Appalachian Community Histories – Coleman, Wayne County: Norfolk & Western Rails, Apple Orchards, and Life Along Twelvepole Creek
Coleman, West Virginia, is the kind of Appalachian community that can disappear if its history is measured only by courthouses, incorporated towns, large industries, and famous names. It never became a major town, and surviving records do not offer a single neat account of when the community began, who first called it Coleman, or exactly where one locality ended and another began. Instead, its history survives in railroad directories, county newspapers, old maps, church notices, government reports, and the names of families who lived along Twelvepole Creek.
Those scattered records are enough to recover something meaningful. By the opening years of the twentieth century, Coleman was recognized as a stop along the Norfolk & Western Railway. By the 1920s, newspaper correspondents were reporting on its orchards, church gatherings, illnesses, visitors, and family connections with Huntington and Wayne. Then, in 1933, the railroad line that had done so much to define communities along Twelvepole Creek was abandoned.
Coleman remained, but its place in the landscape changed.
The surviving evidence also creates an important puzzle. Some later place-name references associate Coleman with nearby Sidney, but period maps and government studies list Coleman and Sidney separately. The records therefore support treating Coleman as a distinct historical locality while recognizing that names and boundaries in this stretch of Wayne County were not always used consistently. That uncertainty is one of the central problems identified by the source research assembled for this article. Pasted markdown
Before the Railroad
Long before the name Coleman appeared in directories, families were living and working along Twelvepole Creek and its tributaries. The valley offered narrow stretches of usable bottomland surrounded by steep hills, a familiar settlement pattern throughout western West Virginia. Farms, timbering, mills, trails, and scattered homesteads developed along the creek well before a railroad connected the region more directly with outside markets.
A manuscript survey preserved through the Library of Congress documents land along Twelve Pole Creek in Wayne County around 1880. It belongs to a period when the future Coleman area was still part of a largely rural creek valley rather than a railroad community identified on widely circulated maps. Such surveys are important because they preserve the older geography underneath places that later became associated with depots, post offices, and highways.
The transformation accelerated during the early 1890s when the Norfolk & Western pushed its Ohio Extension through southern and western West Virginia. A state transportation history explains that the route followed river and creek valleys from the coalfields, eventually turning north along Twelvepole Creek toward Kenova and the Ohio River. The winding terrain required repeated creek crossings, tunnels, trestles, and later steel bridges. Twelvepole Creek alone was crossed dozens of times.
For communities along the line, the railroad offered something that mountain roads of the period could not. People, mail, farm products, timber, manufactured goods, and news could move more reliably between isolated creek settlements and larger places such as Wayne, Kenova, Huntington, and points beyond.
Coleman emerged within that railroad landscape.
A Station Called Coleman
One of the clearest early references comes from R. L. Polk & Company’s West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1904-1905. Its entry is remarkably brief, but it establishes Coleman’s existence with unusual precision. The directory identifies Coleman as a station on the Norfolk & Western Railway in Wayne County, seven miles south of Wayne.
That single sentence reveals much about the community.
Coleman was significant enough to be identified independently in a statewide business and geographic directory, yet the entry does not describe a large population, post office, hotel, bank, or commercial district. Its defining feature was the railroad station itself. The station provided Coleman with an identity on transportation maps even if the settlement surrounding it remained small.
The source research for Coleman makes the 1904-1905 gazetteer especially important because it pushes documentary evidence for the named station earlier than the commonly cited 1911 map appearance. Pasted markdown
Federal mapping also places Coleman within the evolving transportation landscape of the early twentieth century. The 1909 Wayne quadrangle covered the Coleman area, and later historic-map collections continue to identify the community within the narrow Twelvepole corridor.
Then, in 1911, a Rand McNally map of Wayne County explicitly showed Coleman among the county’s named places. Significantly, that same map also showed Sidney Post Office nearby. Coleman and Sidney therefore appear independently on the same map rather than as a single location under two interchangeable names.
Coleman or Sidney?
The relationship between Coleman and Sidney is one of the most difficult parts of Coleman’s history.
Hamill Kenny’s influential 1945 reference West Virginia Place Names has been cited for the statement that Coleman was a variant name associated with Sidney. That interpretation has been repeated in modern geographic summaries of Sidney.
Yet other evidence complicates that conclusion.
The 1911 Rand McNally map identifies both Coleman and Sidney Post Office. A West Virginia Division of Highways historical study of the old Norfolk & Western Twelvepole Line also lists Genoa, Sidney, Coleman, Echo, and Wayne separately among the Wayne County localities that had stations or post offices during the railroad era.
West Virginia Archives and History likewise includes a separate Wayne County place-name entry for Coleman, associating the name with 1911 and an additional date of 1894 whose exact meaning is not obvious from the index alone. It should not be treated automatically as Coleman’s founding date without the underlying documentation.
The safest conclusion is therefore not that one source is necessarily wrong. Rural Appalachian place names frequently overlapped. A railroad station, postal designation, creek settlement, neighborhood, or cluster of houses could each have a different name, while residents might use those names more loosely than official mapmakers did.
For Coleman’s history, the contemporary evidence is strong enough to show that Coleman possessed an identity of its own during the railroad era, even if its relationship with Sidney sometimes became blurred in later records.
Farming Beside the Railroad
The railroad may have placed Coleman on the map, but the community was not simply a collection of railroad buildings.
Agriculture remained an important part of life along Twelvepole Creek. A brief item published in the Wayne County News on May 21, 1925, provides one of the best surviving glimpses of that rural economy. While reporting on the fruit crop throughout Wayne County, the newspaper specifically mentioned the Ferguson orchard at Coleman.
The orchard was carrying a heavy crop of Black Ben and Champion apples after producing relatively little fruit the year before.
It is a small detail, but it makes Coleman considerably more tangible.
Behind the station name were orchards, farms, households, seasonal work, and families measuring years not only by train schedules but also by weather and harvests. Apples grown at Coleman belonged to a broader agricultural economy in Wayne County in which families raised fruit, vegetables, livestock, and other products on whatever usable ground the hills allowed.
The railroad and the farm therefore existed beside one another. A resident could live in a rural valley that still depended heavily upon agriculture while also having access to a rail corridor connecting that valley with Huntington and the industrial world beyond the mountains.
The People of Coleman
Two years later, the Wayne County News provided an even richer picture.
On June 16, 1927, the newspaper carried a section titled simply “News Items, Coleman.” Unlike official railroad reports or maps, the column was concerned with ordinary people. Mr. and Mrs. Riley Mullens of Huntington had visited Mrs. Wilbur Wilson. Emma Workman, who was employed in Huntington, had returned to visit her family. Mrs. J. D. Workman came home after visiting her sister in Huntington. George Rutherford had recovered enough from an illness to be outside again, while Mrs. Miles Jackson remained ill. Mrs. Sidney Wilson was also recovering from sickness.
The repeated references to Huntington are especially revealing.
Coleman was small, but it was not cut off from urban life. Family members worked in Huntington, relatives traveled between the city and the creek settlements, and weekend visits connected a rural Wayne County community to one of West Virginia’s largest cities.
Emma Workman’s employment in Huntington is a particularly useful detail. Her brief appearance in the newspaper illustrates the movement of people between small Appalachian communities and expanding cities during the early twentieth century. Someone could remain part of a Coleman household and social network while earning wages elsewhere.
The news column also shows how newspapers once preserved community history almost accidentally. Illnesses, Sunday visits, employment, preaching appointments, and returning relatives were news because readers knew the people involved. Nearly a century later, those same notices have become some of the strongest evidence for reconstructing everyday life in places that left few formal records.
Twelve Pole Valley Church
Religion was another visible part of Coleman’s community life.
The same June 1927 column announced that Reverend A. W. Damron of Wayne would preach at Twelve Pole Valley Church on June 18 and 19.
The notice connects Coleman to the religious networks that tied together rural communities throughout Wayne County. Traveling ministers could serve several congregations, moving between communities where churches functioned not only as places of worship but also as gathering places, sources of local identity, and centers for family and social connections.
For a place without a municipal government or large commercial district, institutions such as the church mattered enormously. They gave rural residents a shared location around which community life could organize.
The fact that the Coleman correspondent considered the preaching appointment worthy of inclusion beside family visits and illnesses demonstrates how closely religious activity belonged to the normal rhythm of community life.
A Darker Glimpse of the 1920s
Not everything recorded around Coleman reflected farming, churches, and family visits.
On June 10, 1926, the Wayne County News reported that approximately fifty members of the Ku Klux Klan, wearing robes and masks, climbed Wells Mountain to decorate the grave of a deceased Klansman. After completing the memorial service, the group left for the vicinity of Coleman to perform a similar ceremony at another grave.
The report provides evidence that the Klan’s national resurgence during the 1920s reached Wayne County and the rural area around Coleman.
The newspaper account should be read carefully. It documents a particular gathering and does not establish how broadly residents of Coleman supported the organization. Still, omitting the episode would remove part of the community’s historical setting. The same decade that produced newspaper reports about orchards, visiting relatives, and church services also contained organized Klan activity in the surrounding countryside.
Small-community history is rarely made entirely of comfortable material. Preserving the past requires recognizing the ordinary and troubling portions alike.
The Railroad Begins to Fade
By the time these newspaper notices appeared, the railroad that had given Coleman much of its early identity was already losing importance.
The Norfolk & Western’s original Twelvepole route had difficult curves and numerous creek crossings. As coal traffic increased elsewhere in the system, the railroad constructed a more favorable route along the Big Sandy River between Naugatuck and Kenova. Completed in 1904, the newer alignment gradually took traffic away from the Twelvepole Line. A second track along the Big Sandy route, completed in 1925, reduced the older line’s importance even further.
The Twelvepole Line continued operating, and infrastructure was still being improved in places during the early twentieth century, but the railroad had never generated the level of coal traffic that Norfolk & Western officials had once hoped to obtain from the communities along it.
For Coleman, this created a strange historical situation.
The community had become visible because it was a railroad station, yet the line passing through it was gradually becoming unnecessary to the railroad company.
The End of the Twelvepole Line
The decisive change came in 1933.
That year the Interstate Commerce Commission approved Norfolk & Western’s abandonment of approximately fifty-four miles of the Twelvepole Line between Lenore and Wayne. According to the West Virginia Division of Highways historical study, the tracks were removed by the end of the year.
Coleman lost the transportation system that had once caused statewide directories to recognize it.
The railroad’s disappearance did not mean that the landscape suddenly emptied. Instead, portions of the abandoned right of way were converted for automobile traffic. Old rail alignments, bridges, cuts, and other engineering features became part of a new highway network. Routes including portions of modern and former West Virginia roads followed sections of the old railroad corridor.
In this way, the railroad did not completely vanish. Its physical route survived beneath another form of transportation.
People who later drove through the Twelvepole Valley were often following a corridor first engineered for trains.
A Community That Outlived Its Station
A 2015 West Virginia Division of Highways documentation project emphasized that the legacy of the Twelvepole Line survived in the communities and small enclaves that had developed or expanded around it. Its list of Wayne County places includes Wilsondale, Dunlow, Quaker, Ferguson, Radnor, Fleming, Genoa, Sidney, Coleman, Echo, and Wayne.
Coleman’s inclusion matters.
The community was not simply the name of a railroad station erased when the track disappeared. The name survived in maps, geographic databases, local usage, and historical references. Modern mapping continues to identify Coleman as a locality in Wayne County, close to Sidney, Echo, Genoa, and the old Twelvepole transportation corridor.
What changed was the reason outsiders noticed it.
During the early twentieth century, Coleman appeared because trains stopped there. Later maps preserved Coleman because people still recognized the location even after the trains were gone.
Why Coleman Matters
There are thousands of communities across Appalachia whose histories resemble Coleman’s. They never became cities. They may never have had a newspaper, courthouse, or major factory of their own. Some disappeared from highway signs. Others survived only as a name on a map, a church, a road, a cemetery, or a few houses along a creek.
Their histories are still worth telling.
Coleman demonstrates how transportation could create and reshape Appalachian communities. The railroad gave a name and a station to a place along Twelvepole Creek. It connected rural families with Wayne and Huntington while agriculture remained part of everyday life. Newspapers recorded people visiting relatives, recovering from sickness, traveling home from city jobs, attending church, and tending orchards.
Then the railroad left.
What remained was the community.
The surviving documentary trail from the 1904-1905 station entry through maps, geological surveys, newspaper reports, railroad abandonment records, and later federal mapping allows Coleman’s history to be reconstructed piece by piece. The strongest evidence establishes it as a recognized railroad community with its own families, agricultural activity, church connections, and identity within the Twelvepole Valley. Pasted markdown
Coleman’s story is therefore not the story of a town that failed to become something larger. It is the story of the kind of place from which much of Appalachian history was actually made: a small settlement beside a creek, connected for a few decades by steel rails to a much larger world, and remembered today because enough fragments survived to put its people back on the map.
Sources & Further Reading
Dickinson, Kay Stamper, and Jack L. Dickinson. Last Train to Dunlow: History from the Hollows of Wayne County, West Virginia and Coming of the N and W Railroad, 1870–1940. Huntington, WV: Jack Dickinson, 2005. https://books.google.com/books/about/Last_Train_to_Dunlow.html?id=RlyrvgEACAAJ.
Hardesty, H. H., and Company. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia Illustrated: Maps and Histories of Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. New York: H. H. Hardesty & Company, 1884. https://books.google.com/books/about/Hardesty_s_Historical_and_Geographical_E.html?id=s7kM0gEACAAJ.
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://books.google.com/books/about/West_Virginia_Place_Names.html?id=61YlAAAAMAAJ.
Krebs, Charles E., and D. D. Teets Jr. Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties. County Geologic Report 4. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1913. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm.
Library of Congress. “[Survey of a Tract of Land on Twelve Pole Creek, Wayne County, West Virginia].” Manuscript map, ca. 1880. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. https://loc.getarchive.net/media/survey-of-a-tract-of-land-on-twelve-pole-creek-wayne-county-west-virginia.
Lewis, Stephen. An Overview of the History of Wayne County. Wayne, WV, 1997. Referenced in “Wayne County,” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/897.
Massey, Tim R. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/897.
“Klansmen Decorate Graves of Their Departed Members.” Wayne County News, June 10, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260610.html.
“News Briefs.” Wayne County News, May 21, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250521.html.
“News Items, Coleman.” Wayne County News, June 16, 1927. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn270616.html.
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. Coleman entry. 1904–1905. Digitized by LDS Genealogy. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-1-part-26.htm.
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/127444.
Taylor, Mildred. History of Wayne County. Wayne, WV, 1963. Referenced in “Wayne County,” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/897.
U.S. Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection: topoView.” National Geologic Map Database. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/.
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Hardesty’s History of Wayne County.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://waynewv.com/wcghs/wayne_county_hisotry.php?thisPage=wayne_county_hisotry.
Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society. “Wayne County Genealogical and Historical Society.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wcghswv.org/wcghs_officers.php?thisPage=wcghs_officers.
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: C.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamc.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “Wayne County News Historical Transcriptions.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcntoc.html.
West Virginia Division of Highways. Historic Property Inventory Form: Fleming Thru Girder Bridge. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Highways. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/bridges/FlemingThruGirder/docs/hpi.pdf.
West Virginia Division of Highways. State Level Historic Documentation Report: Fleming Thru Girder Bridge. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Highways, 2015. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/bridges/FlemingThruGirder/docs/slhd.pdf.
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties.” National Geologic Map Database, U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10497.htm.
West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Maps, Atlases, and Gazetteers.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/maps-atlases-and-gazetteers.
Wayne County, West Virginia. “County Clerk.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.waynecountywv.org/countyclerk.php.
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://wvculture.org/vital-records-interactive/.
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Birth Records Search.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_bcsearch.aspx.
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Marriage Records Search.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx.
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Death Records Search.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_dcsearch.aspx.
Library of Congress. “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/newspapers/collections/.
Wayne County WVGenWeb. “Wayne County Documents and Historical Records.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.wvgw.net/wayne/documents.html.
Gannett, Henry. A Gazetteer of Virginia and West Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904. https://books.google.com/books?id=9el3QWITMd0C.
Author Note: Coleman’s history survives in scattered railroad records, maps, newspapers, government reports, and the everyday lives of families who called the Twelvepole Valley home. I have treated the uncertain relationship between Coleman and Sidney cautiously because contemporary sources sometimes document them as separate places rather than interchangeable names.