Appalachian Community Histories – Arno, Wise County: Stonega, Preacher Creek, and the Coal Camp That Nearly Disappeared
Along Preacher Creek in Wise County, Virginia, the name Arno has nearly disappeared from the landscape. Unlike Stonega, Appalachia, or neighboring Derby, there is no substantial historic town center left to announce that hundreds of people once lived here, raised families, attended school, shopped at a company store, and went underground for Stonega Coke & Coal Company.
Yet Arno was once a complete coal community. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources dates its establishment to 1908, placing it among the early generation of Stonega Coke & Coal Company camps that transformed the mountains around Appalachia and Big Stone Gap. Arno stood on Preacher Creek, about half a mile west of its confluence with Callahan Creek and roughly three miles from Stonega. The company built housing and the institutions expected of a substantial mining camp, but most of them have since vanished. A small portion of the old community survives today within the Derby Historic District.
The surviving houses make Arno easy to overlook. They appear to belong to Derby, the larger company town constructed upstream in the 1920s. In reality, those modest frame dwellings are remnants of an older settlement, one that had already existed for about fifteen years when Derby was built.
Arno’s story is therefore not simply the history of another coal camp. It is the history of how a company could create a town almost overnight, draw workers into a mountain hollow, sustain a community for several generations, and then leave behind so little that the town itself could almost disappear from memory.
Stonega Coke & Coal Comes to Preacher Creek
Coal had been known in the mountains of southwestern Virginia long before Arno existed. Nineteenth-century geological surveys described the great seams beneath Wise County, but large-scale development required railroads, outside investment, and corporations willing to build the infrastructure necessary to reach them.
The Pennsylvania-backed Virginia Coal & Iron Company, incorporated in 1882, became one of the most important forces in that transformation. Its Pioneer operation, later known as Stonega, developed during the 1890s. In 1902 the Stonega Coke & Coal Company was incorporated and leased Virginia Coal & Iron Company’s lands and mining facilities. From Stonega the company expanded outward, establishing Osaka in 1902, Roda in 1903, and Arno in 1908.
Arno was therefore not an isolated mining operation. It belonged to a growing network of collieries centered on Appalachia and Big Stone Gap, where railroads, corporate offices, commercial establishments, and nearby mining communities formed one interconnected coal economy.
The mountains dictated much of the town’s shape. There was little level ground on which to build. Houses followed the hollow and creek, creating the long rows familiar across the Appalachian coalfields. The National Register documentation for neighboring Derby identifies eleven early one-story frame houses associated with Arno that were probably constructed in 1908 or 1909. They were plainly built, with central chimneys, broad porches, and repeated designs that allowed the company to house miners quickly and efficiently.
Another section extended along Preacher Creek near a company sawmill. Workers there supplied an industry that needed enormous quantities of timber, not only for buildings but also for mine supports, railroad construction, and the countless other wooden structures required by a growing colliery.
Building a Company Town
Arno developed into much more than a collection of miners’ houses.
Historic preservation research indicates that the early Stonega communities, including Arno, eventually contained a church, commissary, theater, playground, school, bathhouse, and boardinghouse. These facilities formed a world in which employment, housing, shopping, recreation, and much of community life were connected to the same company.
The arrangement served an obvious business purpose. Mines had to attract enough labor to operate reliably, and southwestern Virginia’s expanding coal industry could not depend entirely upon the population already living in the mountains. Companies competed for workers. A house, school, store, recreational facilities, and access to medical care could therefore become recruiting tools as much as community improvements.
Stonega developed a reputation for investing heavily in this approach. The company’s efforts have often been described by historians as a form of welfare capitalism, an attempt to improve living conditions and encourage worker loyalty while preserving company authority over the communities surrounding its mines.
That dual character is important when looking at Arno. Company housing could be genuinely desirable to a family arriving in an isolated mountain district, while still tying that family’s home to the employer responsible for the miner’s wages. A company store could provide goods and credit while also giving the company an enormous place in the household economy.
Arno was both a community and a business investment.
Recruiting Miners from Far Beyond Wise County
The people who populated Stonega’s camps came from remarkably varied backgrounds.
Native Appalachian families worked beside African American miners and immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic only years earlier. Virginia historic preservation research identifies Hungarians and Italians as particularly significant among the European workers employed in the Stonega camps. Company agents also traveled through the South recruiting Black laborers and sought workers in immigrant communities farther north.
One extraordinary primary source shows how directly Stonega pursued Hungarian miners.
In 1917 the Hungarian-language Magyar Bányászlap, or Hungarian Miners’ Journal, carried a Stonega Coke & Coal Company advertisement naming Stonega, Roda, Osaka, Arno, Imboden, and Keokee among its Virginia operations. The company promoted steady work, increased wages, houses with electricity and running water, reasonable prices at company stores, and promised that inquiries could be answered in Hungarian.
The advertisement was designed to recruit workers, so its description of camp life cannot simply be accepted as an impartial account. Still, it reveals something important about Arno. By the First World War, this small Wise County hollow belonged to an international labor market. A miner reading a Hungarian newspaper hundreds of miles away could encounter the name Arno and consider moving his family there.
The research collected for this article likewise points toward federal censuses, company archives, and immigration records as particularly valuable ways of recovering the individual families who made up the camp.
A Hungarian Miner’s View of Arno
Company advertising is only one side of that story.
Four years after Stonega advertised its Virginia camps to Hungarian workers, Magyar Bányászlap carried reports from Arno that sounded considerably less promotional.
In February 1921, the paper reported that work at the Stonega operation at Arno was slow, with miners working only about three days per week. Another report later that year came from Gergely Balogh at Arno. Balogh said work remained very slow, generally only two or three days each week. He described coal roughly five to six feet high, water in parts of the mine, carbide lamps, machine-cut coal, and payment by the car. He also complained about expensive food and reported recent accidents. Most tellingly, he did not recommend that fellow Hungarian miners come looking for work there at that time.
Placed beside the company’s 1917 advertisement, the account offers a rare look at the changing realities of coal-camp employment.
Stonega had promised steady work and comfortable living conditions during the wartime coal economy. By 1921, a miner living at Arno could describe a place where the coal remained beneath the mountain but reliable working days did not.
For a coal family, that distinction mattered enormously. A miner could have a job and still struggle if the mine operated only a few days each week.
Black Life in Arno
Arno’s history also included a significant African American community whose experiences can be difficult to recover from corporate records alone.
One of the most revealing accounts came from retired miner Henry Fields, interviewed by The Roanoke Times in 1993. Fields had spent much of his youth at Arno and attended the camp’s segregated Black elementary school. His family could not afford to send him to the Black high school several miles away in Big Stone Gap, illustrating how segregation extended beyond the classroom into transportation and educational opportunity.
Fields eventually entered the mines in 1933. His recollections described a community in which Black and white miners worked together underground even though their children attended separate schools.
His memories also bring Arno away from company balance sheets and back to the people who lived there. When mines worked only a few days, residents passed time around the company store playing horseshoes, dominoes, checkers, and cards. Music crossed many of the ethnic divisions within the camps as Black, white, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and other residents gathered around stores and porches.
The company store was therefore more than a place to purchase flour, clothing, or household necessities. It was one of the places where a company settlement gradually became a community.
Picking Coal from the Arno Dump
Even a Virginia Supreme Court case preserves a glimpse of ordinary life around Arno during the Depression.
In McWilliams v. Commonwealth, decided in 1935, testimony concerned boys selling coal around Appalachia. A local officer explained that authorities objected when boys took coal directly from railroad cars, but noted that there was a coal dump at Arno where discarded coal could be picked up and sold without objection.
It is a tiny detail in a court case about something else, but that is precisely what makes it valuable.
Coal camps were filled with informal economies that rarely appeared in corporate annual reports. Families gathered food, raised gardens where possible, took odd jobs, reused discarded materials, and collected loose coal. For boys around Arno, even waste from the mining industry could become something that could be carried away and exchanged for a little money.
By the 1930s such strategies mattered increasingly as the Depression struck coal communities. Mining companies reduced working time and employment throughout the region. The world built around regular mine production became far less secure.
More Than Five Hundred People in 1940
Arno had not vanished during the Depression.
The United States Bureau of the Census still counted it as a distinct unincorporated community in 1940. That federal report recorded 518 residents in Arno, within Wise County’s Richmond Magisterial District.
That number is important because the landscape that survives today can give a misleading impression of Arno’s scale. Five hundred eighteen people represented dozens upon dozens of households, children walking to school, miners changing shifts, families shopping, church congregations gathering, and porches filled during evenings and idle days.
Federal coal records also confirm the industrial identity behind the community. A 1937 federal coal-price schedule specifically identified Stonega Coke & Coal Company’s Arno Mine as working the Imboden seam.
Arno remained exactly what it had been created to be: a settlement whose fortunes revolved around coal beneath the surrounding mountains.
The Disappearance of the Coal Camp
The system that created Arno could not last forever.
Mechanization steadily reduced the number of miners required to produce coal. Better roads allowed workers to live farther from company property. Automobiles made once-isolated hollows less isolated. Company ownership of houses, stores, schools, and recreation became less necessary as the twentieth century progressed.
By the 1960s, many of Stonega’s old camps had emptied dramatically. National Register research records that vacant company buildings at Stonega, Osaka, Arno, and Roda were sold as the coal-camp system became obsolete.
Buildings disappeared one after another. Sawmill houses vanished. Public buildings were lost. Some houses were demolished while others passed into private ownership.
Eventually, most of Arno ceased to look like a town at all.
Yet the industrial name survived longer than much of the community.
A 1979 Department of Labor notice still listed an Arno Mine among the Stonega Division operations of Westmoreland Coal Company. Federal production records for 1983 identify Westmoreland’s Arno Mine, number 44-04099, as an underground Wise County operation associated with 129,385 tons of coal production in the dataset. In 1985 federal mine-safety proceedings identified both Arno Mine and Arno No. 2 Mine among Westmoreland’s Wise County operations.
The town was disappearing, but Arno remained written into the industrial geography beneath the mountains.
The Piece of Arno That Survived
The strongest physical reminder of the old community survives almost by accident.
When the Derby Historic District was documented for the National Register of Historic Places, preservationists recognized that the houses at its lower end were not originally Derby houses at all. They belonged to the upper portion of Arno.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources today describes this area as the remains of the “now-vanished” Arno colliery. Eight frame houses survive along one side of the road and two along the other, representing part of the older community absorbed into the landscape of Derby.
Those houses are modest. They were never intended as monuments. They were places where mining families cooked meals, raised children, warmed themselves with coal from the surrounding hills, and waited to learn how many days the mine would work that week.
That ordinariness is exactly why they matter.
Arno represents hundreds of Appalachian communities whose physical footprints have contracted faster than their importance to regional history. Coal camps were not merely collections of identical houses owned by corporations. They became homes to Appalachian families, Black migrants from the South, European immigrants, miners, children, storekeepers, teachers, musicians, and generations whose lives unfolded in narrow hollows built around entrances into the earth.
Most of Arno is gone now. The name survives in old census tables, Hungarian newspapers, court testimony, federal mining records, company archives, and a handful of houses beside Preacher Creek.
Together, those fragments allow the vanished coal camp to become a community again.
Sources & Further Reading
Campbell, Marius R. Geology of the Big Stone Gap Coal Field of Virginia and Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 111. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b111
Fishback, Price V. “The Economics of Company Housing: Historical Perspectives from the Coal Fields.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 8, no. 2 (April 1992): 346–365. https://academic.oup.com/jleo/article/8/2/346/819637
Hagley Museum and Library. “Westmoreland Coal Company Records, 1854–1982.” Accession 1765. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum and Library. Part II contains Stonega Coke & Coal Company and subsidiary records, 1902–1974. https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/980
Hagley Museum and Library. “Westmoreland Coal Company Photograph and Video Collection.” Accession 1993.233. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum and Library. https://www.hagley.org/research/news/hagley-vault/were-using-last-post-2022
Stonega Coke & Coal Company. “Map Showing Mines and Property of the Stonega Coke & Coal Co.” Engineering Department, Wise County, Virginia, June 1919. Westmoreland Coal Company Archive, Hagley Museum and Library. Reproduced in the Wise County and Norton Historic Architectural Survey. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Stonega Coke & Coal Company. “Inventories.” February 1, 1924. Box 297, File 3, Westmoreland Coal Company Records, Accession 1765, Hagley Museum and Library. Includes inventories for Arno, Stonega, Roda, Osaka, and Keokee. https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/980
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Wise County and Norton Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Derby Historic District.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places, NRHP Reference No. 03001436. Last updated July 7, 2024. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/097-0048/
Worsham, Gibson. Derby Historic District. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Wise County, VA, 2003. National Park Service and Virginia Department of Historic Resources. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/097-0048_Derby_HD_2004_Final_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Appalachia Commercial Historic District. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Wise County, VA, 2019. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/164-5003_AppalachiaCommercialHD_2019_NRHP_FINAL.pdf
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Population of Unincorporated Communities: 1940. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1940uninc.pdf
Richert, Wendi Gibson. “They Call It Home.” Roanoke Times, March 28, 1993. https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1993/rt0393/930328/03260497.htm
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. https://utpress.org/9780870498855/coal-towns/
McKnight, Brian Dallas, Jodi Deal, Mary B. LaLone, et al. Life in the Coal Camps of Wise County: In Honor of Wise County’s Sesquicentennial. Big Stone Gap, VA: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 2006. https://collections.library.appstate.edu/research-aids/eastern-european-immigration-appalachian-industry
Tomlinson, Christopher Lloyd. “Contentment and Control: The Stonega Coke & Coal Company & Pioneering Welfare Capitalism in Southwest Virginia.” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2024. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/12368/
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. Stonega Coke & Coal Company recruitment advertisement naming Arno and other southwestern Virginia operations, 1917. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/60590/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1917_050.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. Reports from miners at Arno, Virginia, 1921. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/60697/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1921_006.pdf
U.S. Department of Labor. “Stonega Division of the Westmoreland Coal Company.” Federal Register, March 6, 1979. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1979-03-06/pdf/FR-1979-03-06.pdf
Mine Safety and Health Administration. “Westmoreland Coal Co.; Petition for Modification of Application of Mandatory Safety Standard.” Federal Register 50, no. 153 (August 8, 1985): 32127. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1985-08-08/pdf/FR-1985-08-08.pdf
U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Coal Production Data, 1983.” Entry for Arno Mine, Mine ID 4404099, Wise County, Virginia, Westmoreland Coal Company. https://downloads.regulations.gov/EPA-HQ-OLEM-2020-0107-1016/content.pdf
Author Note: Arno is the kind of coal camp that reminds me how easily an Appalachian community can nearly vanish from the landscape while surviving in records and memory. I hope this article helps preserve the story of the miners, immigrants, Black families, and company-town residents who once made Preacher Creek their home.