Appalachian Community Histories – Exeter, Wise County: From Yellow Poplar Mill to Stonega Coal Camp
The history of Exeter, Virginia, begins before the rows of company houses and coal cars that came to define the community. Tucked into the mountains of western Wise County, only a short distance from the Lee County line, Exeter emerged in a landscape where timber came before coal as a major industrial resource.
For much of the nineteenth century, the mineral wealth beneath Wise County remained difficult to exploit on a large scale. Coal was present in extraordinary quantities, but steep mountains, narrow hollows, and inadequate transportation separated the deposits from the industrial markets that wanted them. That changed rapidly with railroad development in the late nineteenth century. By 1891, three major railroad systems had reached Wise County, helping transform a predominantly rural landscape into one of Virginia’s most important coal-producing regions. The Virginia Coal & Iron Company became one of the central corporations in that transformation, eventually creating the Stonega Coke & Coal Company in 1902 to manage its mining operations.
Yet Exeter’s industrial story did not begin with a mine.
Jim Bolling’s 1976 study of Wise County’s lumber industry, drawing on a January 8, 1974 interview with Exeter resident Ross Smith, records that the Virginia Iron and Coal Company operated a band mill at Exeter under the direction of John Crocker from 1912 until 1918. According to Smith, much of the housing in Exeter during this period was constructed from yellow poplar lumber cut at the mill.
That detail changes the way Exeter’s beginning should be understood. Rather than appearing suddenly when a coal company decided to open a colliery, Exeter was already an industrial work site during the years immediately before large-scale coal development. Timber was being cut, processed, and turned into houses while the coal industry was preparing to move deeper into the surrounding mountains.
The surviving research trail even preserves the source behind that story. Bolling identified his information as coming from a private interview with Ross Smith conducted at Exeter in 1974, making the account a rare piece of Exeter-specific oral history rather than a later generalization about Wise County lumbering.
The Coal Camp Arrives
Exeter entered the Stonega system during the late 1910s, although surviving records give slightly different dates for precisely when the coal camp should be considered established.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources identifies Exeter as a Stonega Coke & Coal Company camp established in 1917. Its professional survey of Wise County places Exeter in a sequence that began with Stonega in 1896 and continued through Osaka, Roda, Arno, Exeter, Dunbar, and Derby. The National Register documentation for the Appalachia Commercial Historic District likewise dates Exeter and Lower Exeter to 1917.
Other company-based research points to 1918. National Register studies of Stonega and Derby state that Stonega Coke & Coal decided in 1918 to build new collieries at Exeter and Dunbar as part of the company’s effort to develop better planned mining settlements.
These dates do not necessarily conflict.
A photograph preserved in the Westmoreland Coal Company Archive and reproduced by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources is titled “Town of Exeter, Looking West” and dates to about 1917. The Stonega records also preserve an Exeter boardinghouse plan from 1918. Together, the evidence suggests that Exeter developed in stages. A settlement and company presence existed by 1917, while additional colliery construction and formal expansion followed in 1918. The distinction is important because coal camps were rarely created in a single moment. Roads, houses, boarding facilities, mine openings, railroad connections, stores, and industrial structures could appear across several construction seasons.
The surviving Stonega and Westmoreland records make Exeter unusually well documented compared with many small Appalachian coal communities. The collection includes company-town material, engineering records, correspondence, photographs, maps, housing information, and operational documents. Exeter-specific surviving material includes the early town photograph, the 1918 boardinghouse plan, and a photograph of the Exeter company store.
Building a Town for Coal
The Exeter that developed during these years belonged to a much larger experiment in industrial community building.
Coal operators needed more than miners. They needed miners who could live close enough to report for work in isolated hollows where few established towns existed. That meant building houses, stores, roads, boardinghouses, schools, churches, recreational facilities, and other services that would ordinarily have developed independently in older communities.
Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources describes these coal towns as self-contained settlements. Stonega and similar companies housed native Appalachian workers alongside African American miners and European immigrants, including workers of Irish, Polish, Italian, and Hungarian backgrounds. Housing often reflected occupational status as well as the racial segregation imposed during the Jim Crow era.
Exeter’s surviving records fit that system closely. Crandall Shifflett’s Coal Towns, based heavily on Stonega company records now preserved at the Hagley Museum and Library, includes an Exeter boardinghouse plan from 1918, a photograph of the town, and an image of the Exeter company store. Those seemingly ordinary records reveal much about how the community was organized. The company was not simply digging coal beneath Exeter. It was planning where workers slept, where families lived, and where residents purchased necessities.
The lumber mill made that construction possible at exactly the right time. According to Ross Smith’s recollection, yellow poplar from the Exeter mill supplied much of the community’s early housing. The mill operated through 1918, meaning its final years overlapped directly with Stonega’s construction of the coal settlement. Exeter’s lumber history and coal history were therefore not separate chapters. For several important years, they were happening together.
Exeter on the Stonega Map
By June 1919, Exeter was firmly established within Stonega’s industrial geography.
A remarkable company map prepared by the Engineering Department of the Stonega Coke & Coal Company shows the mines, towns, company property, and transportation lines stretching across the western Wise County coalfield. Exeter appears alongside Stonega, Dunbar, Imboden, Osaka, Arno, and Keokee. The map calculated Exeter at approximately thirteen miles from Appalachia.
The distance mattered because Appalachia functioned as a transportation and commercial gateway for many surrounding coal camps. Exeter was not an isolated settlement operating independently in the mountains. It belonged to a network in which coal, workers, company supplies, mail, and passengers moved between camps and larger railroad connections.
The 1919 map illustrates this world particularly well. It distinguishes Stonega company property while also marking railroad systems, natural gas lines, and other transportation infrastructure. Exeter was one point on an industrial web extending through the coalfield.
Geography dictated much of the community’s physical appearance. The mountains provided coal but left relatively little level ground for construction. Coal towns consequently stretched through narrow valleys and hollows, with houses, roads, streams, mine workings, and rail lines competing for usable land.
A Virginia Geological Survey publication from 1925 offered readers a photograph of what it called a typical mining camp in the Southwest Virginia coalfield. The place chosen for the illustration was Exeter, identified as lying in western Wise County just east of the Lee County line. By the middle of the 1920s, Exeter had become recognizable enough as a mining community that state geologists could use it as a representative image of coal-camp development.
Life Under the Stonega System
The Stonega Coke & Coal Company developed a particularly extensive approach toward managing its mining communities.
Company officials increasingly believed that retaining a stable workforce required more than wages. Housing, recreation, health care, churches, schools, and sanitation could all encourage miners to remain in company communities. Christopher Lloyd Tomlinson’s study of Stonega describes the company’s broader philosophy as a form of welfare capitalism that management eventually referred to as “contentment sociology.”
The philosophy combined improvements in living conditions with unmistakable company control.
National Register research based on Stonega records shows that the company paid close attention to sanitation, garbage disposal, water supplies, infectious disease, health care, and bathhouses. Company programs also included recreational facilities, religious institutions, night schools, and domestic science instruction. When Stonega moved forward with its Exeter and Dunbar collieries in 1918, these newer ideas about building and maintaining coal communities were already influencing management decisions.
For Exeter families, the result was a community in which work and home could rarely be separated completely. The mine provided employment. The company supplied housing. A company store served residents. Boarding facilities accommodated workers. Company policies could shape the physical appearance of the settlement and many parts of everyday life.
That did not mean residents were simply passive occupants of a corporate town. Historians such as Shifflett have emphasized that mining families built their own relationships, neighborhoods, churches, traditions, and systems of mutual assistance inside company-owned communities. Coal companies constructed buildings, but families turned those structures into communities.
Disease in the Young Coal Camp
One unusual federal record offers a small glimpse into Exeter only a few years after its development.
In early 1920, Public Health Reports recorded smallpox cases reported from Wise County communities. Exeter appeared among them, with one weekly federal table reporting three cases. Norton and other surrounding coal communities also appeared in the public health records.
The entry is only a few lines in a national report, but it places Exeter within one of the difficult realities of rapidly built mining settlements. Hundreds of people could be concentrated in narrow valleys where housing, sanitation systems, water supplies, and medical services had to develop almost as quickly as the mine itself.
Stonega officials were well aware of that problem. Company records from the preceding years had already emphasized disease control, sanitation, clean water, garbage removal, and bathing facilities. The public health record from Exeter demonstrates why such concerns were not simply corporate paternalism presented in annual reports. Infectious disease posed a real danger in the growing coal camps.
The Depression Comes to the Stonega Camps
The prosperity of the early coal years could not continue indefinitely.
Coal communities throughout Appalachia suffered when markets contracted during the Great Depression. Stonega’s surviving records show how sharply conditions changed across the company’s operations. National Register research reports that the company hired no new employees in 1931. The following year wages were cut by 12 percent, some collieries reduced operations or closed, and workers were laid off throughout the system.
The surviving sources available online do not provide a simple year-by-year production history for the Exeter colliery, so it would be misleading to assign every company-wide decision directly to Exeter without consulting the underlying mine records. What can be said is that Exeter remained part of a Stonega network confronting shrinking demand, layoffs, wage pressure, and an increasingly complicated relationship between miners, management, and organized labor.
That larger company history matters because Exeter never existed economically on its own. Its fortunes were tied to Stonega and to the market for coal far beyond Wise County.
Stonega Becomes Westmoreland
Stonega Coke & Coal remained a major force in Southwest Virginia for decades after Exeter’s creation.
In 1964, Stonega merged with the Westmoreland Coal Company. Christopher Tomlinson’s research describes Stonega as Virginia’s largest twentieth-century coal operator and notes that the merger created an even larger company. The name on the corporate organization changed, but mining continued to shape the mountains around Exeter.
Evidence from the 1980s demonstrates just how long that connection lasted.
A federal lawsuit, Seabolt v. Westmoreland Coal Co., preserves details surrounding a November 29, 1986 accident at Westmoreland’s Holton Mine near Exeter. Fifty-four-year-old Jack E. Christian of Big Stone Gap was killed in the accident. The resulting employment dispute produced a federal court case that quoted contemporary accounts from the Kingsport Times-News and Bristol Herald Courier.
Almost seventy years had passed since Stonega began developing Exeter, yet coal mining near the community was still generating jobs, danger, newspaper coverage, and court records.
The episode forms a sobering bridge between the Exeter pictured in the company’s 1917 photograph and the industrial world of the late twentieth century.
Exeter in the Archives
Many Appalachian coal camps disappeared almost as quickly as they were created. Houses were torn down, stores closed, mine buildings collapsed, and railroad infrastructure was removed. In some places, little survives beyond a community name or cemetery.
Exeter is unusual because such a substantial documentary trail remains.
The Westmoreland Coal Company records at the Hagley Museum and Library preserve material from Stonega Coke & Coal. The University of Tennessee holds extensive Virginia Coal & Iron Company records, including correspondence, deeds, property reports, financial material, maps, photographs, and blueprints. Wise County deed books preserve the land transactions behind industrial development. Census schedules can reconstruct families and occupations. Draft registration cards can identify miners and employers. Historical newspapers document accidents, marriages, deaths, company announcements, and community events.
The physical record is equally valuable. The Stonega Engineering Department’s 1919 map fixes Exeter within the company’s transportation network. The circa 1917 photograph captures the young settlement almost at its beginning. The 1918 boardinghouse plan reveals how the company expected unmarried or transient workers to live. The photograph of the Exeter company store preserves another institution around which daily life revolved.
There is also Exeter Cemetery, where generations of family history survive in stone. Those graves can help connect names found in company payrolls, census records, newspapers, death certificates, and oral histories with the people who actually lived in the community.
Taken together, these records allow Exeter to be reconstructed not simply as a dot on a coalfield map, but as a place where families worked, shopped, boarded, worshiped, became sick, buried relatives, and built lives around an industry that could offer both opportunity and danger.
Remembering Exeter
Exeter’s story is easy to summarize as the history of another Virginia coal camp, but the surviving evidence shows something more complicated.
Its industrial history began with timber. From 1912 through 1918, a band mill turned the surrounding forests into lumber, including yellow poplar that became part of the community itself. Around 1917, Stonega began establishing Exeter as one of its coal settlements. In 1918, further colliery development followed. By 1919, Exeter had taken its place on the company’s map beside communities such as Stonega, Dunbar, Imboden, and Keokee.
Within only a few years, the settlement had become recognizable as a typical Southwest Virginia mining camp, complete with company housing, boarding facilities, a company store, rail connections, and the close relationship between employer and community that characterized the company-town era.
Coal outlasted the original system that created the town. Stonega became Westmoreland, old patterns of company ownership changed, and the industrial landscape evolved, but mining continued near Exeter well into the late twentieth century.
What makes Exeter especially valuable historically is how clearly those changes can still be traced. A photograph from about 1917 shows the town near its beginning. A corporate map from 1919 places it within the Stonega empire. A geological photograph from the 1920s captures it as a mature mining settlement. Federal records preserve evidence of disease. Company archives preserve its buildings and plans. A federal court case reaches forward to mining near Exeter in 1986.
For a community built in a narrow mountain hollow, Exeter left a remarkably wide paper trail.
That record preserves more than the history of a mine. It preserves the transformation of a place, from timber camp to coal town, from Stonega property to a community whose name has survived long after the company-town world that created it began to disappear.
Sources & Further Reading
Hagley Museum and Library. “Westmoreland Coal Company Records, Accession 1765.” Manuscripts and Archives Department, Wilmington, DE. Includes records of the Stonega Coke & Coal Company and its Wise County coal communities. Hagley finding aid
Stonega Coke & Coal Company, Engineering Department. “Map Showing Mines and Property of the Stonega Coke & Coal Co.” June 1919. Westmoreland Coal Company Records, Hagley Museum and Library. Reproduced in Wise County, Virginia: Historic Architectural Survey. Virginia DHR survey
Stonega Coke & Coal Company. “Town of Exeter, Looking West.” Photograph, ca. 1917. Westmoreland Coal Company Archive, Hagley Museum and Library. Reproduced in Wise County, Virginia: Historic Architectural Survey. Virginia DHR survey
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Wise County, Virginia: Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. The survey includes the 1919 Stonega map and the ca. 1917 Exeter photograph. Virginia DHR survey
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Virginia Landmarks Register Spotlight: The Coal Industry in Wise County.” 2025. Virginia DHR
National Park Service and Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Appalachia Commercial Historic District. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2019. The nomination identifies Exeter and Lower Exeter among the coal camps southwest of Appalachia and discusses their railroad connections. National Register nomination
National Park Service and Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Stonega Historic District. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2004. Stonega Historic District nomination
National Park Service and Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Derby Historic District. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 2004. Includes discussion of Stonega Coke & Coal Company’s 1918 development of collieries at Exeter and Dunbar. Derby Historic District nomination
University of Tennessee Libraries. Virginia Coal and Iron Company Records, 1888–1978. MS-1700. Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, Knoxville. University of Tennessee finding aid
Virginia Coal & Iron Company. “Report of Virginia Coal & Iron Company Properties.” Box 4, Folder 2. Virginia Coal and Iron Company Records, MS-1700. Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Archival record
University of Tennessee Libraries. Virginia Coal and Iron Company Records, 1883–1915. MS-2369. Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, Knoxville. University of Tennessee finding aid
Bolling, Jim. “Wise County’s Other Industry (1887–1940).” Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia, Publication 10, 1976. Bolling cites a January 8, 1974 interview with Exeter resident Ross Smith concerning the Exeter band mill and local yellow poplar lumber. Digitized article
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. University of Tennessee Press
Tomlinson, Christopher Lloyd. “Contentment and Control: The Stonega Coke & Coal Company & Pioneering Welfare Capitalism in Southwest Virginia.” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2024. West Virginia University Research Repository
Eby, J. Brian. The Geology and Mineral Resources of Wise County and the Coal-Bearing Portion of Scott County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 24. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1923. National Geologic Map Database record
Campbell, Marius R. Geology of the Big Stone Gap Coal Field of Virginia and Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 111. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893. U.S. Geological Survey
U.S. Post Office Department. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives
Wiley, Martha. “From the Archives: A Coal Camp Photo Tour.” Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park, April 10, 2020. The museum specifically identifies Exeter among the Southwest Virginia coal camps represented in its photographic collection. Virginia State Parks
Seabolt v. Westmoreland Coal Co., 703 F. Supp. 1235 (W.D. Va. 1989). The decision documents the 1986 fatal accident at Westmoreland’s Holton Mine near Exeter and the employment dispute that followed. Justia case text
Author Note: Exeter is one of those Southwest Virginia communities where the history of timber, coal, railroads, and company life can still be reconstructed through an unusually rich collection of records. I hope this article helps preserve the story of the miners, families, and earlier mill workers who made this Wise County hollow their home.