Appalachian Community Histories – Gilliam, McDowell County: Coal Mines, Company Life, and Russell Lee’s 1946 Portrait
Along the coal seams of McDowell County, West Virginia, towns once appeared almost as quickly as the mines that supported them. A tipple rose beside a railroad. Rows of houses climbed the narrow ground between creek and hillside. A company store opened, miners arrived with their families, and a community took shape around an industry that seemed capable of lasting forever.
Gilliam was one of those places.
Located in McDowell County’s Northfork District and within the great Flat Top-Pocahontas coalfield, Gilliam developed around the Gilliam Coal and Coke Company during the first great expansion of southern West Virginia mining. The West Virginia State Archives records the place name by 1892, the same year that contemporary mining journals were describing substantial industrial construction at the company’s operation.
Gilliam might today be remembered simply as another small coal community among the dozens scattered through McDowell County. Instead, an extraordinary surviving collection of government photographs allows us to enter the town during one day in 1946. Through the camera of Russell Lee, Gilliam becomes more than a company name in a mine report. We see miners leaving for work, children sitting on fences, families eating supper, women shopping, a company doctor examining a child, coal cars beside the store, old coke ovens against the hillside, and streams where household waste collected beneath rows of company houses.
Few small Appalachian coal camps were documented so intimately.
Building a Coal Town in McDowell County
Gilliam emerged during a period when McDowell County was being transformed by coal.
The expansion of the Norfolk and Western Railway into the Pocahontas field opened vast reserves of high-quality bituminous coal to national markets. Investors and operators moved rapidly into the valleys and hollows, opening mines and constructing settlements where permanent communities had previously been small or nonexistent.
By 1892, Gilliam was already more than an experimental mine opening.
The May 7, 1892, issue of the Engineering and Mining Journal reported that the Gilliam Coal and Coke Company had erected a coal tipple fifty-one feet high. Coal was being transported over a 2,400-foot tram road, while one hundred coke ovens were under construction.
Those numbers reveal the scale of the investment. A company planning one hundred coke ovens was preparing not simply to remove coal from a hillside, but to participate in an industrial system that connected southern West Virginia coal with railroads, ironmaking, steel production, and distant markets.
The West Virginia State Archives records Gilliam in McDowell County in 1892, placing the appearance of the community alongside the construction of this early mining infrastructure. In that sense, the town and the industry were almost inseparable. Gilliam existed because coal was beneath the surrounding mountains, and the company created the infrastructure needed to reach it.
From Mine Operation to Community
Mining towns required more than mines.
Workers needed houses. Families needed food, clothing, medical care, schools, churches, postal service, roads, and places to gather. As Gilliam expanded, the landscape around the mine developed into a recognizable company community.
By the early twentieth century Gilliam was firmly established enough to appear in official state records. West Virginia’s 1916 Blue Book listed Gilliam among the post offices of McDowell County. The community was part of the Northfork District, alongside places such as Algoma, Crumpler, Northfork, McDowell, Rolfe, and Worth.
The geography mattered. These communities were separate places, but they belonged to the same industrial world. Families moved between camps, miners changed employers, residents traveled to nearby towns for shopping and entertainment, and the railroad connected mine after mine along the coalfield.
Gilliam remained an active mining operation through the prosperous coal years of the 1920s. The West Virginia Department of Mines included the Gilliam Coal & Coke Company in its 1923 directory of McDowell County mines, confirming that the operation had survived decades beyond its nineteenth-century beginnings.
That longevity distinguishes Gilliam from short-lived speculative operations. From the early 1890s into the middle twentieth century, generations of families experienced the community not as a temporary camp but as home.
Gilliam Nos. 3, 6, and 9
By World War II, the Gilliam operation had grown into a system of several mines.
A federal order published in the Federal Register in March 1945 identified three Gilliam Coal and Coke Company operations. Gilliam No. 3 carried Mine Index No. 72, Gilliam No. 6 carried Mine Index No. 315, and Gilliam No. 9 carried Mine Index No. 1039.
Coal from the three mines could be combined for shipment. Federal regulators described the mixture as approximately 60 percent coal from No. 3, 20 percent from No. 6, and 20 percent from No. 9. The government order established wartime maximum prices for different sizes of coal shipped by rail or truck.
Behind those regulatory numbers were hundreds of men going underground.
The Second World War had made coal indispensable. Factories, railroads, power plants, military production, and much of the American industrial economy still depended upon it. Yet the enormous demand for coal did not mean that coalfield families enjoyed modern living conditions.
That contradiction brought Russell Lee to Gilliam.
Russell Lee Comes to Gilliam
In 1946, the federal government undertook one of the most important investigations of American coalfield life ever conducted.
After a major nationwide coal strike and federal seizure of the mines, the government agreed to investigate medical care, housing, sanitation, and general living conditions in mining communities. The resulting study became the 1947 Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry.
Photographer Russell Lee was assigned to document what the investigators found.
Lee traveled through American mining communities photographing miners not only underground or beside machinery, but inside kitchens, bedrooms, stores, churches, yards, and doctors’ offices. The National Archives describes the project as an unusual opportunity to enter company-controlled communities that outsiders had often found difficult to document. More than two thousand photographs resulted from the wider survey.
On August 13, 1946, Lee photographed Gilliam.
The surviving images create something close to a photographic walk through the town.
There is the mine. There is the tipple. There are coal cars. There are company houses and privies. There are children and parents. There is garbage in the creek. There are old coke ovens left from an earlier industrial generation. There is the company store.
And repeatedly, there is the Howard family.
James Robert Howard and a Miner’s Working Day
James Robert Howard became one of the central figures in Lee’s photographic record of Gilliam.
Lee followed Howard through portions of the ordinary routine surrounding a mining shift. His photographs show Howard preparing for work, taking his lunch, visiting other miners, receiving his safety lamp, and sharing time with his family.
One photograph carries an especially important caption.
When Howard received his safety lamp at the lamp house, Lee recorded that the Gilliam mine employed 232 people and that approximately 60 percent of them were Black.
That single figure changes how Gilliam should be remembered.
African American miners were not a marginal presence in the community. They formed a majority of the workforce recorded by the federal government in 1946.
Black migration into the southern West Virginia coalfields had been part of McDowell County’s growth since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mining companies recruited workers from Virginia, the Carolinas, and other parts of the South, creating coal communities with racial demographics very different from many surrounding rural Appalachian counties.
Gilliam provides unusually direct evidence of that history.
Black Gilliam and Community Life
Lee did not stop at the mine entrance.
His photographs show Black housing at Gilliam, families at home, children throughout the camp, and a Black church that provided an institution outside direct company ownership.
The original federal caption for the church noted that the building had been constructed by its members with their own money and was not company property.
That distinction was important.
In a company town, ownership shaped daily life. The company might own the mine, the worker’s house, the store, and much of the surrounding land. A church built independently by its congregation represented something different. It was a community institution created by the people who worshiped there rather than another building supplied by the operator.
Lee also photographed Black company housing with a water tank and old beehive coke ovens in the background. The image joined two generations of Gilliam history in a single frame. In the foreground were families living in the camp in 1946. Behind them stood remnants of the coke-making infrastructure that had helped establish the operation more than fifty years earlier.
The coke ovens visible behind the houses were the aging remains of the industrial world described in mining publications during Gilliam’s first years.
Inside the Howard Home
Some of Lee’s most revealing Gilliam photographs were taken inside the Howard family home.
The federal photographer recorded Mrs. Howard preparing supper and packing her husband’s mine lunch. He photographed the family around the table, including a moment when James Robert Howard bowed his head to ask a blessing before the meal.
These photographs matter because coal history can easily become dominated by production totals, mine openings, explosions, strikes, and corporate ownership.
The Howard photographs remind us that every shift underground began and ended somewhere else.
It began in houses where lunches were packed and work clothes were put on. It ended at supper tables where miners returned covered in the physical evidence of their labor.
Lee also documented the house itself. One federal caption noted that indoor running water existed in Gilliam company housing only where tenants had paid for and installed it themselves.
That was a striking condition in 1946.
The mine operated in a modern industrial economy. Electricity powered machinery. Coal moved by rail into national markets. The company could operate multiple mines capable of producing for a wartime economy.
Yet some families living beside that industrial system still had to install their own indoor plumbing.
Company Houses and the Limits of Company Responsibility
Housing photographs reveal both the permanence and limitations of company-town life.
Gilliam contained rows of modest houses divided among families, including two-family structures. Lee photographed white and Black sections of the camp separately, evidence that segregation shaped the physical geography of the community as well as its social life.
The houses were not simply shelters. They formed the landscape children remembered as home. Porches, fences, paths, hillsides, privies, and spaces underneath houses became places where everyday life unfolded.
But Lee’s camera repeatedly found the shortcomings of company infrastructure.
Behind homes, garbage and household waste were discarded along hillsides. Streams became disposal channels. One federal caption described garbage and trash being dumped into a stream while seepage from privies contaminated the water.
Another photograph showed the rear of the Howard home and noted the absence of garbage collection. Refuse was simply thrown down the hillside to decay.
These images were not accidental snapshots. Lee was working as part of a federal investigation specifically concerned with whether mining communities met acceptable standards for health, sanitation, housing, and medical care. The conditions at Gilliam therefore became evidence in a national argument about what coal companies owed the people whose labor sustained the industry.
Children in the Coal Camp
Children appear throughout Lee’s Gilliam photographs.
They sit on fences. They gather beside company houses. They play beneath buildings and around structures that adults might have considered anything but playgrounds.
One image shows miners’ children playing in an abandoned shack. Another places children on the fence in front of the Howard house. The National Archives continues to feature the latter photograph in its interpretation of Lee’s coal survey.
Their presence gives the photographs an emotional weight that production reports cannot capture.
Gilliam was an industrial site, but for children it was simply the world they knew.
Coal cars, mine buildings, coke ovens, company houses, tracks, creeks, and waste piles formed the background of childhood. Industrial structures became part of the landscape of play.
The distinction between mine property and neighborhood was often remarkably thin because the neighborhood existed for the mine.
The Gilliam Company Store
The company store stood near the center of that world.
Lee photographed miners gathered there and families shopping inside. James Robert Howard appears visiting with fellow miners in the store, demonstrating how the building functioned as more than a place to purchase groceries.
Company stores in Appalachian mining communities could serve as commercial centers, meeting places, sources of credit, and symbols of company control.
At Gilliam, however, the federal captions reveal that residents were not entirely dependent upon the store. Lee noted that some Gilliam families traveled to nearby towns because they believed they could find better merchandise and a wider selection elsewhere.
That small detail reveals how the mature coalfield had changed from the earliest company-camp era. Improved transportation and nearby commercial centers gave at least some families choices that earlier generations of miners had possessed only in limited form.
The company store nevertheless remained a social center. Men gathered there before or after shifts. Families encountered neighbors. News traveled through the room along with groceries and household goods.
Outside, coal cars were close enough to be photographed beside the store itself. Industry and domestic life occupied the same narrow strip of valley.
The Company Doctor
Medical care was another part of the company-town system.
Lee photographed Mrs. Howard and her son with Dr. J. A. Bennett, identified by the federal survey as the Gilliam company doctor.
The image was significant because medical care was one of the principal subjects of the national coal survey. Investigators examined the way doctors were paid, the availability of hospitals, workplace injuries, sanitation, public health, and the relationship between coal companies and medical providers.
The final government report devoted major sections to housing and sanitation, public health, industrial medicine, general medical services, hospitalization, and hospital facilities. Its purpose was not merely to describe coalfield life but to determine what improvements were needed.
In Gilliam, Dr. Bennett represented the local face of that much larger system.
For a miner’s family, medical care was not an abstract policy issue. It meant whether a sick child could be examined, whether an injured miner could receive treatment, and whether a family living miles from a large city had regular access to a physician.
A Thousand Tons a Day
While Lee documented homes and families, he also photographed the industrial machinery that kept Gilliam alive.
His image of the Gilliam tipple carried a federal caption stating that the mine was producing approximately 1,000 tons of coal each day.
The number gives scale to the community surrounding it.
A thousand tons each day moved through machinery while miners traveled underground, timbermen carried supports toward the workings, coal cars rolled through the camp, store clerks served families, and children played beside the houses.
Lee photographed workers carrying mine timbering toward the Gilliam Mine, an ordinary but critical part of underground safety. Timber supported mine roofs and passageways in a workplace where geological pressure was always present.
The photographs bring together the two halves of Gilliam’s existence.
One half was industrial, measured in tons, mines, railroad cars, equipment, and prices.
The other was human, measured in meals, children, doctors, churches, houses, and the hours before a miner left for another shift.
Neither history makes sense without the other.
Old Coke Ovens and a Changing Industry
Perhaps one of the most historically revealing photographs Lee made at Gilliam shows the old beehive coke ovens.
By 1946 they belonged to an earlier generation of coalfield technology.
More than half a century earlier, the Engineering and Mining Journal had reported one hundred coke ovens under construction at Gilliam. Coke production had been part of the industrial ambition surrounding the community from its earliest years.
Lee’s photograph showed those ovens after that world had aged.
Mining continued, but the industrial landscape was changing. Mechanization increasingly reduced the number of workers required to produce coal. Transportation improved. Old company-town systems weakened. Coke production became concentrated in newer facilities, while rows of nineteenth-century beehive ovens became relics.
Gilliam’s ovens survived long enough to appear behind the houses of the miners whose labor represented a later phase of the same coal operation.
Few photographs capture so neatly the passage of one coalfield era into another.
The Long Decline of the Coal Camp
Gilliam was still remembered among McDowell County coal operations around the middle of the twentieth century, but the forces that would transform the county were already underway.
Mechanization allowed mines to produce more coal with fewer workers. Companies consolidated operations. Families increasingly owned automobiles and could live farther from mine entrances. Stores outside the camps became easier to reach. Company housing systems gradually lost the economic purpose that had created them.
Across McDowell County, the consequences were enormous.
Communities built around mines lost their employment base. Houses disappeared. Commercial buildings closed. Railroad infrastructure changed. Younger generations left in search of work elsewhere.
Gilliam did not vanish completely. The name survives, and the community remains identifiable in McDowell County. West Virginia’s Coal Heritage Highway materials continue to place Gilliam among the coal camps of the Flat Top-Pocahontas field.
But the world Russell Lee photographed was tied to a form of company-town life that could not survive once the mine ceased to dominate nearly every part of the local economy.
Why Gilliam Matters
Gilliam’s history is important precisely because it was not one of the largest or most famous coal towns in West Virginia.
There was no nationally remembered mine battle here. Gilliam never became a major city. Its name rarely appears in broad histories of industrial America.
Yet Gilliam contains almost every major theme of Appalachian coalfield history within one narrow community.
There was the sudden industrial development of the Pocahontas field in the late nineteenth century. There were tipples, tram roads, coke ovens, and rail shipments. There were company houses and a company store. There was racial segregation, but also a Black workforce that represented a majority of the mine employees recorded in 1946. There were churches built through community effort. There were company doctors, sanitation problems, families raising children beside industrial infrastructure, and miners whose lives moved constantly between home and underground work.
Most importantly, there are faces.
James Robert Howard does not survive only as a name on an employment record. We can see him receiving his lamp before work. We can see him talking with other miners. We can see his wife preparing his lunch. We can see his children and neighbors. We can see him bowing his head before supper.
That is the unusual gift of Gilliam’s surviving historical record.
Mining statistics tell us that coal came from these mountains. Russell Lee’s photographs tell us who lived beside them.
The tipple, company store, coke ovens, houses, and mine represented the industrial reason Gilliam existed, but the people in Lee’s photographs were the reason Gilliam became a community.
Sources & Further Reading
Russell Lee. “Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry: Gilliam Coal and Coke Company, Gilliam Mine, Gilliam, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 13, 1946. Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War, Record Group 245. National Archives and Records Administration. https://visit.archives.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/power-light-photo-list.pdf
United States Coal Mines Administration. A Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry: Report of the Coal Mines Administration. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947. National Archives Identifier 312186755. https://docsteach.org/document/medical-survey-bituminous-coal-industry/
United States Coal Mines Administration. The Coal Miner and His Family: A Supplement to A Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947. National Archives Identifier 312186929. https://docsteach.org/document/coal-miner-and-his-family-supplemental/
Lee, Russell. “Children of Miners on the Fence in Front of the Howard House. Gilliam Coal and Coke Company, Gilliam Mine, Gilliam, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 13, 1946. Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Record Group 245. National Archives Identifier 540819. https://docsteach.org/document/children-of-miners-on-the-fence/
National Archives Museum. “Russell Lee: Mines.” Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey. Accessed September 13, 2026. The Gilliam material includes James Robert Howard receiving his safety lamp and the federal caption recording 232 employees, approximately 60 percent of whom were Black. https://visit.archives.gov/galleries/russell-lee-mines
National Archives Museum. “Russell Lee: Home.” Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey. Accessed September 13, 2026. Includes Gilliam company housing and the federal caption concerning tenant-installed indoor running water. https://visit.archives.gov/galleries/russell-lee-home
National Archives Museum. “Russell Lee: Community.” Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey. Accessed September 13, 2026. Includes Lee’s August 13, 1946, photograph of miners’ children at the Howard house in Gilliam. https://visit.archives.gov/galleries/russell-lee-community
“West Virginia: McDowell County.” Engineering and Mining Journal 53, no. 19 (May 7, 1892): 607. Reports the Gilliam Coal and Coke Company’s fifty-one-foot tipple, 2,400-foot tram road, and one hundred coke ovens under construction. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1892-05-07-_Vol_53_Iss_19_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1892-05-07_53_19%29.pdf
United States Office of Price Administration. “Gilliam Coal and Coke Co.: Establishment of Maximum Prices and Price Classifications.” Federal Register 10, March 16, 1945. Identifies Gilliam Mines Nos. 3, 6, and 9 and their federal mine index numbers. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1945-03-16/pdf/FR-1945-03-16.pdf
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 13, 2026. Entry for Gilliam, McDowell County, dated 1892. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamg.html
Johnson, Kim, comp. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Based on The New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia, 1933. West Virginia Archives and History, 2004. Lists Gilliam in McDowell County’s Northfork District. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia University Libraries. “Miner Driving Horse Drawn Coal Cart at Gilliam, W. Va.” West Virginia History OnView. ID 003133. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://wvhistoryonview.org/
West Virginia University Libraries. “Miner Driving Horse Drawn Coal Cart at Gilliam, W. Va.” West Virginia History OnView. ID 003188. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://wvhistoryonview.org/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Bishop Schedule Production Graph; Pocahontas Land Corporation, Gilliam Coal & Coke Company, and Pocahontas Fuel Co., Inc. Map; and Engineering Notes.” ArchivesSpace Public Interface. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://aspace-dev.cloud.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/108660
Coal Heritage Highway Authority. McDowell County, West Virginia Coal Camp Map. West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. Accessed September 13, 2026. Shows Gilliam within the Flat Top-Pocahontas Coalfield and places it geographically among neighboring McDowell County coal communities. https://coalheritage.wv.gov/visitors/Coal%20Camp%20Maps/MCDOWELL.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap. August 3, 1916. Contemporary Hungarian-language miners’ newspaper discussing employment and coal production in the Pocahontas coalfields, useful for the region’s immigrant labor context. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/60522/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1916_031.pdf
Appalachian Regional Commission. “McDowell, West Virginia.” Accessed September 13, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/mcdowell-west-virginia/
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Author Note: Gilliam’s surviving records provide an unusually intimate look at how coal shaped work, housing, family life, race, faith, and childhood in McDowell County. Russell Lee’s 1946 photographs allow us to see the miners and families behind the production figures and remember Gilliam as a community rather than simply another vanished coal operation.