Appalachian History
A hilltop church in a coal town
Climb the long concrete stairway above the old company town of Pocahontas, Virginia, and you reach a modest white frame church with a red metal roof and a square tower crowned by a cross. Inside, the little sanctuary opens like a storybook. Ten life sized oil murals ring the walls and ceiling, with the Last Supper spreading across the apse behind a carved white high altar.
On a Sunday in September 2022, Bishop Barry C. Knestout of Richmond came to this hilltop church to mark its 125th anniversary and to bless those murals after their restoration. He called St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church “a small church amid coal country” and compared the climb up its hill to the Christian journey toward holiness.
For more than a century, the view from those steps has taken in a company town carved into a hollow, a coal seam that once fed the United States Navy, and a cemetery where graves are etched in Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Russian. St. Elizabeth’s sits at the heart of that story.
Pocahontas: coal, company streets, and a “melting pot”
Pocahontas began in the early 1880s as the Southwest Virginia Improvement Company’s great experiment in industrial mining. The company acquired roughly 31,000 acres and opened the first major commercial mine in what would become one of America’s key coal regions. The Norfolk and Western Railroad reached the town in 1883, and over the next seventy years the mines shipped more than forty four million tons of coal before closing in 1955.
The National Register nomination for the Pocahontas Historic District paints a vivid picture of the town in its prime. Brick commercial rows and an ornate city hall lined St. Clair Street. Company built housing stepped up the hillsides. A union church, a synagogue, fraternal halls, and scattered frame houses marked Church Street as the first rise of the steep slope above town.
Coal, however, did not just draw local farmers into the pits. It pulled in immigrants from across Europe. A Cardinal News history of the Pocahontas Cemetery notes that by the 1920s nearly five thousand people lived in the town and “nearly two dozen churches” served a population that included Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Russian workers. Tombstones in the hillside cemetery still show inscriptions in those languages and symbols from multiple Christian traditions, including Russian Orthodoxy.
In that crowded religious landscape, St. Elizabeth’s emerged as the Hungarian Catholic parish for a coal camp that was, for a time, one of the most ethnically diverse places in rural Virginia.
Building an immigrant parish
Company officials and church leaders were already planning for Catholic worship by 1890, when the Southwest Virginia Improvement Company deeded a hilltop lot to the Diocese of Wheeling. Hungarian miners and their families soon turned that lot into a sanctuary.
Local memory and diocesan reporting agree that Hungarian Roman Catholic immigrants built the church in the late 1890s and named it for a beloved saint from their homeland. In a 2022 television segment marking the parish’s 125th anniversary, former pastor Father Dan Brady explained that “Hungarians were a large number of the people who came into the area” and that they built the church in 1896, choosing St. Elizabeth of Hungary as patron.
A 2001 architectural survey for Tazewell County describes the result as “a frame Gothic Revival style St. Elizabeth’s Roman Catholic Church,” completed around 1898 “to serve the many Hungarian miners in the town.” The church’s pointed lancet windows and steep roofline matched the Victorian taste of the era. From the street below, the square entrance tower dominates the façade, topped by a louvered belfry, an arrangement noted in an architectural entry for the church and its rectory.
The parish itself now belongs to Holy Family Parish, which clusters Catholic communities across this part of southwest Virginia. On its website, Holy Family calls St. Elizabeth’s “the oldest Catholic church in our parish,” a traditional wood frame church dating to the late 1800s whose interior is “filled with hand painted murals” and a traditional high altar.
A Hungarian patroness in coal country
For the miners who built St. Elizabeth’s, the choice of patron saint was no accident. St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a thirteenth century princess remembered for her charity to the poor, held an especially strong place in Hungarian Catholic devotion.
Across the United States, Hungarian immigrants often organized ethnic parishes that preserved language, feast days, and devotions from home. A 1910 article in The Catholic Encyclopedia noted that Hungarian Catholics clustered in national parishes with their own clergy and confraternities, mirroring patterns among other Eastern European immigrant groups. St. Elizabeth of Hungary was one of the saints they cherished most.
When Fr. Brady told WVVA that the Pocahontas church was “named after a saint from their homeland,” he was describing more than a pious gesture. For miners pulled from the Kingdom of Hungary to a remote Appalachian coalfield, a church in her honor marked Pocahontas as a place where their faith and culture could take root.
Murals from Cincinnati
If the exterior of St. Elizabeth’s reflects the standard toolkit of late nineteenth century Gothic Revival, the interior art is anything but ordinary. In 1919, the parish’s German Benedictine pastor, Father Anthony Hoch, commissioned a Cincinnati artist named Theodore Brasch to transform the sanctuary with murals.
A feature in Blue Ridge Country magazine on church frescoes across the region describes how Brasch painted ten eight by twelve foot canvases that were then mounted on the walls and ceiling. Each depicted a scene from the life of Christ, from the Nativity to the Resurrection, with the Last Supper stretching behind the high altar. Parishioners, many of them miners, helped fund the project and even built the scaffolding that allowed Brasch to work in the tiny church.
The Tazewell County architectural survey also records that the church interior “was ornamented in 1919 with a remarkable series of murals by [a] Cincinnati artist.” A century later, Bishop Knestout would describe those same paintings as “life sized murals” whose beauty is “significant to this small church amid coal country.”
By the early twenty first century, smoke, coal dust, and time had dulled the colors. Between October 2021 and January 2022, the parish used a $26,000 patrimony grant from the diocese to clean and restore the paintings. When Bishop Knestout visited in September 2022 to bless the newly restored canvases, he singled out the Last Supper mural behind the altar as one of the most striking examples of sacred art in the diocese.
Today the murals glow again above the pews, a complete cycle of Christ’s life painted for a coal town congregation that had once scraped together the money to bring an artist from Cincinnati.
Coal, cabbage rolls, and community
St. Elizabeth’s has always been more than a Sunday worship site. For much of the twentieth century, it also served as a cultural hub that kept Hungarian identity alive long after many immigrant families had moved on or married into other groups.
A 2023 Cardinal News article about the Pocahontas Cemetery includes a telling detail. Local resident Ginger Cates remembered that her mother often cooked cabbage rolls, “a Hungarian dish not something that likely originated in the mountains of West Virginia,” and that “at one time, St. Elizabeth’s Roman Catholic Church would host an annual Hungarian cabbage roll dinner to honor the European heritage of the coal miners.”
Town and tourism materials echo that story, describing St. Elizabeth’s as a church known both for its ten life sized murals and for a Hungarian cabbage roll dinner that honored the town’s immigrant roots. Coal camp chroniclers have even recorded local slang for the dish, “Hunky hand grenades,” a reminder of how ethnic nicknames and shared food traditions mingled in coalfield humor.
These dinners and parish festivals fit a broader pattern. Across the coalfields, ethnic Catholic parishes often held fundraisers that doubled as cultural celebrations, serving Polish pierogi, Italian spaghetti, or Slovak kolachy. For the Hungarian community in Pocahontas, cabbage rolls under the church roof became a way to remember old country kitchens while raising money to keep the sanctuary warm and the murals preserved.
Survival in a declining company town
The mines that drew Hungarians to Pocahontas eventually declined. As the National Register nomination notes, coal production at Pocahontas ended in 1955, leaving a town that had “survived almost intact in the wake of declining industrial activity and loss of population.” Storefronts emptied. Rows of company houses weathered.
Some local institutions vanished entirely. The opera house that once hosted traveling productions closed. Several churches either consolidated or fell into disrepair. Yet St. Elizabeth’s endured.
A 1999 tourist train feasibility study for Pocahontas, prepared for the Virginia General Assembly, treated the church as one of the town’s most significant heritage resources, describing “St. Elizabeth’s Roman Catholic Church” atop the hill overlooking town and noting its “beautifully painted and restored frescoes.” Community groups such as Historic Pocahontas, Inc., have highlighted the church in brochures and photographs as they work to attract visitors to the exhibition mine and Original Pocahontas off road trail system.
At the same time, parish life continued, even as the congregation shrank. A Catholic Virginian article marking the 125th anniversary in 2022 traces the succession of pastors, from Father Hoch and his early twentieth century successors to modern priests who now split their time among multiple mission churches. The restoration of the murals and the bishop’s visit that year signaled that the diocese still sees St. Elizabeth’s as a living parish, not a museum piece.
Meanwhile, other heritage projects have unfolded around it. The Pocahontas Cemetery, long overgrown, is now the focus of a multi phase restoration effort funded in part by a state budget amendment. Taken together, a functioning immigrant built church and a reclaimed “melting pot” cemetery tell a story of survival that goes beyond coal production statistics.
Why St. Elizabeth’s matters
In the broader history of American Catholicism, St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in Pocahontas may seem small. It never boasted the towering brick scale of urban ethnic parishes, nor the huge membership of industrial city congregations. Yet its story illuminates several important themes.
First, it highlights the reach of coal capital. Company agents recruited workers from Ellis Island to a remote corner of Tazewell County. Those miners brought not only muscle but also religious traditions that reshaped the Appalachian landscape. In a region where immigration has historically been low, as Cardinal News has analyzed, Hungarian Catholics in Pocahontas stand out as an exception that proves the rule.
Second, St. Elizabeth’s illustrates how immigrant communities carved sacred space into company towns. The National Register nomination describes Pocahontas as a place without grand architectural monuments yet rich in working buildings that “express the unique pattern of life” in a mining town. Within that pattern, a frame Gothic Revival church on a hill represented the miners’ insistence on worship and identity while working grueling shifts underground.
Third, the church’s murals show how European style sacred art found a home in humble surroundings. From Cincinnati to Pocahontas, artists and patrons stitched together a visual catechism in oil paint. The recent restoration, backed by diocesan funds, suggests that this art still speaks to twenty first century Catholics, just as Bishop Knestout argued when he wrote that murals like those at St. Elizabeth’s turn minds and hearts toward God.
Finally, St. Elizabeth’s is a reminder that Appalachian history is not only Scotch Irish, Baptist, or Pentecostal. It includes Hungarians praying the rosary in a second language, women rolling cabbage leaves for parish suppers, and children learning the Sign of the Cross under a ceiling painted with scenes from the Gospels.
For researchers, the story is far from finished. Parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, likely preserved on site or in the Diocese of Richmond archives, could fill in family names and migration paths. Old postcards and interior photographs chart changes to the sanctuary over time. Local obituaries and Facebook groups preserve memories of long time parishioners who kept the doors open when the coal trains had nearly stopped.
For visitors, though, the starting point is simple. Park below the hill. Climb the steps. Open the red doors. Then stand for a moment under the painted sky of a church that Hungarian miners built more than a century ago and that still looks out over a coal town trying to write its next chapter.
Sources & Further Reading
National Register of Historic Places, “Pocahontas Historic District,” nomination form and listing, 1972. DHR
G. Worsham, Historic Architectural Survey of Tazewell County, Virginia (Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2001), section on St. Elizabeth’s Roman Catholic Church. DHR
Holy Family Parish, “St. Elizabeth (Pocahontas, VA)” official parish page. holyfamilyswva.org
Anne Carter Lee, “St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church and Rectory,” SAH Archipedia (Buildings of Virginia: Valley, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest). Sah Archipedia
“Southwest VA parish marks 125 years as Catholic community,” The Catholic Virginian, Sept. 29, 2022, and related coverage. Richmond Diocesan News
Barry C. Knestout, “Church art, architecture remind us of God’s presence,” The Catholic Virginian, Nov. 14, 2022. Richmond Diocesan News
Clayton McChesney, “Bishop visits local church for 125 anniversary,” WVVA News, Sept. 19, 2022. https://www.wvva.com
“Church Frescoes of the Blue Ridge” (with sidebar on St. Elizabeth’s), Blue Ridge Country magazine. Blue Ridge Country
“A town’s ‘melting pot’ cemetery honored miners from many cultures but fell into disrepair. Supporters want to give it new life,” Cardinal News, Nov. 22, 2023. Cardinal News
“Why has immigration generally bypassed this part of Virginia?” Cardinal News, Apr. 12, 2022. Cardinal News
“Pocahontas” town and tourism pages, including Historic Pocahontas, Inc., and the town website. Pocahontas+1
“Pocahontas, Virginia,” general town histories and entries that reference St. Elizabeth’s and its murals. Wikipedia
Andrew Shipman, “Hungarian Catholics in America,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (1910).