Appalachian History Series – Elk Horn Coal Corporation: Company Towns and the Making of the Elkhorn Coal Field
In the early twentieth century, a cluster of new towns rose along the creeks of Floyd, Knott, Letcher, and Pike counties. They had names like Wayland, Fleming, Wheelwright, Garrett, and Jackhorn, and nearly all of them could be traced back to the same corporate address. On paper, their story begins in New York and Charleston boardrooms. On the ground, it begins with families who sold their bottomland, miners who followed the promise of steady work, and a company that tried to turn the Elkhorn coal field into an industrial empire.
That company was Elk Horn Coal Corporation. Its history runs from speculative leases and company camps through bankruptcy courts and receiverships into the present day, where its name still appears on hunting maps and mineral deeds. Reconstructing that history means following a paper trail of charters and stock certificates, court opinions and annual reports, but it also means listening to photographs and oral histories that preserve life in the camps it built.
From speculative leases to a coal corporation
The Elkhorn field in eastern Kentucky attracted outside capital years before Elk Horn Coal Corporation appeared. Northern Coal and Coke Company and, later, Consolidation Coal assembled large blocks of coal under Beaver Creek and nearby watersheds in the first decade of the twentieth century, often by buying or leasing land that local farmers had held for generations.
In 1913 a West Virginia corporation called Elk Horn Fuel Company was organized to develop these holdings. According to later company histories and stock material, Elk Horn Fuel did not own the coal outright. Instead, it leased roughly two hundred thousand acres from landholding firms like Beaver Creek Consolidated and subleased tracts to operating companies.
The turning point came in 1915. A corporate aid prepared for Western Kentucky University and a stock description from George H. LaBarre Galleries both describe how Elk Horn Fuel, Elk Horn Mining Corporation, and Mineral Fuel Company merged that year to form Elk Horn Coal Corporation under West Virginia law. The new company brought existing mines and leases under one umbrella. At the time of the merger, there were already eighteen mines in operation across three divisions. Seven were in the Wayland Division, seven in the Fleming Division, and four in the Wheelwright Division. The consolidated firm controlled more than 200,000 acres in eastern Kentucky and carried authorized capital stock of just over twenty seven million dollars, a figure that gives some sense of the ambitions involved.
From the beginning, Elk Horn Coal Corporation was more than a simple mining outfit. It was a land and town company as well as a producer. Its officers and board members overlapped with Consolidation Coal’s leadership. Clarence Wayland Watson, a coal magnate and former United States senator from West Virginia, appears in later court opinions as the “ruling spirit” within Elk Horn, chairing the board and then presiding over its reorganized successor. The company raised capital in New York and Charleston, issued glossy promotional booklets for investors, and then turned those dollars into camps and towns in eastern Kentucky.
Building Wayland, Wheelwright, and the Elk Horn camps
Elk Horn’s power is easiest to see on the maps. Pike County and Floyd County historians often talk about the “Elk Horn Coking Coal region,” a belt of leased coal that the company opened up by building railroads and townsites around its mines. In practice, this meant cutting terraces out of narrow hollows, laying out streets and house lots, and stringing tracks and power lines where small farms and mills had stood.
One of the earliest and most important of these places was Wayland. At the confluence of Steele Creek and the Right Fork of Beaver Creek in Floyd County, Elk Horn established a coal camp in 1911. Before that it had been known as Martin’s Mill, a reminder of the grist mill that predated the mines. During the building years the camp went through nicknames such as Camp Steele Creek and Watson Town. Eventually it took the name Wayland in honor of Clarence Wayland Watson. A post office opened in 1914, the railroad reached the camp that same spring, and by 1923 Wayland had been incorporated as a city.
Wheelwright, also in Floyd County, shows a slightly different pattern. The land that became the town belonged to the Hall family until they sold it in 1916. A post office was established that year under the name Wheelwright, honoring Jere H. Wheelwright, then president of Elk Horn Coal Company. Elk Horn leased its Wheelwright mines from Consolidation Coal, built housing and camp facilities, and turned the hollow into a company town. In 1930 Consolidation sold the Wheelwright camp and its mines to Inland Steel, which expanded the town but kept the basic layout that Elk Horn had created.
Other towns followed similar arcs. Kentucky Coal Heritage’s camp lists and local county histories show Elk Horn behind operations at Fleming, Haymond, Hemphill, Garrett, Hi Hat, and Jackhorn, among others. Company records and later National Register of Historic Places nominations for Floyd and Letcher County sites describe a familiar palette of structures. There were rows of company houses graded into the hillsides, segregated by race and job classification. There were company stores, often monumental buildings that served as both economic and social centers. Camps usually had schools, churches, bathhouses, and eventually movie theaters, gymnasiums, and union halls. All of it sat under a skyline dominated by tipples, gob piles, and, later on, strip mine highwalls.
By the mid 1920s, a printed company history by Mary Abdoo, prepared with Elk Horn’s cooperation, could present this network as a single corporate world. Her typescript, preserved at Western Kentucky University, traces how an abstract merger on paper became a string of operating divisions, each with its own mines, village, and local management, but all feeding the same system of capital and rail shipments.
Work, community, and the view from the ground
Corporate documents can tell us how many shares Elk Horn issued or how many tons its mines produced. To see the people who lived under those numbers, it helps to turn to images and voices from the camps themselves.
One remarkable window is the Russell Lee photographic work on Wheelwright. In the mid 1940s, photographer Russell Lee worked for the United States Department of the Interior on a survey of health in bituminous coal communities. As part of that project he spent time in Wheelwright. The University of Kentucky’s Russell Lee: Wheelwright, Kentucky photographic collection preserves sixty five black and white prints from this visit. A National Archives checklist for Lee’s “Power and Light” exhibit shows how deep he went into the life of one mining family there, the Fains, with images of their breakfast table, their front porch on a Sunday afternoon, high school classrooms, the bowling alley, and even the golf course built for miners.
The pictures make visible what company reports describe only in passing. They show modern recreation centers and neat houses, but also the weariness on miners’ faces as they ride the mantrip underground and the ways families stretched limited paychecks by growing gardens and sewing clothes. They capture Wheelwright as an “ultra modern” town in mid century promotional language, but they also hint at the strict control that companies still exercised over housing, credit, and public space.
Oral history adds sound to these images. The Kentucky Oral History Commission’s “Social History and Cultural Change in the Elkhorn Coal Field” project gathers interviews with miners and their families from across the field, including communities served by Elk Horn. Interviewees describe moving from farms into company towns, adjusting to the rhythm of three daily shifts, and living through strikes, layoffs, and mechanization. Many recall how the company provided what looked like complete communities while also making sure it held the store, the payroll, and the deeds.
Other scholars use Elk Horn as part of a broader story about race and migration. In a dissertation on the Great Migration and the making of sundown suburbs, historian Mary C. O’Neal follows Black southerners who signed up with labor agents for Elk Horn and similar companies. One example she gives is Cornelius Brown, recruited on his way to a baseball game and carried from the Deep South to the Kentucky coalfields. Their experiences underline how company towns could simultaneously provide opportunity and reproduce Jim Crow segregation through housing assignments, job classifications, and local violence.
Together, the photographs and oral testimonies complicate any simple picture of Elk Horn’s towns as either model villages or grim industrial outposts. They were both, depending on who you were and when you lived there.
Depression, receivership, and reorganization
Coal demand soared during the First World War and again in the 1920s, but the collapse of prices in the late twenties and the onset of the Great Depression hit Elk Horn hard. By 1931 the company was in receivership in Letcher County. In 1935 a federal court in Ohio adjudged Elk Horn bankrupt under the old Section 77B of the Bankruptcy Act.
The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals later summarized what happened next in a pair of cases known as Bank of Mill Creek v. Elk Horn Coal Corporation. The opinions note that Elk Horn’s original company had acquired more than 150,000 acres of coal and some surface land in Kentucky, that it ran into serious financial trouble, and that the reorganization process stretched into the mid 1930s. Out of that process emerged a new entity called The Elk Horn Coal Corporation in 1937.
Clarence W. Watson remained central even after bankruptcy. The court records describe him as both a major debtor to the reorganized corporation and its well paid president, with a complicated arrangement under which part of his salary retired what he owed. The same opinions document long running disputes over Elk Horn stock and the duties of the lawyers and trustees who handled it. What looks from the outside like a single company is, in these records, a tangle of voting trusts, collateral agreements, and interlocking directorates.
By mid century, Elk Horn is best described as a land and leaseholding firm at least as much as a mining operator. It still owned vast acreage, but much of the actual mining took place through lessees. That structure shows up most clearly not in corporate reports but in a Kentucky case that started with a small grocery store.
Selling the houses, keeping the coal
In 1965 the Kentucky Court of Appeals decided Hall v. Elk Horn Coal Corporation, a case that grew out of Elk Horn’s postwar program to sell off company houses. As the opinion explains, Elk Horn still owned “extensive mining properties” and several whole towns in Letcher and Floyd counties in 1946, including Jackhorn and Fleming in Letcher County and Garrett and Wayland in Floyd County. In that year the company began subdividing its townsites and selling lots and houses to employees as private residences.
Those deeds came with strings attached. Elk Horn reserved all coal and other minerals under the lots. It also imposed a twenty five year restriction that the properties be used for residential purposes only and not for any mercantile or business activity. When residents of Jackhorn began operating small stores from their houses, Elk Horn sued to enforce the restriction. The company argued, and the court agreed, that it still had a strong interest in shaping commercial life in the town, both because it remained the mineral owner and because it received a percentage of sales from a store it leased to another operator nearby.
The Hall case is a reminder that even as Elk Horn retreated from direct company rule, it did not disappear. It shifted into the background as a landlord and lessor, writing mineral reservations and use restrictions into every deed, enforcing those covenants in court, and drawing income from leases to companies like Greer Ellison Coal. Property law picked up where company-town rules had left off.
Elk Horn land in the late twentieth century
The restructured Elk Horn persisted into the later twentieth century as a corporate shell that held coal and gas rights. One measure of that continuity appears in a 2011 press release from Rhino Resource Partners, which acquired Elk Horn Coal Company LLC as a coal leasing firm based in eastern Kentucky. Rhino’s release emphasized that Elk Horn owned about 156,000 acres of minerals and that coal had been mined on its properties for nearly a century, tracing the new limited liability company back to its 1915 origins.
At the same time, some of Elk Horn’s land began to enter a very different kind of public conversation. In 2018 the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources published an “Elk Horn Coal Hunting Access Area Index Map” for tracts in Floyd, Knott, Letcher, and Pike counties. The map identifies more than twenty thousand acres, still owned by Elk Horn or successor entities, as open to public hunting under special agreements. Reclaimed strip benches that once held augers and shovels now carry elk and deer instead of tipples and tramways.
Outdoor guides and hunting regulations list the Elk Horn Coal Hunting Access Area alongside wildlife management areas and national forest tracts. To a casual reader of those guides, Elk Horn’s name might sound like any other landowner. For people who know the history of the Elkhorn field, it is a reminder of how long a coal corporation can shape a landscape, long after the last company store has closed.
Following the paper and the people
Because Elk Horn Coal Corporation was a private company rather than a single mine, its story survives in pieces. Corporate reports for the years before and after the First World War, preserved at institutions like Columbia University, chart tonnage, wages, and investments. Abdoo’s 1935 history, kept at Western Kentucky University, remains the most detailed contemporaneous narrative of its early years. Stock and bond certificates with ornate vignettes circulate among collectors and sometimes include brief printed histories on their backs.
On the ground, the best starting points are often local. The Wheelwright Collection at the University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center gathers maps, correspondence, housing records, and company material for one Elk Horn town that later passed to Inland Steel. Kentucky Coal Heritage town sketches, Pike County Historical Society essays, and National Register nominations pull together fragments of town history that would otherwise stay scattered across newspaper columns, court records, and family collections.
Photographers like Russell Lee and oral history projects coordinated by the Kentucky Oral History Commission bridge the gap between those paper records and daily life. They show us faces, kitchens, schoolrooms, and front porches. They also show us the contradictions of a company that could build model amenities for some while enforcing strict racial and economic hierarchies for others.
Today, anyone driving through Beaver Creek or the Right Fork of Elkhorn can still see Elk Horn’s imprint in the layout of streets, the pattern of house lots, and the scars and terraces on the hills. The corporate names on those deeds have changed over the decades, but the story that began with an ambitious 1915 merger is still written into the landscape of eastern Kentucky, waiting for researchers and local communities to keep reading it.
Sources & Further Reading
Abdoo, Mary. “The Elk Horn Coal Corporation.” Typescript report, 1935. Manuscripts Small Collection 3668, Special Collections Library, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY. DigitalCommons @WKU. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid/5056/
Abdoo, Mary. “Abdoo, Mary, 1913–1990 (SC 3668).” Finding aid for Manuscripts Small Collection 3668. Special Collections Library, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, 2023. DigitalCommons @WKU. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid/5056/
Pike County Historical Society. “Northern Coal and Coke Company – The Beginning.” Pike County Historical Society. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/northern-coke-and-coal-company-the-beginning/
Kentucky Coal Heritage. “Wheelwright, Kentucky.” Kentucky Coal Heritage – Coal Towns. Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. http://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/wheelwright.htm
Kentucky Coal Heritage. “Wayland, Kentucky.” Kentucky Coal Heritage – Coal Towns. Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. http://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/wayland.htm
University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center. “Russell Lee: Wheelwright, Kentucky.” ExploreUK: Kentucky Digital Library. https://exploreuk.uky.edu/
University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center. “Wheelwright Collection, 1916–1979.” Finding aid. ResearchWorks ArchiveGrid. https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/collection/data/62365196
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. Kentucky Coal Facts. 17th ed. Frankfort: Kentucky Department for Energy Development and Independence, 2017. https://eec.ky.gov/Energy/Coal%20Facts%20%20Annual%20Editions/Kentucky%20Coal%20Facts%20-%2017th%20Edition%20(2017).pdf
Kentucky Oral History Commission and University of Kentucky Libraries. “Social History and Cultural Change in the Elkhorn Coal Field Project.” Oral history collection. Kentucky Oral History Commission. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org
O’Neal, Mary C. Segregated Spaces, Racialized Places: The Great Migration and the Making of Sundown Suburbs in the United States. PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2014. https://openscholar.uga.edu/record/3287/files/ONeal_dissertation_final.pdf
Saadati, Nasrin. The Evolution of Coal Company Towns in Kentucky. Master’s thesis, University of Padua, 2023. https://thesis.unipd.it/retrieve/7fc8061b-420d-4209-bc57-fafdb5bd5304/Thesis_NasrinSaadati.pdf
Bank of Mill Creek v. Elk Horn Coal Corporation, 71 S.E.2d 809 (W. Va. 1952) and 77 S.E.2d 543 (W. Va. 1953). Leagle. https://www.leagle.com/
Hall v. Elk Horn Coal Corporation, 386 S.W.2d 258 (Ky. Ct. App.). Leagle. https://www.leagle.com/
Rhino Resource Partners LP. “Rhino Resource Partners LP Announces Acquisition of Elk Horn Coal Company, LLC.” News release, June 10, 2011. Rhino Resource Partners LP. https://www.globenewswire.com/
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “Elk Horn Coal Hunting Access Area.” Public lands hunting information and index map, 2018. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. https://fw.ky.gov/
Columbia University Libraries. “Corporate Reports Collection: Elk Horn Coal Corporation, 1916–1930; 1961–1966.” Corporate Reports with Barcode spreadsheet. https://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/img/assets/4955/Corporate%20Reports%20with%20barcode%2005-05.xls
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1918. Charleston: Tribune Printing Co., 1918. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde36west
Kentucky Geological Survey. Annual Report 1937: Mines and Minerals – Letcher County. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1937. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/kgs/
Kentucky Geological Survey. Jones Mine Report, 1927. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1927. https://kgs.uky.edu/kgsweb/olops/pub/general/jonesminereport1927.pdf
Lawrence County (Kentucky) Genealogical & Historical Society. “Tincher, W. M.” Obituaries database. https://lckghs.com/index.php/obituaries?id=534&layout=edit
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “Watson, Clarence Wayland, a Senator from West Virginia.” In Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–Present. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CDOC-108hdoc222/pdf/GPO-CDOC-108hdoc222-4-23.pdf
Tredegar Corporation. “Agreement of Merger by and among Tredegar Investments, Inc., The Elk Horn Coal Corporation, Pen Holdings, Inc. and PHI Acquisition Corp.” Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, 1993. Tredegar Investor Relations. https://ir.tredegar.com/static-files/ee0cb91b-1456-44c7-bd6b-4868fbe9802d
Pen Holdings, Inc. Registration Statement (Form S-1). Washington, DC: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 1998. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/32386/0000950128-98-000936.txt
Kentucky Coal Heritage / Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. “Kentucky Coal Heritage – Coal Towns: Wheelwright; Wayland.” Coaleducation.org. http://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/
The Mountain Eagle. “The Way We Were.” The Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg, KY), August 25, 2021. https://www.themountaineagle.com/articles/the-way-we-were-722/
George H. LaBarre Galleries, Inc. “Elk Horn Coal Corporation – Stock Certificate.” Description of historic stock certificate. https://www.glabarre.com/item/Elk_Horn_Coal_Corporation_Stock_Certificate/4777/
Author Note: As you read this story of Elk Horn Coal Corporation, I hope you see how one company stitched together a whole coalfield of towns and families. These records and voices matter because they show how decisions in distant boardrooms shaped daily life, land ownership, and memory along Beaver Creek and the Elkhorn branches.