Appalachian Community Histories – Six, McDowell County: The No. 6 Mine and the Coal Camp Between Coalwood and Caretta
Along West Virginia Route 16 in southern McDowell County, the old coal communities of Coalwood and Caretta are well known to people interested in the history of the Pocahontas coalfield. Between them lies a much smaller place whose name can sound almost mysterious to anyone unfamiliar with the region. It is simply called Six.
The name was not a nickname that gradually attached itself to the settlement. Six grew beside the company’s No. 6 mine, and the numbered mine became the identity of the community around it. A Norfolk and Western Railway engineering drawing prepared in August 1921 provides unusually direct evidence. The railroad’s own archival description states that the plan “Shows No. 6 Tipple C.C.Co.” near Coalwood. Nearly a century later, West Virginia’s Coal Heritage Survey reached the same conclusion, identifying Six as the small company settlement between Coalwood and Caretta that took its name from the adjacent No. 6 operation.
For such a small place, Six left a surprisingly substantial paper trail. Railroad drawings, state publications, federal census records, company scrip records, surviving company houses, historic property surveys, newspapers, mine records, and the archival collections of the companies that controlled the Coalwood complex make it possible to reconstruct far more of its history than its present size might suggest.
Before Six: Coal Comes to the Clear Fork Country
The history of Six begins with the transformation of McDowell County itself. The county remained comparatively isolated through much of the nineteenth century, hemmed in by steep mountains and narrow creek valleys. That isolation changed when railroad construction opened the Pocahontas coalfield to industrial mining.
The Norfolk and Western Railway and the coal companies that followed it reorganized the geography of McDowell County. Mines appeared beside newly laid branches, and camps were built wherever companies needed labor close to the coal. Between 1900 and 1910, McDowell County coal production climbed from about 4.6 million tons to 13.7 million tons, while the number of mines increased rapidly. The population was rising just as dramatically as miners, railroad workers, carpenters, merchants, doctors, clerks, and their families poured into the mountains.
One of the men who entered this landscape was Virginia industrialist George Lafayette Carter. Carter began acquiring a large block of land in the Coalwood area in the opening years of the twentieth century. The state Coal Heritage Survey records about 20,000 acres associated with his development, while the Library of Virginia describes Carter as one of the country’s major coal producers and an industrialist who eventually concentrated much of his attention on the McDowell County operation.
Carter organized the Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company and began developing what became Coalwood. The nearby landscape was quickly being converted from isolated mountain property into an interconnected mining district, with underground workings, tipples, sidings, company houses, stores, schools, and roads all serving the same industrial system.
The Railroad Builds the Framework
Coal could be found beneath the mountains, but without transportation it had little value to a large industrial operator. The railroad therefore became as important to the creation of Six as the mine itself.
A Norfolk and Western engineering plan dated March 14, 1905, and revised the following month shows proposed sidings at the coal operations around Coalwood. The drawing belongs to the Clear Fork Branch and records the early physical development of the Carter mining properties. The Coal Heritage Survey dates construction of the Clear Fork Branch to 1905 and 1906 and specifically lists Coalwood and Six as communities served by it.
The branch gave the mining complex a connection to the larger Norfolk and Western system and the markets beyond McDowell County. Loaded cars could leave the narrow valley and become part of a rail network carrying Pocahontas coal toward industrial centers far removed from the communities where it was mined.
The railroad also explains the shape of Six. Like many McDowell County camps, it occupied whatever usable ground existed between mountain slopes, the mine, the road, the creek valley, and transportation infrastructure. There was little room for a conventional town laid out across broad blocks. Industrial necessity determined where people lived.
The No. 6 Mine Gives a Community Its Name
By the 1910s, Six had become distinct enough to appear as a named community rather than merely an unnamed group of company houses outside Coalwood.
The most important surviving piece of physical documentation is the Norfolk and Western drawing dated August 10, 1921. Officially titled a proposed track layout for the Carter Coal Company near Coalwood, the plan contains the note identifying the No. 6 tipple. That notation is particularly valuable because it comes from the railroad engineers responsible for laying out the infrastructure that served the operation. It is not a later recollection or a place-name legend. It establishes that the numbered mine and tipple were active features of the industrial landscape while Six was developing.
The name followed a pattern found throughout coal country. Camps, hollows, schools, roads, and neighborhoods were frequently identified by the number of the mine they served. The numbered operation became the everyday geographic reference for the families living around it. In this case, the number survived even after the industrial machinery that created the name disappeared.
By 1921, Six also possessed a civic identity recognized outside the coal company. The official West Virginia Blue Book listed Six among the post offices of McDowell County. It appeared alongside such familiar coalfield names as Keystone, Superior, Switchback, Thorpe, Twin Branch, Vivian, and others. That simple listing matters because it shows that Six had become an established mailing address and community name, not merely an internal designation on a company’s mine map.
Living in a Company Town
Life in Six was inseparable from the company that owned the surrounding mining operation.
Across McDowell County, coal companies frequently had to create communities almost from scratch because there was little existing infrastructure capable of supporting the thousands of workers arriving in the coalfield. Companies constructed houses, stores, schools, churches, boarding houses, roads, water systems, and recreational buildings. Rent and other expenses could be deducted from wages, while company stores often accepted company-issued scrip.
Six fit within that larger system, but surviving evidence allows the connection to be made more directly. Records preserved by the National Scrip Collectors Association list “SIX 2597” under the Consolidation Coal Company, with 21 recorded entries associated with the community. Coalwood and Caretta also appear separately in the surviving scrip records. The distinction is revealing. Six might have belonged to the same corporate complex as its neighboring towns, but the company economy still recognized it as its own place.
A miner living in Six did not experience the community as an abstract corporate enterprise. It was home. Company housing stood near neighbors who often worked in the same mines. Families raised children there, received mail there, bought household necessities, attended nearby schools and churches, and watched loaded coal cars leave the valley.
The mine shaped the rhythm of nearly everything. A shift change affected the road and the neighborhood. A shutdown affected family income. An accident underground traveled quickly through rows of houses where nearly everyone knew someone employed by the company. Even families whose members did not work underground depended upon the industrial economy that kept the camp alive.
Consolidation Coal Remakes the Community
A major change came in 1922 when Consolidation Coal Company assumed control of the Carter properties.
The transition was more than a change of name on company paperwork. According to the Coal Heritage Survey, Consolidation invested approximately $1.5 million in Coalwood and its sister communities of Caretta and Six. The program included hundreds of houses as well as boarding houses, company-store improvements, schools, public buildings, and other amenities. Coalwood became the showpiece of the development, but Six was included in the same investment program.
Physical evidence of the building periods survives. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey documented seven properties specifically identified as being in Six. Houses at 21586, 21538, and 21526 Tennessee Avenue, along with a house at 35 Perry Camp Branch Road, were dated to about 1910. Another Tennessee Avenue house was dated to about 1922, while two others were dated to about 1915. Several were recommended as potentially eligible under a multiple-property listing for coal company housing.
Those dates tell an important story. Six was not created entirely by Consolidation after 1922. Houses dating to approximately 1910 and 1915 demonstrate an earlier community associated with the Carter era. The house dated about 1922 then falls precisely around the beginning of Consolidation’s large investment program.
What remains along Tennessee Avenue is therefore more than a collection of old homes. The surviving buildings mark successive layers of the camp’s industrial development.
Coalwood and Six Become One Census Community
The relationship between Six and Coalwood became especially clear in the 1940 federal census.
Rather than reporting the two independently, the Census Bureau identified the unincorporated community as “Coalwood-Six” in Big Creek Magisterial District. Its population was 3,145.
That number should not be mistaken for the population of Six alone. The federal government was counting a combined Coalwood-Six community. Yet that decision is historically significant in its own right. By 1940, the two places were so closely connected industrially and geographically that census officials treated them as a single population center.
For historians, the individual census schedules offer an even more valuable path into the community. Household records can potentially identify miners, company employees, wives, children, boarders, occupations, wages, birthplaces, education, and migration patterns. Combined with company payroll books and rental records, those schedules could eventually produce a much more detailed picture of who actually lived in Six.
Carter Returns
Consolidation’s control did not last.
The coal industry struggled during the Great Depression, and Consolidation ultimately lost control of the Coalwood properties. In 1933, the mining complex returned to Carter. The Library of Virginia records that Consolidation had purchased Carter’s coal interests in 1922 for $12 million but defaulted on its payments after the industry’s downturn, allowing Carter to regain control in March 1933.
Norfolk and Western engineering records document renewed Carter investment in the Coalwood complex during the following years. A July 1934 railway drawing covers a proposed outlet track extension for Carter Coal Company’s Olga No. 1 operation, while another from October 1935 shows additional tracks for the same operation. A Norfolk and Western photograph from about 1936 preserves a visual record of the Olga No. 1 mine and tipple at Coalwood.
Although those records concern the larger Coalwood operation, they are important to Six because the communities did not operate as isolated mining worlds. Six was one part of the same Carter industrial landscape, tied to the mines, railroad, housing, stores, and labor force surrounding Coalwood and Caretta.
The Olga Coal Years
Another major transition arrived in 1947.
A dispute involving Carter Coal, the United Mine Workers of America, and payments to the union welfare fund contributed to a period of federal intervention and labor trouble. The properties were ultimately sold to investors who organized the Olga Coal Company. Olga began a major program of modernization and mechanization across the mining complex.
For a time, the Coalwood area remained one of McDowell County’s major mining centers. The Coal Heritage Survey reports about 5,000 people in the larger area by 1951 and places peak production at Coalwood’s Olga No. 1 mine in 1956. Yet the same modernization that helped companies produce coal more efficiently also reduced the number of workers required to produce it.
The old company-town system itself began to loosen. Olga sold company houses to private owners in 1956. The Norfolk and Western tracks and station at Coalwood were removed in 1959. In 1961, the workings of Olga Nos. 1 and 2 connected underground and the No. 1 tipple was removed. Mining continued for decades, but the social world that had created places such as Six was changing.
Olga continued operating in the Coalwood-Six complex into the mid-1980s. By then the great coal boom that had packed McDowell County’s valleys with workers and company towns had passed.
What Happened to Six
Six did not disappear in a single dramatic event.
Its decline came through the same long process that transformed much of southern West Virginia. Mechanization meant that mines required fewer workers. Families moved elsewhere in search of employment. Railroad infrastructure vanished. Company stores closed. Houses that once belonged to coal companies became privately owned homes, were altered, abandoned, or demolished. A community created for an industry gradually became a residential remnant of that industry.
When historians returned to document Six for the 2018 Coal Heritage Survey, they described it as a small settlement between Coalwood and Caretta, approximately eight miles south of Welch along West Virginia Route 16. Only a handful of single-family dwellings remained within the mountainous and heavily forested setting.
Yet several houses survived well enough for preservation specialists to recognize their historical value. The survey recommended some of the six properties dating from approximately 1910 and 1915 as eligible for inclusion in a proposed multiple-property listing devoted to coal company housing.
Those houses are important precisely because so much of the industrial landscape is gone. A tipple can be dismantled, railroad track pulled up, mine opening sealed, and company records scattered among archives, but an ordinary miner’s house can continue standing beside the road long after the world that built it has disappeared.
Six Was Small, but It Was Never Insignificant
Six is easy to overlook beside Coalwood.
Coalwood became nationally famous through Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys and the film October Sky. Caretta retained its own recognizable collection of company-town buildings and history. Six, caught between them, could be reduced to a sentence explaining that it took its name from Mine No. 6.
The records tell a much larger story.
Six had its own post office identity. It had company housing from several periods of development. Consolidation Coal issued scrip associated specifically with Six. Norfolk and Western engineers documented the No. 6 tipple and the railroad infrastructure serving the district. The federal census eventually combined the community with Coalwood into a population center of more than 3,000 people. Some of its company houses still survived when preservation historians surveyed the community nearly a century after they were built.
Most importantly, Six demonstrates how the industrial history of Appalachia was constructed from places that were often very small.
McDowell County’s extraordinary coal production did not come only from famous towns or enormous mines. It came from numbered operations scattered through narrow valleys, from miners living within walking distance of portals and tipples, from families occupying rows of company houses, and from railroad branches that reached farther and farther into the mountains.
Six began because there was a No. 6 mine. The mine created work, the work required people, the people required homes, and the homes became a community.
Today the number remains on the map long after the industrial system that gave it meaning has largely vanished. That may be the most fitting monument to Six. What once began as a practical designation for a coal operation became the permanent name of a West Virginia community and a surviving piece of McDowell County’s coalfield history.
Sources & Further Reading
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Proposed Track Layout for Carter Coal Company, Olga Operation.” Drawing No. 8862A, August 10, 1921. Norfolk & Western Historical Society, HS-K10113. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122577
Norfolk & Western Railway, Clear Fork Branch. “Plan Showing Proposed Sidings at the Coal Operations in the Vicinity of Coalwood.” Drawing No. 294, March 14, 1905, revised April 21, 1905. Norfolk & Western Historical Society, HS-CC10398. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=105169
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Diagram of Various Coal Fields Showing Distances from Branch Lines to Gathering Points.” June 24, 1912, revised 1916. Norfolk & Western Historical Society, HS-G10051. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=103794
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Proposed Outlet Track Extension for Carter Coal Company Olga No. 1 Operation.” July 10, 1934. Norfolk & Western Historical Society, HS-F02960. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=216743
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Proposed Outlet Track Extension & Additional Tracks, Carter Coal Company, Olga #1 Operations.” October 15, 1935. Norfolk & Western Historical Society, HS-CC02822. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=216660
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Olga No. 1 Mine at Coalwood, WV on Clear Fork Branch.” Photograph DS00386, ca. 1936. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=94493
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1919. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1919.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Population of Unincorporated Communities: 1940. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-unincorporated-communities/1940uninc.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. “1930 Census Records.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930/about-locator.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census Records.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “Vital Research Records.” West Virginia State Archives. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_select.aspx/
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Records.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Circuit Court Case Files, AR2094.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
Craft Memorial Library. “Eastern Regional Coal Archives.” Bluefield, WV. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Newspapers.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/newspapers/mcdowell.html
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1921. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Department of Mines, 1921. https://books.google.com/books/about/Annual_Report_of_the_Department_of_Mines.html?id=vi77tPZXTK0C
West Virginia State Archives. “Department of Mines Coal Mine Fire and Disaster Reports.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/collections/ar/ar1519-1536.html
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10446.htm
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the National Coal Heritage Area and West Virginia Division of Highways. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Historic Property Inventory Form Index: McDowell County, Northfork to Vivian. 2018. https://www.aurora-llc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Coal_Heritage_Northfork_to_Vivian_HPI_Index_by_SurveyNo.pdf
National Park Service and West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County, West Virginia. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, 1991–1992. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500726_text
National Register of Historic Places. “Carter Coal Company Store, Coalwood, McDowell County, West Virginia.” National Register nomination. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Carter-coal-company-store-CR2.pdf
National Register of Historic Places. “Carter Coal Company Store, Caretta, McDowell County, West Virginia.” National Register of Historic Places. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/92000329
National Scrip Collectors Association. “West Virginia Scrip Records.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.scripcollectors.org/records
Schust, Alex P., and David R. Goad. Coalwood: A History of the West Virginia Mining Communities of Coalwood, Caretta, and Six. Two Mule Publishing, 2006. 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. 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
Hickam, Homer H., Sr. “McDowell County, Caretta and Coalwood, History.” 1983. A&M 3337. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1637
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://archive.org/details/westvirginiaplac00kenn
Myers, Mark. “Coal Mechanization and Migration from McDowell County, West Virginia, 1932–1970.” Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2001. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/116/
Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1963. https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-smokeless-coal-fields-of-West-Virginia-%3A-a-brief-history/oclc/505990
Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U.S. 238 (1936). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/298/238
Carter Coal Co. v. Litz, 54 F. Supp. 115 (W.D. Va. 1943). Justia. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/54/115/1739390/
Pettus v. Olga Coal Co., Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, 1952. Justia. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1952/10481-2.html
Author Note: Six may look like little more than a name between Coalwood and Caretta today, but its surviving records tell a much larger story. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of the miners, families, and company-town life that grew around the No. 6 mine.