Appalachian Community Histories – Carswell, McDowell County: Houston Collieries, Koppers, and the Mine Explosions of 1919 and 1941
Carswell Hollow does not open like a town with a courthouse square, rows of businesses, or a recognizable downtown. The road turns north from U.S. Route 52 near Kimball and follows Laurel Branch into a narrow valley surrounded by the steep mountains of McDowell County.
At the mouth of the hollow stands an unusually graceful brick building with arched windows and a tiled roof. Above it, on a hillside overlooking Elkhorn Creek, stands the former home of coal company president David E. Houston. Both buildings were designed to be seen. They represented stability, authority, and the wealth that Houston Collieries hoped to draw from the Pocahontas coalfield.
The mine itself was largely hidden beneath the mountain.
Carswell became a place where hundreds of men descended underground, where families lived in company houses, where company scrip passed across store counters, and where two explosions took the lives of miners in 1919 and 1941. The surviving store and Houston residence preserve part of that history aboveground, but the full story of Carswell Hollow lies in the relationship between the camp, the company, and the dangerous workings underneath it.
A Coal Camp Above Kimball
Carswell Hollow is located immediately north of Kimball along Laurel Branch. Elkhorn Creek and the railroad corridor run near the mouth of the hollow, connecting Carswell with the larger chain of mining communities that developed throughout the Pocahontas coalfield.
The Houston Collieries Company established the Carswell coal camp in 1915. The company constructed houses for miners and supervisors along the hollow. David E. Houston, the company president, built his own residence on a hill near the entrance, where it stood apart from the miners’ housing while remaining close to the mine, store, railroad, and company offices.
Carswell was not created as an independent town that later attracted a mine. It was built because of the mine. Housing, commercial buildings, roads, and transportation routes were arranged around the needs of coal production.
The hollow’s location was practical. Coal could be removed from the mountain, processed near the mine, and carried toward the Norfolk and Western Railway line along Elkhorn Creek. From there, Pocahontas coal could move beyond McDowell County to steel mills, railroads, factories, and other industrial consumers.
The Coal Heritage Survey Update described Carswell as a community whose history reflected the growth of industrial capitalism in southern West Virginia. That description reaches beyond economics. The company did not simply own the mine. It shaped the physical landscape in which its employees worked, shopped, raised families, and built community.
Life Within the Houston Company Landscape
Company houses extended along the long, narrow valley. The arrangement placed miners and their families within walking distance of the mine and company stores while separating different kinds of housing according to occupation and status.
Supervisors and company officials generally received larger or more architecturally distinctive residences. The president’s house occupied a prominent position overlooking the entrance to the camp. Its location communicated the hierarchy of the community before anyone entered a mine office or spoke to a foreman.
The company store became the camp’s most visible public building. The surviving Houston Coal Company Store was constructed around 1923. Its brick walls, symmetrical front, round-arched openings, broad porch, tiled roof, and Renaissance Revival influence made it appear less like an industrial commissary and more like a civic building.
The National Register nomination states that the valley once required two stores because the company houses stretched so far into the hollow. The smaller store farther up Carswell Hollow has disappeared. The large store at the mouth remains. It served employees and families under both the Houston and Koppers companies and provided a commercial and social center near the main road to Kimball.
Carswell also participated in the company scrip system that became common throughout the coalfields. A surviving order dated May 5, 1926, requested the immediate shipment of 7,250 pieces of brass scrip for the Houston Collieries Company at Carswell. The order came through the Houston coal interests’ Cincinnati offices and was directed to the Ingle-Schierloh Company of Dayton, Ohio.
The document is a small but revealing primary source. It connects a miner’s labor in Carswell Hollow with company offices in Cincinnati and a scrip manufacturer in Ohio. The metal tokens used in a McDowell County store were part of an economic network that extended far beyond the mountains.
The Brown Family Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania preserves an even larger record of the Houston family’s coal and industrial interests. The collection contains correspondence, photographs, financial records, scrapbooks, and business papers connected with members of the Houston family. Its finding aid identifies the Houston family as investors and entrepreneurs in the coal, lumber, steel, and banking industries of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.
These records show that Carswell was connected to a web of distant capital. Decisions affecting a narrow Appalachian hollow could be made in offices hundreds of miles away.
The Carswell Explosion of 1919
Only four years after Houston Collieries established the camp, Carswell suffered its first major mining disaster.
On July 18, 1919, an explosion struck the Carswell Mine. The current disaster table maintained by the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training records seven fatalities. It identifies the operator as Houston Collieries Company and the location as Carswell near Kimball.
Some older historical summaries give a death toll of six. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey Update repeated that lower number. The present official state table, however, lists seven, making seven the strongest available final figure.
The difference illustrates one of the difficulties of studying mining disasters. Initial newspaper reports were often written while rescue operations were still underway. Injured miners could die days or weeks later. Company, state, federal, and newspaper accounts did not always update their numbers at the same time.
What does not change is the effect on Carswell Hollow. The explosion occurred in a camp where miners lived near one another, shopped at the same stores, traveled the same road, and worked beneath the same mountain. Seven deaths were not an abstract industrial statistic. They represented missing fathers, sons, brothers, neighbors, and coworkers within a small community.
The 1919 explosion became the first great tragedy written into Carswell’s history, but it would not be the last.
Carswell Under Koppers Coal Company
Ownership and management of Carswell later passed into the hands of the Koppers Coal Company. By 1941, the Carswell Mine formed part of what Koppers called its Houston Division, preserving the Houston name even after the original company’s control had ended.
A federal Bureau of Mines report placed the mine approximately one mile north of Kimball on the King Branch of the Norfolk and Western Railway. The operation had grown far beyond a small local mine. Approximately 600 men worked underground and another 100 worked on the surface. The mine operated two shifts and produced an average of roughly 3,000 tons of coal each day.
The operation connected Carswell with the former King and Tidewater workings through a system of shafts, slopes, drifts, haulageways, and ventilation passages. It worked primarily in the Pocahontas No. 3 seam, which averaged about sixty inches in thickness in the areas described by federal investigators. The report characterized the coal as low-volatile bituminous coal that was soft and friable.
The mine was productive, extensive, and heavily mechanized for its time. Electric cutting machines, drills, conveyors, trolley locomotives, telephones, and signal systems helped move coal and men through miles of underground workings.
Mechanization increased production, but it also introduced new hazards. Electric cables operated in an atmosphere where methane could collect. Conveyors required changes in ventilation as working sections moved. Canvas curtains and stoppings directed air through active rooms, but a damaged, displaced, or poorly arranged barrier could allow gas to accumulate.
These dangers came together before dawn on January 22, 1941.
The Morning of January 22, 1941
At approximately 4:30 in the morning, a gas and coal-dust explosion tore through a section of the Carswell Mine.
There were 145 men underground. The explosion remained confined to an area approximately 200 feet around the intersection of Room 36 and the Second Left entry. Because the blast was localized, 127 men working in other sections escaped without difficulty after the dispatcher notified them by telephone. Some had not initially realized that an explosion had occurred elsewhere in the mine.
The men nearest Room 36 faced fire, force, smoke, carbon monoxide, and afterdamp, the poisonous mixture of gases that can remain after an underground explosion.
The federal report prepared soon afterward counted five deaths. Four men were killed outright by burns and violence, while a fifth died two days later from his injuries. Thirteen additional men suffered burns or carbon monoxide poisoning. The current West Virginia disaster table records a final total of six fatalities. The difference indicates that the toll was later revised, probably after another injured miner died, although the sources consulted do not identify that later death.
The response began quickly. A survivor telephoned the dispatcher, who notified the surface and ordered men removed from unaffected areas. Within half an hour, a rescue party that included a doctor entered the mine. A second team followed with breathing apparatus.
One of the most striking passages in the federal report concerns the foreman of the affected conveyor section. Although painfully burned, he directed and assisted ten other men through smoke and afterdamp toward the main haulage entry. Some of the men were frightened, seriously burned, or suffering from exposure to poisonous gases.
Officials divided into smaller groups to search the explosion area. They found dead and injured miners near Room 36 and the surrounding air course. The injured and the bodies of those killed were brought out before noon on January 22.
For families waiting outside, the operation that had employed hundreds of people and produced thousands of tons of coal each day had narrowed to a single question: who would come back out of the mountain?
A Spark at Room 36
Federal and state investigators reconstructed a chain of events leading to the explosion.
Ventilation changes had been made during the preceding days. Canvas stoppings had been erected near the area where Room 36 met the air course. Investigators believed leakage around these stoppings gradually forced a mixture of methane and air from Room 36 toward the adjoining entry.
A conveyor unit had also been moved from one room and reinstalled in a newly opened working place. During that process, the ventilation system serving rooms on both sides of the air course was interrupted. Air was short-circuited away from Room 36, allowing methane to accumulate.
At the same time, the trailing electric cable used for the conveyor, coal drill, and cutting machine had been coiled along the air course. A machine operator working in the newly started Room 37 needed additional cable. He instructed his helper to pull more slack.
An electric arc formed at the cable connection.
The explosion followed.
Investigators learned that arcs had formed at the same connection on earlier occasions. Cable insulation had previously ignited and caused a small fire. The electrical danger was therefore not entirely unknown before the disaster.
The federal report estimated that the Carswell Mine liberated approximately 1.23 million cubic feet of methane during a twenty-four-hour period. Its authors warned that such a large volume required extreme caution because any disruption in ventilation could permit gas to collect in dangerous concentrations.
State and federal investigators agreed that methane had been ignited by an electric arc at the intersection of Room 36 and the Second Left air course. Coal dust contributed to the spread of the explosion, although gas was considered the principal fuel.
One factor prevented the disaster from becoming even worse. The mine had been rock-dusted. Pulverized rock spread through mine entries can reduce the ability of coal dust to ignite and carry an explosion. Investigators believed the rock dust surrounding the affected section helped confine the Carswell blast to its limited radius. Without it, the explosion might have traveled into areas occupied by the other 127 miners.
Lessons Written in the Federal Report
The Bureau of Mines did not describe the Carswell explosion as an unavoidable mystery. Its investigators identified specific failures and specific measures that could reduce the chances of another disaster.
They called for positive ventilation all the way to active working faces. They recommended better constructed line brattices, self-closing doors, incombustible stoppings, improved watering of coal dust, and more careful isolation of abandoned or worked-out areas.
The report also warned against improperly installed and maintained electrical cables. It called for better qualified and specifically trained workers to install and maintain electrical equipment. Foremen, investigators argued, should concentrate on inspection, instruction, and supervision rather than becoming occupied with other mine work.
The findings gave the disaster a disturbing clarity. Methane accumulated because ventilation had been disrupted. The gas reached a location where an electric connection had arced before. When workers pulled slack into the cable, another arc provided the ignition.
The tragedy emerged from a sequence of conditions, decisions, and known hazards rather than from one incomprehensible moment.
The Store at the Mouth of the Hollow
The mine changed ownership, suffered disasters, and eventually closed, but the large company store at the entrance to Carswell Hollow survived.
Constructed around 1923, the one-story brick building retained much of its original appearance when it was surveyed for the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. Its round arches, tiled roof, broad eaves, projecting wings, rear delivery arcade, porch, and symmetrical facade distinguished it from the more industrial-looking company stores found elsewhere in McDowell County.
Its architecture was not accidental. Company stores were meant to be useful, but they could also advertise the strength and prosperity of the company. At Carswell, the store and the Houston residence presented an image of permanence and order at the entrance to the community.
The store served workers and families first under the Houston interests and later under Koppers. The building contained commercial space, offices, storage areas, and delivery entrances. Its porch and accessible location near the main road made it a gathering place as well as a place of business.
The Houston Coal Company Store was entered in the National Register of Historic Places on April 17, 1992, as part of the Coal Company Stores in McDowell County Multiple Property Submission.
Its survival is especially important because so much of the original Carswell landscape has disappeared. The second store farther up the hollow is gone. Mine structures have vanished or deteriorated. Company houses have been demolished, altered, or absorbed into the later residential landscape.
The surviving store remains a physical link between the mine, the company, and the families who once depended upon both.
The Last Years of the Old Carswell Mine
Koppers operated the Carswell mine and store before the major wave of postwar mine closures. In 1953, the old mining operation was leased to Peerless Coal and Coke Company. The Coal Heritage Survey found no evidence that the historic Carswell operation resumed production after that lease.
The end of mining changed the purpose of the hollow. Houses that had once stood near an active industrial operation became ordinary private residences or disappeared. Roads remained after the mine traffic declined. Streams continued flowing past abandoned mine lands and old refuse areas.
The David and Miriam Houston House, constructed around 1920, survived near the entrance. Surveyors also recorded a house at 1158 Carswell Hollow Road dating to approximately the same period. Together with the company store and remaining residences, these properties preserve fragments of the social divisions and architectural choices built into the original camp.
Elsewhere in McDowell County, the loss has been severe. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey estimated that between 25 and 40 percent of the approximately 1,200 historic resources documented during the county’s 1991 survey had been demolished. Carswell’s surviving buildings therefore belong to a rapidly shrinking group of physical records from the coal camp era.
Why Carswell Hollow Matters
Carswell Hollow tells the history of a coal camp through both survival and absence.
The company store and Houston residence survive because they were substantial buildings associated with management and commerce. Many miners’ houses and industrial structures did not. The buildings that remain show how the company wished to present itself. The mine reports reveal what workers faced beneath that presentation.
Carswell was built in 1915 to extract coal from the mountain. Within four years, seven miners were dead in an explosion. Under Koppers, the operation grew to employ approximately 700 men and produce thousands of tons each day. Then, in 1941, another explosion killed six.
The disasters were separated by more than two decades and different corporate owners, but they belonged to the same landscape. Aboveground stood company houses, scrip stores, offices, and the president’s residence. Underground were methane, electric cables, conveyor sections, canvas stoppings, unstable roof, coal dust, and men whose labor powered industries far beyond McDowell County.
Carswell Hollow is more than a surviving company store beside U.S. Route 52. It is the story of a community designed around one industry, of distant investors connected to local labor, of families living beside a dangerous workplace, and of the buildings and records that remain after the mine has gone.
The brick store at the mouth of the hollow was constructed to symbolize the permanence of the coal company. Instead, it has become a monument to the people who outlasted it.
Sources & Further Reading
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report, McDowell County, West Virginia. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office and National Coal Heritage Area, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Brown Family Collection, 1806–2020. Collection 4341. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. https://www2.hsp.org/collections/manuscripts/b/Brown4341.html
Chambers, S. Allen, Jr. “Houston Coal Company Store and Houston House.” SAH Archipedia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012–. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/WV-01-MD8
Davis, J. D., D. A. Reynolds, R. E. Brewer, B. W. Naugle, D. E. Wolfson, F. H. Gibson, and G. W. Birge. Carbonizing Properties: British Columbia, Matanuska Valley (Alaska), and Washington Coals and Blends of Six of Them with Lower Sunnyside (Utah) Coals. Bureau of Mines Bulletin 510. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1952. https://dggs.alaska.gov/webpubs/usbm/b/text/b510.pdf
Humphrey, H. B. Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States, 1810–1958. Bureau of Mines Bulletin 586. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1960. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12740/
Ingle-Schierloh Company. “Houston Collieries Company Scrip Order.” May 5, 1926. Newman Numismatic Portal, Washington University in St. Louis. https://nnp.wustl.edu/Library/AdvancedSearch?contenttype=Archive&fullsearchterm=Cincinnati&page=4
Miller, Charles J. “Carswell Eroding Refuse.” West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Land Restoration, Abandoned Mine Lands and Reclamation, 2008. https://dep.wv.gov/dlr/aml/Documents/Recognition%2C%20Carswell%20Eroding%20Refuse.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census: McDowell County, West Virginia.” 1950 Census. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://1950census.archives.gov/search/?county=McDowell&page=1&state=WV
National Archives and Records Administration. “Enumeration District Maps for the 1950 Census.” Accessed July 18, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950/ed-maps
Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. “National Mine Map Repository.” United States Department of the Interior. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://www.osmre.gov/programs/national-mine-map-repository
Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. “National Mine Map Repository Database.” Accessed July 18, 2026. https://mmr.osmre.gov/
Oklahoma City Times. “Rescuers Search for Bodies of 14 Men in Wreckage.” July 18, 1919, 1. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064187/1919-07-18/ed-1/seq-1/
Pene, W. J., and F. E. Griffith. Final Report, Explosion, Carswell Mine, Koppers Coal Company, Kimball, McDowell County, West Virginia, January 22, 1941. Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1941. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/carswell_1941.pdf
Capital Journal (Salem, OR). January 22, 1941, 12. https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn90066132/1941-01-22/ed-1/seq-12/
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://search.worldcat.org/title/666823075
Sone, Stacy. “Houston Coal Company Store.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, December 16, 1991. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Houston-coal-company-store.pdf
United States Bureau of Mines. Report of Explosion of the Houston Collieries Company, Kimball, McDowell County, West Virginia, July 18, 1919. 1919. https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/1919_Carswell_Report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “topoView: Historical Topographic Map Collection.” Accessed July 18, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Vital Records Interactive.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://wvculture.org/vital-records-interactive/
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1918. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1918. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde36west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1919. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1919. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde37west
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “WV Mine Disasters, 1884 to Present.” Accessed July 18, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. 2019 Annual Report. Charleston, WV, 2019. https://minesafety.wv.gov/PDFs/CY%202019%20Annual%20Report.pdf
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. “Coal Company Stores in McDowell County.” National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, 1992. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/64500726.pdf
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. “McDowell County: National Register of Historic Places Nominations.” Accessed July 18, 2026. https://wvculture.org/agencies/state-historic-preservation-office-shpo/register-of-historical-places/national-register-of-historic-places-nominations/mcdowell-county/
West Virginia University Libraries. “Sanborn Maps of Kimball, 1927.” West Virginia and Regional History Center. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/2021
West Virginia University Libraries. Sanborn Map Company Fire Insurance Maps for West Virginia. A&M 1307. West Virginia and Regional History Center. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/4608/collection_organization
West Virginia GIS Technical Center. “Historical Aerial Photography Coverage.” West Virginia University. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://wvgis.wvu.edu/data/dataset.php?ID=283
Author Note: This article follows Carswell Hollow from its founding by Houston Collieries through Koppers ownership and the mine’s final years. Where historical reports disagree on casualty totals, I have favored the final official state record while identifying earlier figures.