coke ovens burned beside the railroad, company houses climbed the available slopes, and one of the region’s most powerful coal operators looked down on the community from a mansion above the valley.
For a time, Switchback stood near the center of a remarkable industrial network. The community was associated with the Lick Branch mine, the Norfolk Coal and Coke Company, Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries, and later the Pocahontas Fuel Company. A substantial power plant connected Switchback to the early electrical development of southern West Virginia. A large company store served miners and their families. Elkhorn High School became part of the surrounding community’s educational life.
Yet the event that fixed Switchback most firmly in coalfield history was tragedy.
On December 29, 1908, an explosion killed fifty miners at Lick Branch. Only two weeks later, on January 12, 1909, another explosion tore through the same operation and killed sixty-seven more. The official West Virginia death toll from the two disasters was 117 men.
Switchback survived those explosions and continued as an active coal community for decades, but the disasters revealed the human cost behind the immense industrial wealth being pulled from the mountains of McDowell County.
A Railroad Name in the Pocahontas Coalfield
Switchback’s history cannot be separated from the railroad.
Before industrial development transformed this portion of McDowell County, settlement was sparse and travel through the mountains was difficult. The expansion of the railroad through the Pocahontas coalfield opened previously isolated coal reserves to national markets. Mines soon appeared along the line, followed by company housing, stores, schools, offices, and other institutions necessary to support a large workforce.
The name Switchback itself reflects that railroad world. West Virginia’s historical place-name records show Switchback in McDowell County by 1901 and list Switchback Junction by 1920. A report on West Virginia place names later included Switchback among communities whose names developed from railroad construction. By 1921, the official West Virginia Blue Book listed Switchback among the state’s post offices.
Norfolk and Western records provide even stronger evidence of the railroad’s physical presence. A company engineering map dated September 11, 1905, documented land being deeded at Switchback, while a related drawing showed a proposed 400,000-gallon water tank near the railroad. Such records reveal a community that was not simply beside the tracks. Switchback was being incorporated into the infrastructure necessary to move immense quantities of coal through the mountains.
The railroad also made the boundaries between Switchback and neighboring Maybeury difficult to separate. Mines, company property, houses, roads, and families stretched through the same narrow industrial corridor. Federal officials eventually treated much of the area as a combined community. In 1940, several census enumeration districts were officially described as portions of “Maybeury-Switchback.” The 1950 census went further, listing Maybeury-Switchback as an unincorporated place with a population of 1,646.
Lick Branch and the Beginning of Industrial Switchback
The mine most closely associated with Switchback was Lick Branch.
A technical account published in Mines and Minerals in March 1909 described Lick Branch as one of the older collieries in the Pocahontas region. According to that report, Stuart M. Buck and E. S. Hutchinson opened the operation around 1889. The mine stood on the Norfolk and Western main line near Switchback, approximately nineteen miles east of Welch and seventeen miles west of Bluefield.
By the early twentieth century, Lick Branch had become part of an increasingly complicated corporate system. It had belonged to the Norfolk Coal and Coke Company, whose properties also included Shamokin, Caswell Creek, Sagamore, and Cherokee. In 1904, those interests became part of the Pocahontas Consolidated Company. Another consolidation in 1907 created the Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries Company, bringing together important mining properties on both sides of Flat Top Mountain.
At Switchback, James Ellwood Jones served as general manager.
The Lick Branch operation was extensive. Its underground workings reached through the mountain and included what miners called the Old Mine and New Mine. The Old Main was also known as the Turkey Gap entry. Coal traveled from mine openings by tramroad to the tipple, while 192 coke ovens stood at the plant and were operating at the time of the 1908 disaster. Electric mining machines and electric haulage were used in portions of the operation, while mules continued to move coal in rooms of the older workings.
Federal coal testing gives another glimpse of the value of Switchback’s mineral resources. The United States Geological Survey examined material from a Switchback mine working the Pocahontas No. 3 bed as part of government fuel-testing work connected with the Jamestown Exposition. The presence of Switchback coal in those experiments shows how closely this small McDowell County community had become connected to the technological and industrial economy of the United States.
James Ellwood Jones Above the Coal Town
Few individuals became as closely associated with Switchback as James Ellwood Jones.
Jones came from a coal family. His father, Jenkin Jones, was an early operator in the Pocahontas field, and James learned mining while working at his father’s Caswell Creek operation in Mercer County. He later attended Roanoke College and studied mine engineering at Columbia University before returning to southern West Virginia.
According to the National Register research for his Switchback home, Jones acquired control of five Norfolk Coal and Coke Company mines near Maybeury. He eventually became vice president and general manager of Pocahontas Fuel Company and remained in that position until his death in 1932.
His technical interests extended beyond mine management. A 1903 United States patent identified James Ellwood Jones as a resident of Switchback when he patented an improved loading machine designed to pick coal from the mine floor and transfer it into mine cars. The patent offers a direct primary record of Jones trying to mechanize one of the labor-intensive stages of underground coal production.
Jones built his home high above Switchback during his years with Norfolk Coal and Coke. Its location was significant. From the hill, he could overlook the entrances of his five area mines and keep watch over the industrial landscape below. The house itself contained an extraordinary wraparound room with large windows and stained glass, while the grounds included gardens, a greenhouse, fountain, patio, and imported trees.
The separation between the operator on the hill and the company community below produced one of Switchback’s most unusual details. Jones had a cable suspended between his property and the company store area so that goods could be sent up the hillside without requiring the long trip between the two. The arrangement was practical, but it also created an almost perfect physical representation of Switchback’s industrial hierarchy, with the operator’s home overlooking the mines and community that sustained the company.
Later preservation research credited Jones with supporting roads, public education, scholarships, and a countywide dental clinic. Those accounts form an important part of how he was remembered locally, although his career also belonged to the wider company-town system in which employers exercised enormous influence over work, housing, commerce, and community institutions.
The First Lick Branch Explosion
By late 1908, Lick Branch was an established and technically advanced mine by the standards of the period. That did not make it safe.
A state inspection conducted in August 1908 had reported the mine’s ventilation, drainage, timbering, and machinery in good condition. No gas problem was reported, and no recommendations were made. Yet the same mine relied heavily upon blasting, including the use of black powder, and later investigators found conditions capable of turning a poorly placed or excessive charge into a catastrophe.
On the afternoon of December 29, 1908, an explosion occurred in the Old Mine.
Approximately seventy men were underground. The official West Virginia mine-disaster record places the death toll at fifty. Some contemporary accounts differed by one or more victims, a common problem during rapidly developing mine disasters, but the state has continued to recognize fifty fatalities from the December explosion.
The destruction underground was surprisingly limited in places. Roof falls were comparatively few, and portions of the mine survived with relatively little physical damage. That did not spare the miners. Investigators found that many of the victims appeared to have died from afterdamp, the poisonous mixture of gases left behind by an explosion.
Mine inspectors, company representatives, and federal specialists entered Lick Branch to determine what had happened. Their conclusions revealed a dangerous combination of blasting practices and coal dust.
Investigators found evidence of miners shooting coal from the solid and using excessive quantities of black powder. One report described dust suspended in the mine atmosphere and warned that such material could help carry an explosion once ignition occurred. Inspectors recommended prohibiting highly flammable explosives, improving ventilation at working faces, reducing excessive charges, using shot firers, tamping holes with clay, and watering dusty sections.
The exact initial point of the first explosion remained debated among investigators. Some believed it began with a blown-out or overcharged shot in the section known as Italy. Chief mine officials were reluctant to claim certainty about the precise location, but the broader danger was clear. Black powder, improper shooting, dust, and inadequate control of working conditions could combine with devastating results.
The dead had scarcely been buried before men went back underground.
Disaster Returns on January 12, 1909
The portion of Lick Branch that had escaped the first explosion was permitted to return to production while cleanup continued elsewhere in the mine.
On the morning of January 12, 1909, disaster struck again.
At approximately 8:40 a.m., an explosion ripped through the New Mine. This blast was much more violent than the first. Timbers were reportedly thrown from a drift opening across a ravine, and smoke and flame blackened the opposite mountainside. Mine cars and track were destroyed, and rescuers again entered the workings searching for men.
Early newspaper reports produced wild estimates of the dead. Some dispatches claimed one hundred or even two hundred men might have perished. The uncertainty reflected the confusion surrounding the mine and the inability of rescuers to immediately determine who had been underground. Newspapers across the country repeated the first frightening reports from Switchback.
The official West Virginia figure eventually settled at sixty-seven dead.
Combined with the fifty men killed on December 29, the two Lick Branch explosions claimed 117 lives in approximately two weeks.
Investigators again focused on blasting. The coroner’s jury concluded that an overcharged gunpowder shot in the New Mine had started the second explosion and absolved the company of legal blame. State investigators likewise identified an overcharged hole as the probable initial point. The broader investigation, however, documented a mining system in which combustible dust, powerful explosives, ventilation practices, and production methods created conditions where a single bad shot could spread destruction through extensive underground workings.
One man near the Tug River drift escaped the second explosion after being knocked down by the first rush of air. The technical account described him crawling toward the opening as hot air and afterdamp followed the blast. Nearly everyone else underground was lost.
Widows, Children, and a Village in Mourning
The numbers alone cannot explain what happened to Switchback.
A February 24, 1909 letter from the Lick Branch Mine Relief Committee provides one of the strongest surviving descriptions of the community immediately after the explosions. It described Switchback as a typical company-owned mining village with a normal population of about 1,000 people. The houses and store belonged to the company, while employees of Lick Branch and nearby mines rented the houses or lived there as boarders.
The relief committee reported fifty-three widows and seventy-six children under the age of sixteen left without support. Fifty-seven victims were unmarried, although some undoubtedly had supported parents or other relatives. Seven bodies had not yet been identified when the committee assembled its figures.
Even the relief letter demonstrates how difficult casualty accounting could be. It described fifty-one deaths in the first explosion and sixty-six in the second, while modern official West Virginia records give fifty and sixty-seven. Both sets of figures total 117, which remains the accepted combined toll.
The company initially paid transportation and burial expenses and provided temporary support for affected families. It contributed $5,000 to the relief fund, while other donations added approximately $3,000. The committee hoped to raise at least $50,000 for longer-term assistance. The Carnegie Hero Fund later contributed $10,000 for victims and their families.
Behind every one of those figures was a household somewhere in the Switchback and Maybeury mining district suddenly missing a father, son, brother, husband, or boarder.
Coal towns depended upon wages brought home from underground. When more than one hundred miners disappeared from a connected group of communities in two weeks, the disaster did not end at the mine portal. It entered kitchens, churches, boardinghouses, stores, and schoolrooms throughout the valley.
Switchback Becomes an Electrical Center
The disasters did not end industrial development at Switchback.
Only a few years later, the community became part of another major transformation in southern Appalachia: the development of a regional electrical system.
By 1912, contemporary electrical-industry reporting described Switchback as one of the communities connected to the Appalachian Power Company’s high-voltage network. A substation operated or was being constructed there, and the company had arranged to use the Pocahontas Consolidated Collieries Company’s 7,500-horsepower steam turbine plant at Switchback as reserve generating capacity and as a supplement to hydroelectric power.
That role placed Switchback in a network reaching coal communities and industrial towns throughout southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. The same electrical system served places such as Welch, Keystone, Pocahontas, Coalwood, Bluefield, Graham, and Wytheville.
Switchback was therefore more than a place where coal was extracted. For a period, it also helped supply the energy infrastructure that allowed the larger coalfield to modernize.
The Pocahontas Fuel Company Store
By 1917, the corporate landscape around Switchback had changed again. Pocahontas Fuel Company controlled the area’s major operations and constructed a new company store at Switchback.
The building was designed by Bluefield architect A. B. Mahood, who became responsible for some of the coalfield’s most prominent commercial and residential architecture. At Switchback, he created a large two-story brick store with a one-story office wing, a high stone foundation, classical detailing, and arched entrances. The building stood near the railroad and what became U.S. Route 52.
The store was much more than a place to purchase food or clothing. Its office wing handled company business, while the larger building served as one of the community’s most important gathering places. National Register researchers described it as the center of business and social activity for the surrounding residential district and mine complex.
Company stores occupied a complicated place in Appalachian coal history. They provided essential goods in isolated places where independent commercial development was often limited, but they also strengthened the company’s control over the everyday lives of its workforce. Housing, employment, commercial activity, and sometimes medical or postal services could all revolve around the same corporation.
At Switchback, the sheer scale of the store reflected the wealth being generated by the Pocahontas coalfield.
Elkhorn High School and Life Beyond the Mine
A coal camp could not remain merely a collection of mine openings and company houses. Families needed schools, churches, recreation, transportation, and places where community identity could develop separately from the work underground.
One important institution serving the Switchback area was Elkhorn High School. The West Virginia and Regional History Center preserves a panoramic photograph of Elkhorn High School at Switchback dating from approximately the 1920s or 1930s. The image is valuable because it captures another side of community life during the coalfield’s prosperous years, when children growing up in the surrounding camps attended substantial local schools rather than leaving the valley for education.
By then, Switchback had existed long enough for multiple generations to know it as home. Men might work at Lick Branch or another nearby mine, but their families also knew the place through classrooms, stores, neighbors, baseball games, church gatherings, railroad activity, and the daily traffic moving along the valley.
That is one reason the history of Switchback should not be reduced to the Lick Branch explosions. Those disasters are essential to the story, but they happened within a living community that continued for decades afterward.
Maybeury-Switchback at Midcentury
By 1950, the United States Census Bureau counted 1,646 people in the combined unincorporated place of Maybeury-Switchback. The census label confirms how thoroughly the two communities had become connected in federal geography.
This was also the moment when McDowell County reached the height of its population. Nearly 99,000 people lived in the county in 1950, supported overwhelmingly by coal and the businesses that depended upon it.
The following decades were very different.
Mechanization reduced the number of workers required to produce coal, operations consolidated or closed, and thousands of McDowell County residents left in search of employment elsewhere. The county’s population fell from 98,887 in 1950 to 71,359 in 1960 and continued downward afterward.
Switchback shared in that contraction. As area mines closed, some residents left, and others traveled elsewhere for work. Better roads made larger commercial centers easier to reach, reducing the importance of institutions such as the enormous company store.
By the early 1990s, the Switchback store was vacant and deteriorating, although preservationists still considered it an important surviving symbol of McDowell County’s industrial history. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 but was later demolished.
The James Ellwood Jones House followed a different path. It was also listed on the National Register in 1992 and survived as one of the clearest physical reminders of the operators who controlled the early coalfield.
What Remains of Switchback
Switchback is easy to pass today without realizing how much history lies in the surrounding mountains.
The modern landscape does not immediately reveal a mine whose tunnels once crossed beneath the ridges, a plant with nearly two hundred coke ovens, a large company store designed by one of southern West Virginia’s notable architects, an early power station tied into a regional electrical network, or a community that once carried the grief of 117 miners killed within the space of two weeks.
Yet the records remain remarkably rich.
Norfolk and Western engineering drawings preserve the railroad landscape. Federal coal tests document what came from the mines. Mine inspectors left detailed descriptions of underground conditions. Newspapers recorded confusion and grief as rescuers entered Lick Branch. The relief committee counted widows and children. Census officials mapped Maybeury-Switchback street by street and hollow by hollow. Photographers captured Elkhorn High School and the industrial structures around the community. Preservationists documented the company store and the Jones house before more of the landscape disappeared.
Together, those records show that Switchback was never simply another dot on a coalfield map.
It was a place where the transformation of southern West Virginia can be seen in unusually concentrated form. Railroad construction opened the mountains. Coal companies built mines and settlements. Workers arrived to dig the Pocahontas seams. An operator’s mansion rose above the valley while company houses filled the limited ground below. New technologies changed mining and electrical power. Disaster exposed the dangers beneath the prosperity. Schools and stores helped turn an industrial camp into a community. Mechanization and mine closures eventually pulled much of the economic foundation away.
The story of Switchback is therefore not only the story of a mine disaster, although Lick Branch can never be separated from it. It is the story of the entire coalfield cycle, from railroad expansion and industrial ambition to community building, catastrophe, prosperity, consolidation, and decline.
Along this narrow stretch of McDowell County, the history of industrial Appalachia is still written into the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Stoek, H. H. “The Lick Branch Disaster.” Mines and Minerals 29 (March 1909): 360–365. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/LickBranch_1908.pdf
Lick Branch Mine Relief Committee. Letter concerning the Lick Branch mine explosions and relief efforts, February 24, 1909. Transcription from material reportedly preserved in the Eastern Regional Coal Archives. https://www.wvgw.net/wvcoal/branch.html
Fairmont West Virginian. January 12, 1909. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092557/1909-01-12/ed-1/seq-1/
Fairmont West Virginian. January 13, 1909. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092557/1909-01-13/ed-1/seq-1/
Fairmont West Virginian. January 14, 1909. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092557/1909-01-14/ed-1/seq-1/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “WV Mine Disasters, 1884 to Present.” Charleston, WV. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
United States Bureau of Mines. Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States, 1810–1958. Bulletin 586. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12740/
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Map of Land to Be Deeded by Pocahontas Coal & C. Co. at Switchback.” September 11, 1905. Drawing HS-B24062, document Y-5900. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=209971
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Lick Branch Colliery Coke Ovens circa 1898.” Photograph DS00379. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=94541
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Tipple and Washer at Lick Branch and Shamokin Mines, Switchback WV.” Photograph DS00319. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=93921
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Delta Mine.” Photograph DS00244. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=93559
Burrows, John Shober. Mine Sampling and Chemical Analyses of Coals Tested at the United States Fuel-Testing Plant, Norfolk, Virginia, in 1907. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 362. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b362
United States Bureau of the Census. 1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions: West Virginia, McDowell County, ED 24-47 through ED 24-52. National Archives Identifier 5888422. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-West_Virginia–McDowell_County-_ED_24-47,_ED_24-48,_ED_24-49,_ED_24-50,_ED_24-51,ED_24-52–NARA-_5888422.jpg
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population: West Virginia. Series PC-8, no. 47. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1951. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/pc-08/pc-8-47.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
Sone, Stacy. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Store.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, 1991. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Pocahontas-fuel-company-store-HWY52.pdf
Sone, Stacy. “James Ellwood Jones House.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, 1992. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/James-Ellwood-jones-house.pdf
Sone, Stacy. “Coal Company Stores in McDowell County.” National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Culture and History, 1991–1992. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/64500726.pdf
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Elkhorn High School, Switchback, WV, circa 1920s–1930s.” Panoramic Photographs Collection, A&M 4168, Box 3, Folder 2. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/242690
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Pocahontas Mines Collection, 1883–1997. Ms. 2004-002. Blacksburg, VA. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3408
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Lick Branch Map.” Pocahontas Mines Collection, Box 561. Blacksburg, VA. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/top_containers/24059
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for coal heritage preservation and documentation efforts, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
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
Sullivan, Charles Kenneth. Coal Men and Coal Towns: Development of the Smokeless Coalfields of Southern West Virginia, 1873–1923. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=Coal+Men+and+Coal+Towns+Charles+Kenneth+Sullivan
Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. 1963. Reprint, Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. https://wvupress.com/9780937058558/smokeless-coal-fields-of-west-virginia/
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/
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Moore, Tyrel G. “A Southern West Virginia Mining Community Revisited.” Southeastern Geographer 38 (1998): 1–21. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/files/d/35c65bfe-5457-4df3-a45f-2ced15355960/appalachian-studies-bibliography-cumulation-1994-2012.pdf
Author Note: Switchback’s surviving records reveal far more than a mine disaster. They preserve the story of a railroad coal town where industry, family life, innovation, and extraordinary loss became inseparable.