Appalachian Community Histories – Gary, McDowell County: U.S. Steel, Coal, and Life in Gary Hollow
In September 1908, photographer Lewis Hine stood outside a coal mine at Gary, West Virginia, and watched the morning shift disappear underground. Among the miners and drivers was a boy employed as a trapper, responsible for opening and closing ventilation doors inside the mine. Hine recorded that the boy went underground at seven in the morning and would remain there until five-thirty that evening. His pay was one dollar a day.
Another photograph taken during the same visit showed something seemingly contradictory. Gary was already using a mechanical coal-cutting and loading machine that Hine said allowed three men to accomplish work that had once required around fifty. Industrial technology had arrived deep in the mountains of McDowell County, yet boys could still be found working underground beside it.
That contradiction captures much of Gary’s history.
Gary was modern and old-fashioned, prosperous and controlled, diverse and segregated. It offered thousands of families wages, houses, schools, churches, recreation, and a community in one of the most isolated parts of Appalachia. At the same time, almost every important part of life existed beneath the influence of a single corporation.
The corporation was United States Steel.
For much of the twentieth century, Gary Hollow became one of the greatest coal-producing landscapes in Appalachia, sending the fuel of McDowell County outward to steel mills, railroads, factories, cities, and eventually the machinery of two world wars.
A Coal Town Built for Steel
Gary did not slowly develop from a crossroads settlement into a mining town. It was built because one of the most powerful corporations in the United States needed coal.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrialist J. P. Morgan’s enormous United States Steel Corporation moved into the southern West Virginia coalfields. With the assistance of Bramwell banker Isaac T. Mann, interests connected with Morgan secured control of more than 50,000 acres of valuable coal land along Sandlick Creek and the Tug Fork. The United States Coal & Coke Company was organized as the U.S. Steel affiliate responsible for developing the property.
The new industrial center was named Gary for Elbert H. Gary, one of the principal figures behind U.S. Steel and the corporation’s first chairman.
Construction began at enormous speed. Timber was cleared, mine openings were driven into the mountains, houses appeared along the narrow valleys, and industrial buildings rose beside the tracks. The Historic American Landscapes Survey identifies Gary Hollow as a landscape ultimately associated with fourteen historic underground mines and their supporting communities. A 2018 historic-resource survey dates Main Gary itself to 1902.
The geography dictated much of what followed. There was little level ground in the hollow, so mines, houses, roads, churches, schools, stores, railroad tracks, and industrial plants were fitted into the narrow spaces beside streams and beneath steep mountainsides.
The Norfolk & Western Railway became the connection between this isolated landscape and the industrial United States. Its branch lines reached through Gary Hollow, and by 1910 the railroad had been extended to the company’s mining operations. Coal that had rested beneath McDowell County for millions of years could now travel directly toward U.S. Steel’s enormous industrial system.
Gary Hollow Becomes an Industrial System
Gary was not simply one mine with a few houses around it.
As development continued, Gary Hollow became a chain of industrial communities. Historic documentation identifies places such as Wilcoe, Gary, Thorpe, Ream, Elbert, and Filbert within the landscape that eventually formed the incorporated city. The larger U.S. Coal & Coke operation included additional mine camps and numbered works stretched through the hollow.
At the center stood Main Gary and the No. 3 Works, where company offices and major facilities helped direct the larger operation. The West Virginia Encyclopedia describes a fully developed Gary Hollow containing twelve separate company towns connected by paved roads and Norfolk & Western rail spurs.
The scale was extraordinary.
A 1909 article in the Engineering and Mining Journal described twelve mines already in operation at Gary and portrayed the system as one of the most technologically advanced coal operations in the country. The mines worked valuable seams of Pocahontas coal, much of it particularly suited for producing the coke required in steelmaking.
Thousands of beehive coke ovens became part of the industrial landscape. A U.S. Coal & Coke advertisement in the McDowell Times on May 19, 1916, announced that the Gary operation had eleven mines and 2,000 coke ovens working six days each week. The company was openly seeking another thousand miners and coke drawers.
Gary was becoming less like a conventional town and more like an industrial machine spread across an Appalachian valley.
The People Who Built Gary
Machines could cut coal, railroads could haul it, and corporate offices could calculate production, but Gary still needed people.
They came from Appalachia, the American South, and across the Atlantic.
A West Virginia Bureau of Mines report from 1915 counted 1,479 hand-loading miners at Gary. Among them were native-born white Americans and African Americans alongside hundreds of Hungarian, Romanian, Italian, Polish, and other eastern and southern European miners.
The population created one of the most culturally diverse communities in the southern West Virginia coalfields.
African Americans were particularly important to McDowell County’s mining economy. Black workers came north from Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and other southern states during an era when coal operators aggressively recruited labor. European immigrants arrived for many of the same reasons. Mining offered hard and dangerous work, but it could also offer wages unavailable in the agricultural communities they had left behind.
Gary became a place where Appalachian families, Black southern families, and European immigrants might work in the same industrial system while carrying different languages, churches, foods, traditions, and experiences into the hollow.
They did not, however, enter an equal society.
The Model Company Town
U.S. Coal & Coke promoted Gary as more than a place to work. The company wanted a stable workforce, and stability meant convincing miners to bring their families and remain in the hollow.
Houses were constructed in large numbers. Schools, churches, stores, medical facilities, recreational spaces, and public improvements followed.
This was corporate paternalism in its most complete Appalachian form.
The company provided services that would have been difficult for workers to obtain otherwise in an isolated mountain valley. At its height, Gary Hollow contained churches, stores, restaurants, elementary schools, high schools, athletic facilities, a clubhouse, a bowling alley, a pool hall, a country club, a bakery, a dairy operation, and a theater. By the 1940s, the larger Gary complex was home to nearly 15,000 people.
Federal investigators studying coal communities during the 1920s regarded Gary as unusually well developed compared with many other company towns.
Yet those amenities came with another reality.
U.S. Coal & Coke owned the mines. It built much of the housing. It controlled major stores and workplaces. The economic life of thousands of families ultimately depended upon the same employer.
Even the houses reflected rank.
The McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey found that different house plans helped distinguish supervisors and foremen from rank-and-file miners. The geography of corporate authority was therefore visible from the street. A worker’s position within the company could help determine where and how his family lived.
Gary was a community, but it was also a company town in the fullest sense of that term.
Modern Machinery and Boys Underground
U.S. Steel wanted Gary to represent efficient industrial mining.
Lewis Hine’s camera complicated that image.
When Hine arrived in September 1908 for the National Child Labor Committee, he photographed mine entrances, machinery, workers, drivers, and boys employed around the Gary mines.
One photograph showed the mechanical loader that could dramatically reduce the number of workers required to move coal. Hine specifically called attention to the irony that such advanced machinery operated in mines where boys still worked as drivers and trappers.
Another photograph showed the entrance to a Gary mine with a trapper boy standing among adult workers. Hine recorded a workday lasting from 7:00 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. and wages of one dollar per day for trappers.
These photographs are important because company records and mining journals naturally emphasized production, engineering, efficiency, and safety. Hine pointed his camera toward the people whose labor made those statistics possible.
The result is one of the most valuable surviving visual records of early Gary.
Gary Goes to War
World War I made the coal beneath Gary even more important.
Steel was required for rails, locomotives, ships, weapons, artillery shells, and countless other wartime necessities. Producing that steel required enormous quantities of coal and coke.
U.S. Coal & Coke turned patriotism into a recruiting tool.
In November 1918, the company placed a remarkable advertisement in the McDowell Times urging additional men to come to Gary. It promoted wages, housing, schools, and churches while presenting miners as essential participants in the war effort. The company called its workers “industrial soldiers of our country.”
The advertisement also demonstrates the racial organization of Gary. U.S. Coal & Coke specifically advertised schools and churches for both Black and white residents and listed the earnings of white immigrant and Black workers as examples of the money that could be made.
The company was also expanding housing. Its 1918 advertisement claimed that new employee houses representing an investment of one million dollars were under construction.
Gary’s miners were thousands of miles from the Western Front, but their coal entered the same industrial chain that supplied American forces overseas.
A September 1918 newspaper report celebrated extraordinary production at Gary and described miners increasing output as an act of wartime patriotism. Coal mining had become part of the language of national service.
Black Gary and the Segregated Coalfields
Gary’s diversity did not erase segregation.
Housing and schools in Gary Hollow were divided along racial lines. The company might employ Black and white miners inside the same industrial system, but their families lived within the racial boundaries of early twentieth-century America.
The Black community nevertheless built a strong institutional life.
Gary became home to churches, schools, civic organizations, athletic programs, and local leaders. In 1921, African American residents organized McDowell County’s first branch of the NAACP in Gary, placing the community within the broader history of Black political organization in Appalachia.
Education became particularly important.
For decades, Gary maintained separate schools for Black and white children. Gary District High School became an important center of Black education and community identity, while Gary High School served white students.
The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education did not immediately erase that structure.
Gary High enrolled its first Black students in 1958. A former teacher later remembered white students briefly protesting outside the school on the first day. The assistant principal rang the bell early, students went inside, and the demonstration ended.
Even then, integration remained incomplete. Gary still had two racially separate high schools in 1960. Gary District High continued serving predominantly Black students until McDowell County finally consolidated the system during the mid-1960s.
Integration opened institutions that had been formally closed to Black students, but it also brought losses. Black schools had provided teaching positions, coaching jobs, administrative leadership, traditions, and social networks within African American communities. When those schools disappeared, much of that institutional leadership disappeared with them.
Gary’s school history therefore tells two connected stories, one about overcoming legal segregation and another about what Black communities lost during consolidation.
Gary Hollow at Its Height
By the 1940s, Gary Hollow had become one of the great industrial landscapes of West Virginia.
The West Virginia Encyclopedia estimates that nearly 15,000 people lived throughout the complex. Twenty-seven churches served different neighborhoods and congregations. Ten company stores and several independent stores supplied families. Children attended numerous elementary schools and two high schools. Residents could visit athletic fields, restaurants, a movie theater, bowling facilities, a clubhouse, and other recreational spaces.
The mines beneath them remained the reason all of it existed.
Over its decades of full operation, the Gary complex shipped more than 200 million tons of high-quality coal. Unlike coal companies primarily selling into an open market, Gary formed part of U.S. Steel’s vertically integrated industrial empire. Coal from McDowell County was directed toward the corporation’s steel-producing facilities in Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes region.
During World War II, that relationship once again gave Gary national significance. The mines provided metallurgical coal for a steel industry producing ships, weapons, vehicles, rails, factories, and the material infrastructure required by an industrial war.
Federal photographers arrived again in 1946, this time as part of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry. Their photographs captured miners preparing for work, families, children, houses, churches, stores, sanitation, and the ordinary routines of life inside the Gary mining system.
By then, Gary was no frontier mining camp. It was a mature industrial community whose families had spent generations in the hollow.
The Beginning of Decline
The very thing that had made Gary prosperous also made it vulnerable.
Gary depended upon coal, and more specifically upon the needs of U.S. Steel.
When those needs changed, there was no equally large industry waiting to replace mining.
The heritage survey identifies the closing of Gary No. 12 in 1949 as an early indication of the economic problems ahead. Mechanization also allowed companies to produce coal with fewer miners. Even when tonnage remained substantial, employment did not necessarily recover.
Changes in steel production, competition from foreign producers, shifts in energy markets, exhaustion of some easily accessible coal reserves, labor disputes, new technology, and changing corporate strategies gradually weakened the economic structure that had sustained Gary.
By the late 1960s, U.S. Steel began disposing of its enormous real-estate holdings. Company houses that generations of families had rented were sold into private ownership. Other buildings were abandoned or demolished.
The transition fundamentally changed Gary.
For most of its history, Gary had belonged to a company.
Now it had to become a city.
Gary Becomes Its Own City
Gary incorporated in 1971.
The new municipality included several of the old company communities, bringing places including Main Gary, Wilcoe, Thorpe, Ream, Elbert, and Filbert under a new civic identity.
Incorporation meant local government, but independence from the company did not mean independence from coal.
The city’s tax base, employment, population, and commercial activity remained tied to mining. As long as miners went to work, money circulated through the community. When they did not, nearly everything suffered.
During the early 1980s, that dependence became catastrophic.
U.S. Steel closed mines and laid off workers throughout its Gary district as the American steel industry contracted. The company that had brought thousands of families into Gary Hollow was withdrawing from the landscape it had created.
In February 1983, the crisis reached the floor of Congress. A member speaking about unemployment in southern West Virginia told lawmakers that unemployment in Gary Hollow had reached approximately 90 percent and that the city could not even afford to keep its streetlights illuminated.
Later that year, the same figure appeared again during Senate debate as lawmakers described families exhausting unemployment benefits and selling possessions to survive.
Few statistics better illustrate what the collapse of a single-industry economy could mean.
When U.S. Steel Left Gary
By 1984, the town that had once symbolized corporate industrial power was being discussed nationally as a symbol of industrial decline.
A Washington Post report that December described a community whose population had fallen dramatically and whose homes, stores, entertainment buildings, and other company-era structures were disappearing. U.S. Steel had closed additional mines and its major processing facilities while large numbers of miners remained laid off.
U.S. Steel’s historic Gary operation effectively came to an end during the middle 1980s. Heritage surveys record final closures in parts of Gary Hollow by 1986, although mining did not completely disappear. Other operators later acquired or leased remaining coal properties.
Gary Enterprises, for example, purchased a Gary mine from U.S. Steel in 1987 and agreed to employ some former U.S. Steel workers represented by the United Mine Workers.
Coal therefore survived in reduced form.
The industrial world that had built Gary did not.
What Remains in Gary Hollow
Much of the old mining infrastructure has disappeared.
Tipples were dismantled. Mine buildings collapsed or were demolished. Company stores vanished. Rail facilities lost their former purpose. Houses were removed as population declined, while vegetation reclaimed former industrial ground.
Yet Gary Hollow is far from empty of history.
The Library of Congress Historic American Landscapes Survey found hundreds of residential and community structures associated with the historic mining landscape still surviving, many of them continuing to be used. Churches, houses, roads, retaining walls, railroad grades, mine openings, foundations, and altered hillsides preserve pieces of the industrial plan.
The surviving records are just as important.
The Eastern Regional Coal Archives in Bluefield preserves an extraordinary concentration of U.S. Coal & Coke material, including payroll books, company records, photographs, account books, mine information, and personal collections connected with people who lived and worked in Gary. Your research material identifies approximately one hundred linear feet of U.S. Coal & Coke payroll and company records alone, with additional Gary collections documenting doctors, safety inspectors, railroads, newspapers, and daily community life.
Lewis Hine’s photographs remain at the Library of Congress. Federal coal records survive in the National Archives. Mine reports preserve production, employment, accident, and inspection statistics. Railroad drawings preserve the routes that once carried coal out of the hollow.
Together they make Gary one of the best documented company-town landscapes in Appalachia.
Even the abandoned mines remain part of daily life.
A 2025 United States Geological Survey investigation of Gary’s water resources reported that the city’s existing public water supply comes from a well tapping abandoned underground mine workings in the Pocahontas No. 3 and No. 4 coal seams. More than a century after mining created the town, the physical spaces left by that industry remain tied to the community’s survival.
Why Gary Matters
Gary’s history is larger than the history of one West Virginia town.
It is the history of what happened when the industrial United States entered Appalachia on an enormous scale.
U.S. Steel found coal beneath McDowell County and built an entire human landscape around extracting it. Mines opened. Railroad tracks climbed the hollow. Thousands of houses appeared. Families came from the Appalachian mountains, the American South, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Black and white miners entered the same mountains even while their children attended segregated schools. Churches, ball fields, stores, clubs, schools, and neighborhoods grew beside the industrial works.
For decades, Gary could appear to prove that a corporation could construct an entire community around industry.
Then the industry left.
The collapse demonstrated the other side of the company-town bargain. When one employer controlled the economic reason for a town’s existence, corporate withdrawal could become a community catastrophe.
Still, Gary should not be remembered simply as a place where coal disappeared.
It was a place where thousands of Appalachian families built lives. Children went to school there. Miners formed friendships underground. Black residents organized for civil rights. Immigrant families became West Virginians. Baseball games, church services, school dances, union meetings, shopping trips, funerals, weddings, and ordinary evenings unfolded beneath mountains honeycombed with mine workings.
The ruins tell only the final chapter.
Gary’s complete history is found in the people who transformed an industrial project into a community and remained long after the corporation that built it was gone.
Sources & Further Reading
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “United States Coal & Coke Company Records.” USX Collection, Accession 89-100. Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. The collection contains approximately 100 linear feet of payroll books and company records dating from 1901 to 1950. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Machine Used in Gary W. Va. Mine That Digs the Coal and Loads It on the Car.” September 1908. Photograph. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673709/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Main Entrance, Gary W. Va. Mine. Trapper Boy in Center.” September 1908. Photograph. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673712/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Tipple & Elevator into Shaft. Leads Down to Mine 200 Ft. Below. Gary Mine.” August 1908. Photograph. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673705/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Construction of Coke Ovens, Upper End Number 3 Works, Looking West.” November 1902. Coal Life: U.S. Steel Photograph Collection, Ph82-115.3.49, United States Steel Photograph No. 267. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/wvmemory/photodetail.aspx?Id=317
United States Coal Commission. Records of the United States Coal Commission, 1896–1927. Record Group 68. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/068.html
United States Coal Commission. “Completed Mining Community A Schedules with Camp Ratings, December 1922–June 1923.” National Archives Identifier 6293264. Record Group 68, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-068-coal-commission
United States Public Health Service. “Sanitary Surveys of Coal Communities, April–June 1923.” National Archives Identifier 6278177. Records of the United States Coal Commission, Record Group 68, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-068-coal-commission
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Map and Profile of the Right Fork Spur of the Sand Lick Branch of the Tug Fork Branch of the Ohio Extension of the N&W Railway Co.” February 23, 1907. Drawing B355, HS-CC10672. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122583
“Coal Mining Methods at Gary, West Virginia.” Engineering and Mining Journal 88, no. 1, July 3, 1909. Digitized 1909 issue
United States Coal & Coke Company. “1000 Miners and Coke Drawers: 11 Mines and 2000 Coke Ovens Working Six Days Per Week.” Advertisement. McDowell Times (Keystone, WV), May 19, 1916, 2. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/1916-05-19/ed-1/seq-2/
Orr, Elisabeth, Stefania Staniscia, and Charles Yuill. “Gary Hollow, 38 Church Street, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Historic American Landscapes Survey No. WV-6. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0557/
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways, November 15, 2018. Coal Heritage Survey Update
McGehee, C. Stuart. “Gary.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised April 24, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/2025
Garay, Ronald G. U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. https://utpress.org/9781572337978/u-s-steel-and-gary-west-virginia/
Carter, Alice E. “Segregation and Integration in the Appalachian Coalfields: McDowell County Responds to the Brown Decision.” West Virginia History 54 (1995): 78–104. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh54-5.html
Kozar, Mark D., and Samuel H. Austin. Reconnaissance of Potential Alternate Water Supply Sources for the City of Gary, West Virginia. Open-File Report 2025-1037. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2025. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20251037
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. HathiTrust catalog record
Tams, William Purviance, Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1964. Internet Archive record
Author Note: As an Appalachian historian, I find Gary especially important because its surviving records allow us to see both the enormous industrial power of the coalfields and the everyday lives built beneath it. The story of Gary is also a reminder that these communities were never simply company towns, but homes shaped and sustained by generations of Appalachian families.