Appalachian Community Histories – Block, Campbell County: Highway 63, Coal Scrip, and a Mining Community in the Hills
Four miles west of Caryville, along the road that became Highway 63, Block grew around coal, rail, and the hard geography of western Campbell County. It was never a large town, and it never became a county seat, railroad hub, or resort community. Its story was quieter than that. Block was one of those Appalachian places where the mine shaped the map, the company shaped the workday, and the school, church, commissary, post office, and houses formed a community around the seam beneath the hills.
The strongest early description of Block comes from a 1939 community sketch prepared by Della Yoe, with information supplied by Sam B. Hatmaker, the postmaster at Block. That account described Block as an unincorporated mining community in the western part of Campbell County, about forty-five miles north and west of Knoxville. It gave the population as 135, listed Southern Railroad and State Highway 63 service, and stated plainly that coal mining was the only industry. There was one Baptist church, and educational facilities were provided by two graded schools. The village, according to the same account, was settled in 1889.
That 1939 sketch matters because it did not look back from a century of nostalgia. It came from the period when Block was still understood as a living coal community. The source was the local postmaster, a person whose work connected the settlement to residents, mail routes, family correspondence, money orders, official notices, and the outside world. For a small unincorporated coal camp, that kind of source carries unusual weight.
The Name in the Seam
The name Block came from coal itself. The 1939 account explained that the community took its name from a seam, or thick vein, of coal called a block. In that way, the place name worked like a short industrial record. It did not honor a politician, a railroad official, or an early family. It pointed directly to what drew people there.
That was common in the coalfields of Campbell County. Some communities carried names tied to companies, seams, minerals, railroad men, or post offices. Block belonged to the same world as Caryville, Elk Valley, Wooldridge, Newcomb, and the coal camps around LaFollette and Jellico. Each place had its own story, but all were shaped by the same broad forces: mineral rights, rail lines, company capital, local labor, and the demand for coal.
Goodspeed’s 1887 history of Campbell County came just before Block’s reported settlement date, but it helps explain why a place like Block was possible. By the late nineteenth century, Campbell County was already known for mineral wealth, transportation potential, and a growing coal economy. The arrival and expansion of rail service made remote seams more valuable, because coal could be shipped out of the mountains in marketable quantities. Block emerged in that changing landscape, where a seam in the hills could become a town name, a worksite, and a community.
Railroad, Road, and Mountain
Transportation made Block possible, but it did not make Block easy to reach. The 1939 sketch listed both the Southern Railroad and State Highway 63 as serving the community. Those details place Block inside the transportation corridor that connected Caryville, Jellico, and the coal communities of western and northern Campbell County.
Local memory adds more texture. Kila Hatmaker Powers, whose recollections were preserved in Marshall L. McGhee’s work on coal-mining towns and later discussed by Dallas Bogan, remembered Block as a community where the train was once the only practical way in or out. The road came later, and when it did, it was gravel. After rains, it could become rutted and rough, the kind of mountain road that forced slow travel and made every trip feel longer than the mileage suggested.
This detail is important because Block sat between two kinds of connection. On paper, it had railroad and highway service. In daily life, residents still dealt with mud, creek crossings, mountain slopes, and the limits of rural infrastructure. Coal camps were often connected to national markets before they were comfortably connected to neighboring towns. Coal could leave by rail, but families might still carry water by hand.
A Community Built Around the Mine
Block Coal & Coke Company appears in historical coal-operator records under Campbell County, listed simply as Block Coal & Coke Co., Block. That short listing confirms what the local accounts describe: Block was not merely a rural neighborhood where some residents happened to mine coal. It was a coal-company place.
Later federal coal records also identified Block Coal & Coke Company with Block No. 3 Mine at Block, Tennessee. By the mid-1940s, the company still appeared in official regulatory material. The details are technical, but they matter. They show that Block’s mine was part of the wider system of coal production, pricing, regulation, and record keeping that governed bituminous coal during the New Deal and World War II years.
The company’s presence can also be seen in material culture. Coal scrip from Block Coal & Coke Corporation survives in collector catalogs and auctions. These tokens were not just curiosities. They were small pieces of the company-store economy. A one-cent token from Block, Tennessee, carried the company name, the place name, and language tying its use to pay days and merchandise. In a coal camp, that kind of token represented more than a purchase. It represented the relationship between labor, wages, store credit, and company control.
Houses, Water, and Daily Life
The 1939 account gave the outline of Block. Local memory fills in the texture.
Kila Hatmaker Powers remembered Block as a fairly self-sustained coal community, with a boarding house, commissary, post office, doctor’s office, school, and later a bathhouse for miners. There were about fifty houses for miners and officials. Some stood along the main settlement area, while others were on the mountain, where families had to walk from the highway to reach home.
Most of the houses were remembered as shotgun houses, with rooms lined up from front to back. The larger and better houses were reserved for mine officials. That kind of arrangement was common in coal towns, where the built environment reflected the hierarchy of the mine itself. The superintendent, foremen, skilled employees, miners, boarders, and families did not all experience the camp in the same way.
Water shaped daily life. Homes did not have running water in the early period remembered by Powers. Drinking water came from a spring across the creek. Wash water came from the creek itself. That meant ordinary chores required labor before the work even began. Cooking, washing, bathing, and laundry all depended on carrying water, heating water, and making do with what the settlement provided.
The bathhouse came later and served miners before they returned home. For men coming out of the mine covered in coal dust, that building changed the line between work and home. It did not remove the danger of the mine or the hardships of camp life, but it did mark an improvement in daily conditions.
School, Church, and Community Gatherings
The 1939 sketch listed a Baptist church and two graded schools. Local recollection adds that church services were sometimes held in the one-room school. Movies, when someone came to show them, were also held there. The school was not simply a schoolhouse. It was one of the few public gathering places in the community.
That was typical of small Appalachian coal camps. A school building could become a church, meeting hall, social space, and entertainment venue. It held children during the week and adults at other times. In places without a large commercial district or municipal government, the school helped hold the community together.
For children in Block, the school connected them to both opportunity and limitation. Education was present, but it existed within the boundaries of the camp. The same community that gave children teachers and classmates also surrounded them with the sounds of the mine, the railroad, the commissary, and the work that employed their fathers, brothers, neighbors, and sometimes themselves as they grew older.
The Danger Beneath the Camp
Every coal community carried the danger of the mine into daily life. In September 1942, a newspaper report from LaFollette stated that Lawrence Elkins, a fifty-two-year-old coal miner, was killed in a slate fall at the Block Coal and Coke Company mine at Block. The report said Sheriff M. A. Ayres investigated and that Elkins died instantly from chest injuries.
That short account opens a window onto the human cost of Block’s industry. Slate falls were one of the constant dangers of underground mining. A man could leave home for a shift and never return. Families lived with that knowledge, even when they did not speak of it every day.
The report also named survivors, reminding readers that a mine death did not end at the mine mouth. It moved into a household, a church, a school, and a community. A widow, children, parents, siblings, and neighbors carried the loss. In a place the size of Block, such a death would not have been distant news. It would have been known.
Labor, Law, and the Wider Coalfields
Block’s history also reached into court records. Block Coal & Coke appeared in Tennessee Supreme Court cases in the 1940s and 1950s, including litigation involving the United Mine Workers of America, District No. 19, and later cases involving the company. These legal records show that Block’s coal history was not only local memory and map evidence. It was part of the legal and labor history of Tennessee mining.
Coal communities were often shaped by questions that reached far beyond the camp: union organization, unemployment compensation, injury claims, wages, ownership, and state regulation. Even when a case did not describe daily life in detail, it could preserve the names of companies, miners, officials, and disputes that otherwise might fade from local memory.
For Block, the legal record helps keep the company visible after the camp itself declined. It reminds us that coal towns were never isolated from larger systems. They were tied to state courts, federal agencies, railroad markets, company offices, and labor organizations.
Decline and Memory
Like many coal camps, Block declined when the mine no longer supported the community that had grown around it. Local memory preserved the familiar pattern: when the mine closed or work disappeared, people moved elsewhere. Houses emptied, services faded, and the public buildings that once held school, church, mail, business, and entertainment lost their original purpose.
Yet Block did not disappear completely. It survived in maps, scrip, court cases, federal records, community sketches, and family memory. The United States Geological Survey preserved the name in geographic records. Historical topographic maps preserve the surrounding landscape and the changing roads, streams, ridges, and settlement patterns. The Tennessee Division of Geology’s work on the Block quadrangle points researchers back to the mineral landscape beneath the story. County records, census schedules, deeds, tax books, post office records, and vital records can still help recover the names of residents who lived there.
That is often how coal-camp history survives. A place that once had smoke, railcars, schoolchildren, church services, mine whistles, company tokens, and creek water becomes scattered across many kinds of records. No single source tells the whole story. The history has to be gathered from official sketches, maps, court opinions, company traces, newspaper items, and the memories of people who knew the place when it still felt like home.
Block in Appalachian History
Block’s story is not unusual in the Appalachian coalfields, and that is exactly why it matters. It was a small place, but it carried the larger themes of the region. A mineral seam gave the community its name. A company gave it work. A railroad connected it to distant markets. A gravel road connected it slowly to neighboring towns. A school and church gave it gathering places. A commissary and coal scrip tied daily purchases to the company economy. A mine death reminded families of the danger beneath the mountain.
To write about Block is to write about the kind of Appalachian community that can be missed if history only follows courthouses, cities, battles, and famous people. Block was a working place. Its record is thin in some places and surprisingly strong in others. It remains visible because a postmaster answered a community questionnaire in 1939, because former residents remembered the houses and water sources, because maps preserved the name, because coal directories listed the operator, because courts recorded disputes, and because small pieces of scrip still carry the words Block Coal & Coke Corp., Block, Tenn.
The coal seam that gave Block its name helped build a community. The community changed, declined, and scattered, but the records still point back to a place west of Caryville where the mine, the road, the railroad, and the people of Campbell County met in the hills.
Sources & Further Reading
Yoe, Della. “Block.” In “Campbell County Place Names,” with source note from Sam B. Hatmaker, postmaster, Block, Tennessee, May 2, 1939. TNGenWeb Campbell County. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/placenames.html
Bogan, Dallas. “Coal Dust Memories of Block, Tennessee.” TNGenWeb Campbell County. https://www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist-bogan/coaldust.html
United States Geological Survey. “Geographic Names Information System.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
United States Geological Survey. “Domestic Names.” U.S. Board on Geographic Names. https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/domestic-names
United States Geological Survey. “topoView.” National Geologic Map Database. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” U.S. Geological Survey. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
Luther, Edward T. “Geologic Map and Mineral Resources Summary of the Block Quadrangle, Tennessee.” Tennessee Division of Geology, Geologic Quadrangle Map GM 128-SE, 1967. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-paleontology/article/new-middle-pennsylvanian-westphalian-amphibian-trackway-from-the-cross-mountain-formation-east-tennessee-cumberlands/47D8173548C075EFF31679B52CB247BD
Tennessee Geological Survey. “Catalog of Publications.” Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, 2026. https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/environment/geology/documents/geology_catalog.pdf
Coal Mining Companies and Operators of the United States. Chicago: Keystone Consolidated Publishing Company, 1918. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Coal_mining_companies_and_operators_of_the_United_States_%28IA_coalminingcompan00chic%29.pdf
Federal Register. “Bituminous Coal Division Notice Listing Block Coal & Coke Co., Block #3, Block, Tenn.” June 16, 1945. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1945-06-16/pdf/FR-1945-06-16.pdf
Block Coal & Coke Co. v. United Mine Workers of America, District No. 19, 177 Tenn. 247, 148 S.W.2d 364. Tennessee Supreme Court, 1941. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914cbcfadd7b04934805506
Block Coal & Coke Corporation v. Case, 193 Tenn. 377, 246 S.W.2d 52. Tennessee Supreme Court, 1952. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/block-coal-coke-corporation-893177261
Block Coal & Coke Co. v. Gibson, 199 Tenn. 116, 285 S.W.2d 112. Tennessee Supreme Court, 1955. https://app.midpage.ai/document/block-coal-coke-co-v-8303419
Numista. “1 Cent: Block Coal and Coke Corp., United States.” https://en.numista.com/195221
National Park Service. “Scrip: A Coal Miner’s Credit Card.” Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/biso/learn/historyculture/scrip.htm
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “PLD-1503.011. Pocahontas Coal Co. Cirrus Mine, Peerless Coal and Coke Co. Vivian Mine.” Pocahontas Mines Collection, Ms-2004-002. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/109188
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “PLD-1503.041, Pocahontas Corporation Property Map. McDowell County, West Virginia. Tazewell County Virginia.” Pocahontas Mines Collection, Ms-2004-002. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/109112
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheets About Campbell County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-campbell-county
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Bibliography of Tennessee Local History Sources: Campbell County.” Tennessee Secretary of State. https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/history/bibliographies/bibcampbell.htm
Tennessee Genealogical Society. “Campbell County Locality Guide.” June 21, 2024. https://www.tngs.org/resources/Documents/Locality%20Guides/Campbell%20County%20Locality%20Guide.pdf
Goodspeed Publishing Company. “Campbell County.” In History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present, 1887. TNGenWeb. https://www.tngenweb.org/goodspeed/campbell/
Goodspeed Publishing Company. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: East Tennessee Counties. Nashville: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1887. https://archive.org/details/historyoftenness03good
Killebrew, Joseph Buckner. Introduction to the Resources of Tennessee. Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1874. https://archive.org/details/firstsecondrepor00tenn
Killebrew, Joseph Buckner. Introduction to the Resources of Tennessee. Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1874. HathiTrust catalog record. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008923656
Glenn, Leonidas C. The Northern Tennessee Coal Field Included in Campbell, Claiborne, Scott, Anderson, and Morgan Counties. Nashville: Tennessee Division of Geology, 1925. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-campbell-county
Tennessee Encyclopedia. “Campbell County.” Tennessee Historical Society. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/campbell-county/
Campbell County, Tennessee. “Welcome to Campbell County, Tennessee.” Campbell County Government. https://campbellcountytn.gov/
Author Note: Small coal communities like Block can be hard to recover because their stories are scattered across maps, court cases, scrip, newspapers, and family memory. I wanted this article to keep the focus on the people and records that still point back to a Campbell County camp west of Caryville.