Appalachian Community Histories – Clinchco, Dickenson County: The Clinchfield Coal Corporation and the Rise of a Mining Town
Along the McClure River in northern Dickenson County, Virginia, the town of Clinchco occupies a narrow mountain valley where coal, railroads, and generations of working families shaped one of Southwest Virginia’s most distinctive mining communities. Today, the surviving company houses, older commercial buildings, and railroad landscape offer reminders of a time when Clinchco was an important center of the Clinchfield Coal Corporation’s operations. During the first half of the twentieth century, thousands of tons of coal left the surrounding mountains, while the families who lived alongside the mines built schools, churches, businesses, and a community that extended far beyond the industry responsible for its creation.
Clinchco’s modern history began during the great expansion of the Appalachian coalfields in the early twentieth century. The completion of the Clinchfield Railroad through the region in 1915 opened previously difficult-to-reach coal deposits to distant markets, and the Clinchfield Coal Corporation began developing mines and housing around what had been a much smaller settlement known as Moss. Within a few years, a collection of homes and rural businesses had become a company town with hundreds of residences, a substantial commercial district, and a population drawn from different parts of the United States and beyond.
Yet Clinchco’s history cannot be understood through coal production alone. Its surviving records describe the daily experiences of Black and white mining families, the effects of segregation, struggles over union representation, and the consequences of industrial decline. Federal photographs taken in 1946 preserve images of the town’s houses, schools, and public facilities, while court decisions and contemporary government reports reveal conflicts that were not always visible in the more favorable accounts of company-town life.
Together, these records tell the story of a settlement that grew rapidly because of coal, endured profound changes as the industry declined, and eventually emerged as an incorporated town determined to preserve its own history.
Before Clinchco: The Settlement of Moss
Long before Clinchco became associated with the Clinchfield Coal Corporation, families lived and worked along the McClure River and its tributaries. The mountainous terrain of northern Dickenson County encouraged settlement along creek bottoms and the limited areas of level ground, where farming, timber cutting, and small local industries provided livelihoods before large-scale coal development transformed the region.
One of the earliest industries remembered in local accounts was Sykes Mill, a water-powered gristmill established during the late nineteenth century. The mill served the surrounding rural population at a time when transportation remained difficult and most communities depended heavily on nearby farms and businesses for their ordinary needs. Its presence illustrates the settlement that existed before the arrival of modern coal mining, when the river and the surrounding mountains supported an economy quite different from the one that would follow.
The community became known as Moss, a name that continued to appear in local historical accounts after the development of the railroad and mines. According to the 2011 Virginia Coal Heritage Trail corridor management plan, which drew upon earlier local histories, Moss had only eighteen residents in 1913. Although that figure should be understood as a locally reported estimate rather than a verified federal enumeration, it demonstrates the dramatic difference between the small settlement remembered before industrial development and the mining town that emerged within the following decade.
The transformation of Moss was made possible by two developments occurring throughout the Appalachian coalfields. Industrial investors were acquiring large tracts of land and mineral rights, while railroad builders worked to establish reliable transportation through mountains that had long limited the commercial value of the coal beneath them.
The Clinchfield Coal Corporation, organized in 1906, became one of the most influential companies operating in this part of Southwest Virginia. Its expanding operations were connected to the nearby mining town of Dante in Russell County, where the corporation maintained its headquarters and oversaw a growing network of mines, railroads, and company facilities.
For Moss, however, the decisive change came when the railroad finally reached the valley.
The Clinchfield Railroad and the Birth of a Coal Town
The Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway was among the most ambitious railroad projects undertaken in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Developed through the efforts of industrialist George L. Carter and his associates, the railroad connected the coalfields of Southwest Virginia with markets in the Carolinas and, through its northern extension, the larger railroad network at Elkhorn City, Kentucky.
The completion of the route in 1915 fundamentally changed the economic possibilities of communities along its path. Coal that had once been difficult to transport could now be loaded into railroad cars and shipped to industrial customers far beyond Dickenson County, while the same tracks brought machinery, building materials, merchandise, and workers into the mountains.
At Moss, the railroad established a stop that helped make substantial mining development possible. Clinchfield began constructing the facilities necessary to extract and transport coal, and the community grew around the company’s expanding operations.
A contemporary account published in the August 1955 issue of Virginia Record provides one of the clearest surviving timelines of the early mines. According to that publication, the Clinchfield Coal Corporation began operating its No. 7 Mine at Clinchco in June 1916. The No. 9 Mine followed in 1919, while the No. 8 Mine also contributed coal through the No. 7 tipple.
These operations worked the Upper Banner coal seam, which the 1955 account described as varying between forty-two and sixty inches in thickness. The coal was considered a high-grade product that attracted substantial demand, making Clinchco an important part of the corporation’s larger industrial network.
As the mines expanded, the name Clinchco replaced Moss. Local traditions differ over whether the new name was derived principally from the Clinchfield Railroad or formed as a shortened reference to the Clinchfield Coal Corporation. The Virginia Coal Heritage Trail study places the establishment of the Clinchco post office and the adoption of the community’s new name in 1917.
Whatever the precise origin of the name, its significance was unmistakable. The settlement was becoming closely identified with the company that supplied its principal employment, constructed much of its housing, and exercised considerable influence over everyday life.
Building the Company Town
Clinchco grew with a speed that would have seemed extraordinary to families familiar with the older settlement of Moss. The coal company needed a dependable workforce, and attracting workers required more than opening mines. It needed to provide places where miners could live, purchase necessities, raise children, and participate in community life.
The Virginia Coal Heritage Trail’s historical account reports that by 1918, the company had constructed 285 houses and ten seven-room apartments, along with a range of commercial and public buildings. The developing town included a school, church, theater, doctor’s office, barber shop, drug store, confectionery, boarding houses, and a company commissary with departments selling groceries, meat, hardware, and women’s merchandise.
These facilities reflected the extent to which the company-town system could provide the institutions of an ordinary community while keeping much of the surrounding economy under the influence of a single employer.
For miners and their families, the convenience of company housing and stores was accompanied by a dependence that could become especially difficult when work slowed or wages were disputed. The company controlled employment and much of the housing, and its commercial facilities occupied an important place in the household economy. Losing a mining job could therefore threaten more than a family’s income, particularly when employment and residence were connected.
Nevertheless, Clinchco was not simply a collection of buildings belonging to a corporation. Families established relationships with neighbors, children attended school, congregations organized worship services, and businesses became gathering places where residents exchanged news and participated in the social life of the town.
The commissary was particularly important because it connected the industrial and domestic sides of company-town life. Miners who spent their working hours underground returned to a community where the same corporation maintained a major source of groceries, clothing, and household supplies.
An original federal photograph taken in 1946 documents the company-owned commissary at Clinchco. The image, preserved by the National Archives, provides direct visual evidence of the commercial infrastructure that served mining families and of the company’s enduring presence in town life.
The photograph is one of several surviving images that make it possible to reconstruct Clinchco’s appearance during the years when the mines remained active.
A Diverse Community Divided by Segregation
Like many Appalachian coal towns, Clinchco attracted workers from different racial, cultural, and geographic backgrounds. The demand for labor encouraged migration into the McClure River valley, bringing new families into a region where the population had previously been much smaller.
The town’s official historical account emphasizes the diversity of the people who came to work in the mines, while Susie Baker’s 1982 documentary, Clinchco: Story of a Mining Town, preserves the memories of residents who experienced the community during its industrial years.
The documentary describes Clinchco as a coal camp where Black and white families lived within the same larger community. That shared existence, however, did not eliminate the racial segregation that shaped education, residential arrangements, and public life throughout Virginia during the Jim Crow era.
Federal photographs taken in 1946 provide particularly important evidence of those divisions. Images associated with Clinchfield’s No. 7 and No. 9 mines document separate residential areas identified as the Black section of the camp and show buildings associated with the education of Black and white children.
One photograph records the building and playground used by Clinchco’s Black school. Its original federal caption explains that the same building was also used for religious services by the Black community, demonstrating how educational and religious institutions could share limited facilities.
Other photographs identify the building that accommodated white elementary and high school students, including the recreational spaces associated with the school. These images preserve more than architectural details. They provide visible evidence of unequal educational arrangements that existed within the same mining settlement.
The experiences of children from neighboring communities add another perspective. In her 2016 master’s thesis, An African American Oral History Narrative: Labor, Race, Class, and Gender in a Coal Mining Community, historian Lindsey Robinette Whitley examined the life of Kenneth Keys, an African American resident of nearby Steinman.
Keys remembered traveling to school in Clinchco and described the differences between transportation arrangements for Black and white students. His recollections include attending a school system in which children could travel toward the same community while remaining separated by race once they arrived.
His testimony is especially valuable because it places Clinchco within the wider social world of the Dickenson County coalfields. The town was not isolated from neighboring settlements such as Steinman, and its schools served families whose homes and workplaces connected multiple communities along the region’s rivers and railroads.
Taken together, the interviews and photographs reveal a complicated history. Mining employment brought people of different backgrounds into proximity, but the institutions around them continued to reflect racial divisions that were deeply embedded in twentieth-century Virginia.
Underground Work and the Hazards of Coal Mining
The prosperity associated with Clinchco’s mines depended upon work that could be dangerous, exhausting, and unpredictable. Miners spent their shifts beneath the mountains extracting coal from seams that could be only a few feet thick, using equipment and methods that changed considerably during the first half of the twentieth century.
Roof falls, explosives, mine cars, machinery, and ventilation problems were among the hazards confronting underground workers throughout the region. Although mining technology gradually improved, the danger of serious injury or death remained an important reality for coalfield families.
A 1921 decision of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, Clinchfield Coal Corporation v. Hawkins, illustrates the hazards associated with the company’s early mining operations. The case concerned Edgar Hawkins, a young and inexperienced worker who had been assigned to load coal underground.
After approximately two weeks of employment, Hawkins was injured by falling rock in a working area where coal had been loosened with explosives. The resulting litigation examined questions of employer responsibility, workplace safety, and the risks encountered by inexperienced miners.
Although the case does not establish that Hawkins was injured at a particular Clinchco mine, it provides contemporary evidence of the working conditions and legal disputes associated with the same corporation during the period when Clinchco was expanding.
Mining families lived with the consequences of these dangers. An injury could remove a family’s principal wage earner from employment, while a fatal accident could leave a household without the income upon which it depended.
Today, the Dickenson County Coal Miners Memorial in Clinchco provides a physical reminder of that history. Located near the post office, the memorial has displayed 309 names associated with men and women who lost their lives in the county’s mining industry, with records extending back into the early twentieth century.
The memorial commemorates the wider mining history of Dickenson County rather than only the workers of Clinchco. Its presence in the town nevertheless reflects the importance of preserving the names of those whose labor and sacrifices supported the region’s industrial development.
Union Organizing and the Struggle for Workers’ Rights
Coal mining in Clinchco was also shaped by the struggle over labor organization. Throughout the Appalachian coalfields, miners sought to improve wages, working conditions, and employment security through collective bargaining, while coal companies frequently resisted union organizing efforts.
The Clinchfield Coal Corporation became the subject of several important labor disputes during the 1930s and early 1940s. Some of the most detailed evidence survives in federal court records involving the National Labor Relations Board and the company’s relationship with the United Mine Workers of America.
According to the 1944 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Clinchfield Coal Corporation, efforts by the United Mine Workers to organize Clinchfield employees intensified in 1933. The case examined evidence that the company had opposed those efforts, encouraged an alternative employee association, and taken discriminatory actions against certain workers involved in union activities.
The court described a labor struggle in which the company and workers disputed not only the terms of employment but also which organizations would have the authority to represent the miners.
Company-supported employee associations were especially controversial because they raised questions about whether workers could choose their representatives independently of management. The Clinchfield Employees’ Association and the Dante-Clinchco Independent Union became central subjects of the federal proceedings.
The court ultimately upheld important findings concerning interference with union activity, although it also modified the Labor Board’s order. In particular, the judges concluded that the evidence did not sufficiently establish company domination of the Dante-Clinchco Independent Union and rejected some of the Board’s proposed remedies.
This distinction matters because the decision documents a substantial history of conflict without supporting every allegation made against the corporation.
For Clinchco’s miners, these legal proceedings concerned matters that could directly affect their livelihoods. Organizing efforts carried the possibility of improved bargaining power, but they also produced divisions among workers and uncertainty about employment.
Those tensions became especially visible during a confrontation in 1939.
The Coal Strike and the Armed Roadblock of 1939
In the spring of 1939, a labor dispute brought Clinchco into a confrontation involving miners, union supporters, and Virginia state authorities. The conflict developed during a period when unionized mines across parts of the Appalachian coalfields were affected by the expiration of a wage agreement, while Clinchfield’s operations continued working.
A contemporary account appeared in the May 1939 issue of the Virginia Highway Bulletin, a publication of the Virginia Department of Highways. Under the heading “The Coal Strike and Traffic Check Up in the Haysi Residency,” the bulletin described large groups of union miners traveling from other coalfields in Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia to Clinchco.
According to the report, demonstrators attempted to pressure Clinchfield miners into joining the union, and confrontations occurred involving workers and motorists. The highway account alleged that some people were threatened, beaten, or forced to sign union cards.
The report was written from the perspective of state transportation officials rather than union organizers, and its descriptions of the demonstrators should be understood in that context. Nevertheless, it provides direct evidence of the seriousness of the confrontation and the extraordinary measures authorities took in response.
State officials dispatched approximately fifty officers to the Clinchco area, where Colonel M. S. Battle, director of the Division of Motor Vehicles, personally supervised the response. The bulletin reported that the principal highway entrance to Clinchco, then identified as Route 59, was blocked for three days.
Officers guarding the roadway were equipped with machine guns.
The highway bulletin stated that the roadblock prevented additional groups of union supporters from entering Clinchco and that the demonstrators eventually dispersed. It also reported that state officers remained in the area after the immediate confrontation had ended.
The episode illustrates how sharply divided the coalfields could become over the question of union representation. For the miners involved, the dispute concerned employment, bargaining power, and the future of labor organization. For the state authorities, it became a confrontation serious enough to justify armed control of a public highway.
The event also demonstrated that Clinchco was connected to a much larger regional labor movement. The workers arriving from Kentucky, West Virginia, and other parts of Virginia were part of an Appalachian coal economy in which disputes in one community could rapidly affect another.
Susie Baker’s later documentary returned to the conflict through the memories of residents, preserving recollections of the efforts to organize Clinchco and the opposition those efforts encountered.
The Federal Photographs of 1946
One of the most valuable surviving sources for Clinchco’s history is the photographic record produced during the federal investigation of the bituminous coal industry in 1946.
Following a major national coal dispute, the federal government undertook an extensive examination of the medical, housing, and sanitary conditions experienced by American mining families. Photographer Russell Lee became closely associated with the survey, which produced thousands of photographs documenting coal communities across the United States.
The surviving federal collection associated with Clinchfield’s No. 7 and No. 9 mines offers an unusually detailed view of Clinchco during the final years of its major company-mining operations.
Rather than concentrating exclusively on mine entrances and industrial machinery, the photographs document the physical environment in which workers and their families lived. Images show company housing, schools, playgrounds, the commissary, a company-owned clubhouse, a water treatment plant, and other structures that formed the community.
Several photographs focus specifically on sanitation.
One records outdoor privies associated with houses along an area known as Power House Row. Another shows garbage disposal near company housing, while a separate image documents a burning dump used by residents of the camp.
These photographs provide evidence of the everyday infrastructure that supported the town, including conditions that might otherwise have received little attention in company reports celebrating coal production.
The school photographs are equally significant. They document segregated facilities and provide a way to examine the physical differences between the spaces used by Black and white students.
Other images preserve the arrangement of residential areas, including the Black section of the camp and the main company housing district. One federal caption even identifies a house occupied by the secretary of a union, connecting the photographic record of residential life to the town’s complicated labor history.
The importance of these images lies in their ability to bring together subjects that historical accounts sometimes treat separately. The mines created employment, but the federal photographs show what employment meant for housing, education, sanitation, recreation, and the organization of the community itself.
By 1946, Clinchco had already experienced decades of industrial growth, economic uncertainty, and labor conflict. The photographs preserve the town at a moment when the company-town system still existed but was approaching a period of substantial change.
World War II, Wages, and a Changing Coal Industry
World War II increased the importance of coal to the national economy. Fuel was needed for industrial production, transportation, electrical generation, and the broader war effort, while many younger residents of Appalachian communities entered military service.
The Clinchfield Coal Corporation continued operating its mines during the war, and its workforce became part of national debates over wages, hours, and federal labor regulations.
A second federal case, Walling v. Clinchfield Coal Corporation, examined the company’s obligations under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The litigation began in 1943 and concerned disputed overtime compensation, employment records, and the classification of certain supervisory workers.
The court proceedings revealed that the company had operated mines at both Dante and Clinchco during the period under examination. The lower court found that certain wage and recordkeeping violations had occurred but characterized them as inadvertent and corrected, while the subsequent appellate decision rejected the additional relief sought by the federal administrator.
The case illustrates the increasingly complicated relationship between coal companies, workers, and the federal government. Questions that had once been handled primarily through local employment arrangements were now being examined through national labor laws and federal courts.
The war also connected Clinchco to events far beyond the coalfields through the service of its residents.
Among the town’s most widely remembered sons was Darrell C. “Shifty” Powers, born in Clinchco on March 13, 1923. Powers joined the United States Army in 1942 and became a member of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.
He served during the European campaigns of World War II and later became widely known through the history of Easy Company and the television miniseries Band of Brothers. His childhood experiences hunting and developing his marksmanship in the mountains around Clinchco became a notable part of his wartime biography.
Powers’s life illustrates another dimension of the town’s history. The community produced not only miners and railroad workers but also soldiers, musicians, teachers, business owners, and families whose experiences connected this small part of Dickenson County to the wider world.
The Closure of the Major Mines
By the early 1950s, Clinchco’s industrial foundations were changing. The mines that had created the community were approaching the end of their productive lives, and mechanization and shifting coal operations were altering employment throughout the Appalachian region.
The August 1955 issue of Virginia Record provides specific dates for the closure of Clinchco’s principal mines.
According to the publication, No. 7 Mine operated from June 1916 until 1952, producing approximately twelve million tons of coal when combined with production from No. 8 Mine, whose coal had passed through the No. 7 tipple.
No. 9 Mine, which began operating in 1919, closed in 1953 after producing approximately sixteen million tons.
Together, the recorded totals amounted to approximately twenty-eight million tons of coal from the operations described in the report.
These figures demonstrate the enormous industrial activity associated with a relatively small mountain community. For decades, the mines supplied coal to markets far beyond the McClure River valley, while the wages earned underground supported much of Clinchco’s commercial and residential life.
The closure of the mines, however, meant that the company no longer needed the same concentration of workers and housing in the town.
The Virginia Coal Heritage Trail’s historical account describes the subsequent sale of company houses to individual owners and the closure of businesses that had depended upon the mining economy. Residents began leaving the area in search of employment, with some relocating to industrial centers in Ohio and Michigan.
The change was not confined to Clinchco. Similar transitions occurred throughout the Appalachian coalfields as older mines closed and mining companies increasingly relied upon more mechanized operations.
Clinchfield itself continued producing coal elsewhere in Dickenson County. The same 1955 Virginia Record account described the company’s large Moss Mine operation on Lick Fork, which had begun producing in 1947 and achieved substantial production during the early 1950s.
The distinction is important. The closing of Clinchco’s principal No. 7 and No. 9 operations did not mean that coal mining disappeared from the county, but it did fundamentally change the employment and population patterns of the original company town.
Electricity, Housing, and the End of Company Control
As mining declined, some of the institutions that had remained under company ownership began passing into other hands.
An article published in the March 1955 issue of The Illuminator, the employee publication of Appalachian Electric Power Company, documented the transfer of electrical systems serving Clinchco and Dante.
The publication reported that Clinchfield Coal Corporation had owned and operated the electrical distribution systems in both communities since approximately 1920. When Appalachian Electric Power assumed service, Clinchco’s system included 225 domestic customers and three commercial customers.
Although the figures did not represent a complete population count, they provide a useful contemporary picture of the town during its industrial transition.
For decades, Clinchfield’s involvement in electricity, housing, stores, and employment had made the corporation an essential part of daily life. The transfer of the electrical system was another sign that the old company-town arrangement was changing.
The sale of company houses represented an equally significant development. Families who had once occupied property belonging to their employer gained opportunities to own their homes independently of the corporation.
The change did not replace the jobs that had disappeared with the closing mines, but it helped transform Clinchco from a community organized around the needs of a coal company into a residential town whose inhabitants increasingly controlled their own property and local affairs.
This transition altered the relationship between residents and the place they called home. Clinchco had been constructed largely for industrial purposes, but the families who remained continued to regard it as a community worth preserving even after its original economic foundations weakened.
Population Decline and the Memory of the Coal Town
Clinchco’s declining employment opportunities eventually produced changes in the town’s population and commercial activity.
One of the most useful population records comes from the United States Census Bureau’s 1940 report on unincorporated communities. Published in 1943, the report recorded 1,466 residents in Clinchco, within the Sand Lick Magisterial District of Dickenson County.
This figure provides a documented population count during the period when the town’s major mines were still operating. Larger figures sometimes associated with Clinchco’s peak years may reflect different dates or boundaries, and they should not be confused with the specific population recorded by the federal census.
As mining declined during the 1950s and subsequent decades, the disappearance of jobs affected stores, schools, and residential neighborhoods. Many younger residents followed employment opportunities elsewhere, leaving behind a community increasingly shaped by older residents and the memories of its industrial past.
In 1982, filmmaker Susie Baker produced Clinchco: Story of a Mining Town through Appalshop, an Appalachian media organization known for documenting the region’s culture, history, and working people.
The documentary combined interviews with former miners and residents, family photographs, and recollections of the community’s development. Rather than presenting Clinchco simply as a successful industrial settlement or a town ruined by economic decline, the film examined the experiences of people who had lived through both periods.
Residents discussed their memories of community life, the racial relationships within the coal camp, working conditions, union organizing, and the gradual changes that followed the industry’s decline.
The film became an important historical record precisely because it preserved the voices of people whose experiences might otherwise have remained outside the written archives. Company reports could document production and employment, but the recollections of residents provided a different understanding of what it meant to raise a family, work underground, or grow old in Clinchco.
Through those interviews, the town’s history became something more personal than a record of mine openings and closures.
Incorporation and the Preservation of Clinchco
Although Clinchco developed as a recognizable coal town during the 1910s, it did not become an incorporated municipality until 1990.
The Virginia General Assembly formally established the Town of Clinchco through Chapter 925 of the Acts of Assembly of 1990, creating the legal framework for municipal government. A subsequent amendment in 1992 addressed provisions concerning town elections and the organization of the mayor and council.
The distinction between the town’s industrial founding and its legal incorporation is important. Clinchco had existed as a community for generations before it became a municipality, and the 1990 charter recognized a town whose social identity had survived long after its major mines closed.
Preservation efforts have continued through local institutions and historical collections.
Among the most significant is the Dennis E. Reedy Railroad and Coal Mining Museum, which grew from Reedy’s personal interest in collecting objects connected to the area’s industrial past. The collection includes coal-mining tools, railroad artifacts, and other materials associated with the communities of Dickenson County.
Surviving company houses and railroad-related structures also provide evidence of the town’s earlier appearance. The Clinchco area’s New Camp settlement, established during the early 1920s, retains buildings associated with the coal-mining era, while local historical descriptions identify other surviving structures connected to the community’s commercial and industrial development.
The Dickenson County Coal Miners Memorial serves a complementary purpose by honoring those who died in the industry. Together, the museum, memorial, and surviving buildings preserve different parts of the same historical experience.
More recently, community preservation has also focused on the future of the town’s older structures.
In 2024, Appalachian Voices reported on local discussions concerning the former Clinchco post office, a building that residents identified as both a reminder of the town’s past and a possible opportunity for rehabilitation. Suggestions included preserving the structure as a museum or historical landmark, demonstrating how older buildings could contribute to a new period of community development.
The same concern appears in local planning efforts aimed at improving recreational spaces, strengthening connections between neighborhoods, and creating new reasons for residents and visitors to spend time in Clinchco.
These efforts reflect the continuing importance of the town’s identity. Although the industrial economy that originally supported Clinchco has changed, the surviving landscape and the memories attached to it remain resources for understanding the past and shaping the community’s future.
Why Clinchco’s History Matters
Clinchco’s history illustrates the extraordinary influence coal companies exercised over the development of Appalachian communities during the twentieth century. A small settlement along the McClure River became a substantial mining town because industrial investors recognized the value of the coal beneath its mountains and built the transportation and housing necessary to extract it.
Within a few years of the railroad’s arrival, the community had acquired many of the institutions associated with a much larger town. Houses, schools, churches, stores, and recreational facilities appeared alongside the mines, creating a place where daily life was closely tied to the corporation that provided employment.
Yet the surviving records reveal a more complicated history than industrial growth alone. Racial segregation shaped the organization of schools and neighborhoods, miners struggled over union representation, and dangerous underground work placed considerable burdens upon families. The 1939 confrontation and subsequent federal labor decisions show that the question of who controlled employment and working conditions remained deeply contested.
The closure of the major mines in the early 1950s brought another transformation. As the company sold houses and transferred services, the community began separating its future from the corporation that had built it. Residents left in search of work, businesses declined, and the town gradually became smaller, but its identity survived.
Today, the photographs taken by federal investigators in 1946, the interviews preserved by Appalshop in 1982, and the artifacts collected by local historians provide an unusually detailed record of a place that once stood near the center of Dickenson County’s coal economy.
For descendants of Clinchco’s mining families, these materials preserve the houses, schools, businesses, and working lives of earlier generations. For historians, they offer evidence of how industrial development transformed mountain communities and how those communities adapted when the industries that sustained them began to disappear.
Clinchco was built because of coal, but its history belongs to the people who made a life there. Their experiences transformed Moss from a small settlement into a town with its own traditions, institutions, and memories, leaving a legacy that extends far beyond the mines themselves.
Sources & Further Reading
Baker, Susie, director. Clinchco: Story of a Mining Town. Appalshop, 1982. Documentary film, 30 minutes. https://vimeo.com/205210592
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940. Population: Unincorporated Communities. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1940uninc.pdf
Virginia Department of Highways. “The Coal Strike and Traffic Check Up in the Haysi Residency.” Virginia Highway Bulletin, May 1939, 19–20. https://vdot.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/myfirst/id/505/download
National Labor Relations Board v. Clinchfield Coal Corporation, 145 F.2d 66 (4th Cir. 1944). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/145/66/1475922/
Walling v. Clinchfield Coal Corporation, 159 F.2d 395 (4th Cir. 1946). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/159/395/1565802/
Clinchfield Coal Corporation v. Hawkins, 108 S.E. 704 (Va. 1921). Reproduced in United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Decisions of Courts and Opinions Affecting Labor, 1921. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/decisions-courts-opinions-affecting-labor-3906/decisions-courts-opinions-affecting-labor-1921-492991/fulltext
Virginia Record. “Coal Mining.” August 1955, 21. Historical account of Dickenson County’s coal industry and the Clinchfield Coal Corporation. https://usmodernist.org/AIAVA/AIAVA-1955-08.pdf
“The Illuminator.” “Dante and Clinchco in Abingdon District Area.” March 1955. Appalachian Electric Power Company. Virginia Room Digital Collection. https://www.virginiaroom.org/digital/file/7812
National Archives and Records Administration. “Clinchfield Coal Company, Nos. 7 and 9 Mines, Clinchco, Dickenson County, Virginia.” Federal coal-industry survey photographs, 1946. Reproduced in Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Clinchfield_Coal_Company
National Archives and Records Administration. Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey. Historical exhibition documenting federal investigations of coalfield communities in 1946–1947. https://visit.archives.gov/whats-on/explore-exhibits/power-light-russell-lees-coal-survey
The Dickenson County Herald. Clintwood, VA, 1927–1930. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn95079120/1927-02-10/ed-1/
Dickenson County Herald. Clintwood, VA, 1939–1951. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn95079130/?st=calendar
Giles, Albert W. The Geology and Coal Resources of Dickenson County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 21. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1921. https://energy.virginia.gov/Commerce/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=2555
Hibbard, Walter R., Jr. Virginia Coal: An Abridged History and Complete Data Manual of Virginia Coal Production/Consumption from 1748 to 1988. Blacksburg: Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/items/273ed1ce-e50e-4c0a-996d-ba8cc991dace
Reedy, Dennis, ed. School and Community History of Dickenson County, Virginia. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1994. https://books.google.com/books/about/School_and_Community_History_of_Dickenso.html?id=89EPY9U6uyYC
WMTH Corporation. Virginia Coal Heritage Trail Corridor Management Plan. Chapter 6, “Unique Features: Coal Camps.” 2011. https://www.trailsrus.com/vacoaltrail/cmp/CHAPTER%20VI%20-%20UNIQUE%20FEATURES%20-%20COAL%20CAMPS.pdf
Whitley, Lindsey Robinette. “An African American Oral History Narrative: Labor, Race, Class, and Gender in a Coal Mining Community.” Master’s thesis, Middle Tennessee State University, 2016. https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/items/f470bb91-db73-4c68-99d7-2b972fbf535d
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. https://utpress.org/9780870498855/coal-towns/
Historic American Buildings Survey. Trammel Middle Camp, Trammel, Dickenson County, Virginia. Survey VA-1344. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/va1754/
Town of Clinchco. “History of the Town of Clinchco.” Official municipal history. https://clinchcova.net/history
Virginia General Assembly. Charter of the Town of Clinchco. Acts of Assembly, 1990, Chapter 925, amended 1992, Chapter 35. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/clinchco/
Appalachian Voices. “Connecting the Future to the Past Through Five Special Places.” December 3, 2024. https://appvoices.org/2024/12/03/ejcps-place/
Clinchfield Railroad. “Clinchfield Coal Company.” Historical overview and collection of railroad and coal-company materials. https://www.clinchfield.org/clinchfield-railroad/clinchfield-coal-company/
University of Louisville Libraries. “Appalshop Videos.” Catalog of Appalachian documentary films, including Clinchco: Story of a Mining Town. https://library.louisville.edu/ekstrom/appalshopvideos
Morehead State University. “Appalachian Kentucky Video Archives.” Collection listing Appalshop’s 1982 documentary about Clinchco. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/appalachian_kentucky_video_archives/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Official listing of counties within the Appalachian region. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: Clinchco’s history preserves the story of how coal, railroads, company control, and generations of working families transformed a small settlement along the McClure River into one of Dickenson County’s most important mining communities. I hope this article helps preserve the memories of the miners, railroad workers, families, and residents who shaped Clinchco and carried its history forward long after the major mines closed.