Appalachian History Series – Black Mountain Coal Company and the Camp at Kenvir
In a 1946 photograph by Russell Lee, the tipple of Mine 31 rises over a narrow hollow at Kenvir while rows of company houses climb the slope behind it. Men move coal, children and laundry hang on porches, and the whole scene feels at once ordinary and precarious. The picture freezes a moment near the middle of Black Mountain Coal Company’s life in Harlan County, but the story behind it stretches from the First World War to the age of mountaintop removal and the Blackjewel blockade.
Black Mountain Coal Company was not just a mine. It was a company town, a Peabody subsidiary, a battleground of the Harlan County War, and later a name that reappeared on mine permits in Virginia and West Virginia. The camp at Kenvir linked Harlan County miners to national coal markets, to union struggles, and to later debates over land, labor, and environmental justice across the wider Appalachian region.
A company town on the Kentucky Virginia line
Kenvir sits on Yocum Creek about eight miles east of Harlan, close to the Kentucky Virginia border that gave the camp its name. Kenvir was established around 1919 by Black Mountain Coal Company, which soon became part of Peabody Coal’s network of captive properties. The Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer notes that the post office opened in 1921 and that the camp remained a small but distinct census place into the twenty first century.
From the beginning, Kenvir was designed as a classic early twentieth century coal camp rather than a scattered cluster of independent holdings. Black Mountain controlled the mines, the housing, the store, the hospital, and much of the social life of the hollow. CoalCampUSA’s survey of the site emphasizes that Black Mountain Coal Company operated as a subsidiary of Peabody Coal, marketed coal under the “Great Heart” trade name, and eventually shut the Kenvir mines in 1958, a date that roughly marks the end of deep mining there.
Building Kenvir as a captive camp
Company maps, photographs, and architectural studies show that Kenvir was laid out with rows of camp houses marching along the hillside, the mine works and tipple at the mouth of the hollow, and a cluster of institutional buildings that included a hospital and recreational spaces. An architectural study of Harlan County camp housing notes that a simple four room bungalow plan, easy to expand and modify, was the most common type at Black Mountain. One of these houses still stands on what used to be the Black Mountain camp, recognizable by its compact footprint and the enclosed porch that was once open to the yard.
Black Mountain Coal Company maintained its own hospital at Kenvir, one of only three hospitals in Harlan County in 1931. A recent thesis on Harlan County health care describes the Black Mountain facility as serving both the camp and some residents from the surrounding area, a reminder that company institutions handled not just emergencies underground but births, illnesses, and chronic injuries that defined daily life.
Russell Lee’s 1946 photographs of Black Mountain property make the built environment of Kenvir vivid. His images show the big tipple, coal cars, belts and trestles, rows of houses, outbuildings, and narrow paths climbing the hillside. One widely reproduced photograph captures the tipple of Mine 31 with company housing stacked behind it, while others show company houses, first aid drills, and families standing in the yards. Lee was working for a federal war agency, the Solid Fuels Administration, and his assignment produced a visual record of the camp at a moment when underground mining still provided steady production but the long arc of mechanization and decline was already underway.
Everyday life in Kenvir revolved around the company store and the scrip system that Black Mountain used during much of its history. Surviving scrip tokens stamped “Black Mountain Coal Corporation – Kenvir, Ky – One Dollar” show how pay could be diverted into company credit rather than cash. Token collectors and local histories identify these pieces explicitly as belonging to Peabody’s Black Mountain operation, a reminder that the store was both a convenience and a mechanism of control.
Disaster in Mine 30
On May 22, 1928, Black Mountain’s Mine 30 exploded. A brief state report noted that the disaster at Kenvir killed eight men and that the mine produced about three thousand tons of coal daily at the time. The U S Bureau of Mines investigation described Mine 30 as a Peabody operation at Kenvir and concluded that the immediate cause was the detonation of explosives, probably percussion caps and dynamite, which in turn ignited gas and dust.
Newspaper coverage reprinted on the U S Mine Disasters site offers a stark narrative of the explosion. An Associated Press story reported that a box of caps exploded, that eight men died, and that only the timing of the blast prevented much greater loss of life because the main day shift had already left the mine. Tram crews, electricians, a foreman, and laborers were among the dead. Rescue teams from nearby operations fought gas and debris to reach their bodies and to confirm that scores of other miners had escaped through alternative headings.
The Kenvir explosion appears again in memorial sources decades later. Compilers of the Harlan Miners Memorial and death lists used state and federal records to piece together county mining fatalities and included the 1928 Kenvir disaster among their entries. Later Harlan County death lists for the 1940s show additional Black Mountain miners killed in roof falls, haulage accidents, and explosions at Mine 31, a reminder that the 1928 disaster was only one of many fatal incidents at the company’s properties.
Strikes, scrip, and the Harlan County War
The trauma of explosion and the grind of company town life unfolded against a background of intense labor conflict. In the early 1920s Black Mountain miners were among the last in Harlan County to keep a union contract with the United Mine Workers of America. A letter by retired union representative Chester C Watson, reproduced in the narrative often circulated as Hell in Harlan, recalls that Black Mountain miners held a union local at a time when other Harlan camps had already gone non union, and that their stand led to armed guards, evictions, and a strike that collapsed only after months of pressure.
The crisis of the 1930s pushed those conflicts into a new phase. On February 16, 1931, as the Great Depression slashed demand for coal, the Black Mountain Coal Company announced a ten percent wage cut. The Clio entry on the Battle of Evarts uses contemporary evidence to describe how that decision triggered a broader strike across Harlan County. Hundreds of miners walked off the job, many of them Black Mountain men, and union organizers tried again to build UMWA locals in the county.
Miners who joined or were suspected of supporting the union lost their jobs and their houses. Harlan Miners Speak, the Dreiser Committee report compiled from hearings and affidavits in 1931, preserves testimony from Black Mountain miners and their families who describe wage cuts, blacklisting, and evictions from company houses. One miner recalled receiving a notice to vacate within a few days and watching furniture set out on the road while company deputies stood by.
Pamphlets and radical newspapers of the time reinforced the picture found in official testimony. The pamphlet Shame That Is Kentucky’s, produced by the General Defense Committee, called Kenvir’s Black Mountain operation a large captive mine that belonged to Peabody and described it as a core stronghold of the operators during the Harlan Mine War. Coverage in the Daily Worker treated the 1931 Black Mountain strikes and the Evarts fighting as part of a national labor struggle, reporting on picket lines at Kenvir, guards brought in from outside the county, and miners’ attempts to shop outside the company store.
United Mine Workers correspondence from the period and later union histories emphasize that Black Mountain miners were often among the most militant and organized in the county. One letter in the UMWA president’s files, now preserved in the Penn State union archives, describes conditions faced by miners at the “Black Mountain Coal Co, a subsidiary of the Peabody Coal Company,” and blames the company’s wage policies and guard system for much of the unrest.
Black Mountain under guard
As violence mounted, the state took the unusual step of formally declaring a state of lawlessness around Black Mountain property. In 1935, after the home of superintendent E J Asbury was dynamited, the Kentucky governor issued an order that appears in the Hell in Harlan compilation. The order notes that reliable reports of intimidation and beatings by deputy sheriffs in the vicinity of Black Mountain mines justified a declaration that “a state of lawlessness is declared to exist in the Black Mountain Coal Corporation section of Harlan County” and assigned National Guard soldiers as peace officers near the camp.
The same source shows how the sheriff and county judge tried to block National Guard intervention, arguing that only county deputies could preserve the peace. The Kentucky Supreme Court eventually overturned that injunction, but the episode highlights how thoroughly Black Mountain and other operators had fused their private guard forces with local law enforcement. For miners and their families in Kenvir, the men who controlled evictions and picket lines often wore both company badges and county stars.
Black Mountain’s management played a central role in Harlan County coal politics. Senate investigations and later historical accounts quote Asbury’s testimony about assessments paid to the operators’ association for private guards sometimes called “thug killers.” The Hell in Harlan narrative includes an incident in which Asbury accused the sheriff’s deputies of bombing his house in order to force Black Mountain to abandon its union contract, and it notes that he demanded the removal of certain deputies from his property.
Black Mountain and the Battle of Evarts
Black Mountain miners and guards were at the heart of the Battle of Evarts, the most famous gun battle of the 1930s Harlan County War. On May 5, 1931, a coal truck belonging to Black Mountain Coal Corporation drove past a group of UMWA pickets at Evarts. Accounts collected in Hell in Harlan and summarized by historians describe how strikers later ambushed the truck’s return, leading to a running gunfight that left three company men and one miner dead.
Bill Bishop’s reconstruction of the battle and John Hevener’s Which Side Are You On place Black Mountain in the center of that struggle. Black Mountain trucks hauled strikebreakers and coal through Evarts, Black Mountain guards rode shotgun, and Black Mountain miners were among the most active picketers and union supporters. Later conspiracy trials revolved around the question of whether Evarts miners and their allies planned an ambush or acted in self defense, but all sides agreed that the conflict could not be understood without the wages, guards, and evictions at Kenvir.
The operators won the immediate battle. By June 1931 the initial strike wave had collapsed, and company guards and deputies drove the union underground. Yet Black Mountain miners continued to surface in later organizing drives, and by 1935 the company once again had a contract with the UMWA, one of only a few union mines left in the county at that moment. Hell in Harlan notes that National Guard troops were called out several times in the mid 1930s as Black Mountain and other union properties faced renewed threats from anti union deputies and gunmen.
Work, home, and memory in the camp
Oral histories gather the voices of Black Mountain miners and their families and place them against this backdrop of conflict. Interviews collected in Alessandro Portelli’s They Say in Harlan County include men and women who grew up in company towns like Kenvir and recall the double edged nature of company paternalism: ready access to housing, a doctor, and a school on one hand, and rules about behavior, church attendance, and union activity on the other. One former miner remembered that “they kept a lot of laws in coal camps,” including curfews and restrictions on public gatherings that made organizing risky.
The oral history collection Our Appalachia contains similar memories of Black Mountain’s store and scrip system. Interviewees describe the way company credit worked, how groceries and clothing were purchased with tokens or store checks, and how getting behind at the store could mean being forced to take on more work or losing access to credit altogether. For families at Kenvir, the store was the center of community life, the place where neighbors met and gossip spread, yet it was also the ledger that measured debt and dependency.
Individual interviews add human detail to this broader picture. Jack Roy, a miner interviewed in the 1980s, talked about Black Mountain Coal Company in the wider circuit of coal work in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, recalling both the danger of the mines and the pride that came with steady work in a camp that had its own hospital and theater. He and others emphasized that Kenvir was not only a site of strikes and disasters but also a place where people fell in love, raised children, and watched ball games on red clay lots between their shifts.
After Peabody: Black Mountain in a wider Appalachian story
Peabody Coal closed the Kenvir mines in 1958, according to CoalCampUSA, and the camp began to empty. Some of the frame houses were moved or demolished. Others survived as privately owned homes, altered but still recognizable in modern photographs of the hollow. The tipples and most of the heavy structures came down, leaving only foundations and openings that marked the old mine portals.
The name Black Mountain Coal Company did not disappear with Kenvir. Federal energy data from the 1980s and 1990s list Black Mountain Coal Co Inc as the operator of Algoma No 14, an underground mine in McDowell County, West Virginia, and of mines in Buchanan County, Virginia. In these records, the company address appears as Drawer 9 at Crumpler, West Virginia, and later a Virginia post office, suggesting a corporate line that carried the Black Mountain brand into a different part of central Appalachia.
Virginia state mine safety databases list Black Mountain Coal Co Inc and Black Mountain Mining Company among active operators in Buchanan County during the late twentieth century. Environmental studies, satellite mapping projects, and public interest reports on coal in that region document how underground mining fed into an expanding program of surface mines and mountaintop removal across eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and southern West Virginia. While these later Black Mountain firms operated under different circumstances, they inherited a regional landscape already shaped by companies like Peabody and camps like Kenvir.
By the late twentieth century, much of the debate around Black Mountain and neighboring ridges had shifted from underground safety to the environmental and health costs of surface mining. Groups such as Appalachian Voices, as well as federal reports and academic studies, have documented how mountaintop removal and related methods erase entire ridges, bury headwater streams, and increase health risks for nearby communities. Big Black Mountain in Harlan County features in several of these discussions as a symbol of the trade offs between short term coal production and long term environmental damage.
From Black Mountain to Blackjewel
Modern journalists often link Black Mountain’s history to more recent fights over coal jobs and unpaid wages. Reporting on the 2019 Blackjewel coal bankruptcy and the Harlan County railroad blockade frequently points out that the same hollows where miners once fought guards around Kenvir and Evarts saw miners and families again blocking coal trains, this time to demand paychecks that had bounced. Articles in outlets such as the New Yorker, Teen Vogue, and regional public radio frame the Blackjewel protest as part of a long Appalachian tradition of labor militancy that includes the Black Mountain miners of the 1930s.
Those stories hinge on both continuity and change. Coal employment in Harlan County has shrunk dramatically, and mechanization and environmental regulation have transformed the industry. Yet the basic conflict between outside capital and local labor remains familiar. When miners camped on the tracks in 2019 with “No Pay, We Stay” written on cardboard signs, they stood in the shadow of nearly a century of strikes and shootings whose earlier chapters had been written in Kenvir and at Black Mountain.
Why Black Mountain’s story still matters
Today, visitors who drive up Yocum Creek see only traces of the old Black Mountain camp. A few former company houses survive, altered by additions and vinyl siding. The mine openings are sealed or collapsed. The hospital, theater, and store are gone. What remains is a landscape of memory, where the names of mines, disasters, and battles still carry weight in families that remember who died in Mine 30 or who lost a job during the wage cuts of 1931.
Black Mountain Coal Company’s story reaches far beyond one hollow in Harlan County. It links local people to national energy markets, federal war agencies, and the long arc of labor and environmental history in Appalachia. The Russell Lee photographs, the Bureau of Mines accident report, the Dreiser Committee hearings, the governor’s lawlessness proclamation, and the oral histories of miners and their families all converge on Kenvir as a place where corporate ambition, state power, and working class resilience collided.
To tell the story of Black Mountain Coal Company is to trace how a single company town could generate wages, profits, disasters, songs, and court cases that still echo across the mountains. It is also to recognize that the struggles over safety, pay, land, and dignity that shaped Kenvir have not disappeared. They have simply moved to new seams and new companies, while the miners and families of Harlan County continue to live with the legacy of coal.
Sources & Further Reading
“1940–49 Harlan Co Miners Deaths.” USGenWeb Harlan County, Kentucky. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.usgenwebsites.org/KYHarlan/1940_49_miners_deaths.html. USGenWeb
“Black Mountain (Kentucky).” Global Energy Monitor Wiki. April 29, 2021. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.gem.wiki/Black_Mountain_%28Kentucky%29. Global Energy Monitor
Bishop, Bill. “1931: The Battle of Evarts.” Southern Exposure / Facing South. 1984. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.facingsouth.org.
Caudill, Harry M. Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. https://archive.org/details/nightcomestocumb00caud. GovInfo
“Coal Data.” U.S. Energy Information Administration. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/coal/data.php. EIA
“coalpublic1986.xls.” Coal Public Data, 1986. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/coal/data/public/xls/coalpublic1986.xls. EIA
“Hell in Harlan – front page.” Harlan County pamphlet and related documents, including gubernatorial proclamation declaring a “state of lawlessness” in the Black Mountain Coal Corporation section. PDF, ca. 1930s, reproduced online. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://carlestes.com/hellinharlan.pdf. Carl Estes
Hevener, John W. Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. https://dokumen.pub/which-side-are-you-on-the-harlan-county-coal-miners-1931-39-0252002709-9780252002700.html. Dokumen.pub
“Harlan County, USA.” Documentary film directed by Barbara Kopple. Cabin Creek Films, 1976. Information at Wikipedia. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County%2C_USA. Wikipedia
Jack Roy. Oral History Interview: Jack Roy. Marshall University Oral History Collection, OH64-496, 1988. Marshall Digital Scholar. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/383/. Marshall Digital Scholar+1
Kelly, Kim. “Appalachia’s Long, Proud Tradition of Labor Militancy.” Teen Vogue, August 15, 2019. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/why-harlan-county-kentucky-miners-blockading-coal-trains. Teen Vogue
“Kentucky Coal Mine Safety Data Information System.” Virginia Department of Energy. Operator listings for BLACK MOUNTAIN COAL CO., INC. and BLACK MOUNTAIN MINING COMPANY, Buchanan County, Virginia. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://energy.virginia.gov/DMINQUIRY/frmMain.aspx?ctl=11. Virginia Energy
“Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program.” University of Kentucky Libraries. Digitized runs of the Harlan Daily Enterprise, Lexington Herald/Herald-Leader, and Louisville Courier-Journal, 1910s–1940s. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://kentuckynewspapers.org.
Kormann, Carolyn, and Edward Steed. “The Battle for a Paycheck in Kentucky Coal Country.” The New Yorker, September 9, 2019. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-battle-for-a-paycheck-in-kentucky-coal-country. The New Yorker
Lee, Russell. “Furman Currington and His Son, Miners. Black Mountain Corporation, 30–31 Mines, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky.” Photograph, September 6, 1946. Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1946–47, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons%3ANational_Archives_and_Records_Administration/Categorize/US_National_Archives_series%3A_Photographs_of_the_Medical_Survey_of_the_Bituminous_Coal_Industry%2C_compiled_1946_-_1947. Wikimedia Commons
Lee, Russell. “Black Mountain Corporation, 30–31 Mines, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky” (series of photographs including mine tipple, housing, hospital wards, miners’ families). In “Russell Lee in Harlan County, Kentucky – 1946,” Art Blart blog. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://artblart.com/tag/social-documentary-photogaphy/. Art Blart
“Mine Deaths from the Harlan Miners Memorial Monument, 1913–2000.” USGenWeb Harlan County, Kentucky. PDF. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.usgenwebsites.org/KYHarlan/Mine%20Deaths%20From%20The%20Harlan%20Miners%20Memorial%20%20Monument.pdf. Appalachianhistorian.org+1
National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. New York: National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, 1932. PDF edition with introduction by Alessandro Portelli. University of Kentucky Appalachian Center. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/HD9547_KA4.pdf. Appalachian Center
“Our Appalachia: An Oral History.” Edited by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Our-Appalachia/Laurel-Shackelford/9780813101842. Books-A-Million+1
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Harlan-County-History/dp/0199934851. Amazon Web Services, Inc.+1
“Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1946–1947.” National Archives and Records Administration series description and image set, including multiple Russell Lee images of Black Mountain Corporation Mines 30–31 at Kenvir, Kentucky. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons%3ANational_Archives_and_Records_Administration/Categorize/US_National_Archives_series%3A_Photographs_of_the_Medical_Survey_of_the_Bituminous_Coal_Industry%2C_compiled_1946_-_1947. Wikimedia Commons
Scott, Shaunna L. Two Sides to Everything: The Cultural Construction of Class Consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Two-Sides-to-Everything2. Kentucky Geological Survey
Sergent, Joanna. “The Harlan County Coal Wars 1931–1939.” Kentucky Tennessee Living, 2021. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://kytnliving.com/the-harlan-county-coal-wars-1931-1939/. US Mine Disasters
Shackelford, Laurel, and Bill Weinberg, eds. Our Appalachia: An Oral History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/our-appalachia-laurel-shackelford/1111386055. eBay+1
“Shame That Is Kentucky’s! The Story of the Harlan Mine War.” Pamphlet. Athens, OH: Ohio University, ca. 1930s. Ohio University Libraries Digital Collections. https://www.ohio.edu/library (search “Shame That Is Kentucky’s”).
Titler, George J. Hell in Harlan. Ebook edition. Lulu, 2011. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.lulu.com/shop/george-j-titler/hell-in-harlan/ebook/product-17gddq8v.html. Lulu
United States Bureau of Mines. Report of Explosion, Black Mountain Corporation, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky, May 22, 1928. Report of Investigations. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1928. Digital facsimile at U.S. Mine Disasters: https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com.
“United States Coal Public Data, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990.” Data tables listing Black Mountain Coal Co., Inc., Drawer 9, Crumpler, West Virginia, operator of Algoma No. 14 in McDowell County, West Virginia. U.S. Energy Information Administration Coal Public Data. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.eia.gov/coal/data/public. EIA
“Women’s Ward in Hospital Owned by the Company. Black Mountain Corporation, 30–31 Mines, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky.” Photograph by Russell Lee, September 6, 1946. Description via Alamy image DHCEWX. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/black-hospital.html. alamy.com
“‘Mine No. 30 – Looking East – Kenvir, KY.’ Arthur W. Morgan Collection.” Kentucky Historical Society online catalog. Photograph of Black Mountain Coal Corporation Mine No. 30 and company camp at Kenvir, Kentucky. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://kyhistory.pastperfectonline.com.
“Kenvir, Black Mountain Theatre, Hospital, and Camp Housing.” Harlan Kentucky site (community photo compilation). Accessed January 5, 2026. https://www.angelfire.com/tn/jro99/index.html.
“The Battle of Evarts, Kentucky, 1931.” The Clio: Your Guide to History. Public history entry with bibliography. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://theclio.com.
“The Ballad of Harlan County.” Economic Hardship Reporting Project, July 11, 2016. Accessed January 5, 2026. https://economichardship.org/2016/07/the-ballad-of-harlan-county/.
Author Note: Writing about Black Mountain Coal Company and Kenvir means returning to hollows where coal, conflict, and community have been intertwined for generations. I hope this piece helps you see the camp not just as a name in the Harlan County Coal Wars, but as a lived place where miners’ work, losses, and resilience still echo.