Appalachian Community Histories – Hemphill, McDowell County: Exeter, Warwick, Orkney, and Life Along the Tug Fork
Only a short distance northwest of Welch, Hemphill grew along one of the most heavily industrialized stretches of the Tug Fork in McDowell County. Today it is a small unincorporated community, but during the first half of the twentieth century its location placed it squarely inside the machinery of the Pocahontas coalfield. Railroad tracks followed the river, coal operations pushed into the surrounding mountains, and company housing spread through the narrow spaces left between water, rail, and steep hillsides.
The National Coal Heritage Area survey dates Hemphill to 1905 and identifies three collieries associated with the community: Orkney, Warwick, and Exeter. Over the first half of the twentieth century, companies connected with mining there included Solvay Collieries Company, Central Pocahontas Coal Company, and Kingston-Pocahontas Coal Company. The result was less a single compact town than a collection of mining neighborhoods tied together by the railroad, the Tug Fork, company employment, and the name Hemphill.
Hemphill’s surviving history is especially rich because the community appears in state mine reports, federal records, newspaper accounts, railroad history, geological studies, and a remarkable group of photographs taken in 1946. Read together, those records show not merely where coal was mined, but how a McDowell County coal community worked, traveled, worshiped, bought groceries, played baseball, raised children, and adapted when the mines finally closed.
The Railroad Came Through the Mountains
Hemphill’s development cannot be separated from the Norfolk & Western Railway. Coal production in McDowell County depended upon an enormous transportation system capable of carrying millions of tons out of narrow mountain valleys and toward industrial markets far beyond West Virginia.
The National Coal Heritage survey records that the Norfolk & Western completed two tunnels at Hemphill in 1906. Railroad history places those tunnels within a larger early twentieth century effort to straighten and improve the Pocahontas Division between Welch and Davy. The older railroad followed the bends of the Tug Fork more closely. The improved alignment cut through the mountains instead, crossing the river and passing through tunnels where geography refused to give the railroad a straight path.
That transportation infrastructure helped define Hemphill. Coal cars could be loaded near the mines and moved directly onto one of the most important coal-hauling railroads in the country. Workers and their families lived within sight and sound of the line. Decades later, Russell Lee’s photographs would still show railroad tracks passing immediately beside company houses, stores, and industrial structures.
The relationship also made the railroad part of everyday life rather than something distant from the community. Trains did not merely pass Hemphill. They ran through its physical center.
Exeter, Warwick, and Orkney
The three names most closely associated with Hemphill’s mining history are Exeter, Warwick, and Orkney. Ownership and corporate organization changed over time, a common pattern in the Pocahontas coalfield, but those mine names remained attached to the community’s landscape.
Official state records provide firm evidence of the industrial scale that had developed by the early 1920s. The West Virginia Department of Mines annual report for 1923 lists Central Pocahontas Coal Company No. 4 in McDowell County with Hemphill as its post office. The same reports, examined across multiple years, allow changes in operators and individual mines to be traced through the period when Hemphill was tied closely to coal production.
Local memory later described Hemphill as a collection of separate camp areas rather than a single uniform neighborhood. Trula Vandell Gray’s A Coal Camp Chronicle: Rememberin’ My Raisin’ remembered Warwick Hollow, Orkney Hollow, and the Shaft Bottom area as distinct parts of Hemphill. That arrangement reflected the geography of the coalfield. In a broad city, streets could spread outward in every direction. In McDowell County, mountains forced settlement into narrow strips along hollows, streams, roads, and rail lines.
The company presence could be seen everywhere. Housing, roads, stores, and industrial structures existed because mines needed workers close enough to report for shifts. Some surviving residences are brick, and the National Coal Heritage survey specifically notes company-built brick houses still standing in Hemphill. Yet the photographic record also preserves long rows of simpler wooden company houses. Hemphill, like many coal communities, contained more than one kind of company housing and more than one level of material comfort.
A Community Large Enough for Its Own Post Office
Coal production brought not only miners but families, merchants, postal services, churches, teachers, railroad workers, and the many occupations necessary to sustain an industrial community.
Hemphill appears in official West Virginia publications as a recognized post office during the coal boom. By 1925, its postal operation had become significant enough that the federal government recorded a change in status. The Congressional Record states that the Hemphill office became a presidential post office on July 1, 1925, and records the nomination of Rufus B. Scott as postmaster.
That small federal entry helps show what coal had created in only about two decades. Hemphill was no longer merely a railroad point beside the Tug Fork or the location of a mine opening. It was a named community with a post office serving the people who lived among the surrounding operations.
The company-store system provided another center of daily life. Coal-camp stores sold food, clothing, household necessities, and other goods to families whose economic lives revolved around mining. Surviving coal scrip associated with Kingston-Pocahontas and the Exeter operation provides a physical reminder of that system. One known token identifies the Kingston-Pocahontas Coal Company and Exeter directly, tying the company economy to the Hemphill mining complex.
The 1936 Hemphill Train Wreck
One of the most dramatic events preserved in Hemphill’s newspaper record began on a Saturday evening in September 1936.
A Norfolk & Western freight train derailed at Hemphill, overturning a locomotive and wrecking fourteen loaded coal cars. Approximately 700 tons of coal were scattered along the right-of-way. The wreck blocked both tracks and disrupted traffic on the Pocahontas Division between Bluefield and Iaeger for much of the following day. Passenger trains were rerouted, wreck crews worked through the night, and Norfolk & Western officials came to Hemphill to supervise the recovery.
The wreck became a public spectacle. The McDowell Recorder reported that several thousand people visited the scene during the night and the following Sunday, watching crews work among twisted cars, spilled coal, locomotives, and railroad derricks. Remarkably, the accident produced no serious loss of life. The engineer escaped injury, while the fireman suffered only minor injuries after jumping from the locomotive before it overturned.
Investigators soon suspected that the derailment had not been accidental. Railroad spikes had apparently been placed on the rails. The investigation eventually centered on fourteen-year-old Harold Smith of Hemphill, who admitted his involvement. Contemporary reporting said the boy told authorities that he had placed spikes on the tracks after seeing other boys do it.
The case went before juvenile court. Teachers and local mothers appeared as character witnesses and described Smith as well behaved, but Judge G. L. Counts nevertheless sentenced him to reform school. In only a few weeks, an incident involving a child, several railroad spikes, and a passing freight train had produced one of the most costly and disruptive railroad accidents Hemphill had witnessed.
The story also illustrates how closely the railroad and community existed beside one another. Children grew up within steps of tracks carrying enormous quantities of coal. The railroad was workplace, transportation artery, industrial boundary, and an everyday presence running directly through the place they called home.
Russell Lee Comes to Hemphill
Ten years after the wreck, Hemphill received one of the most valuable historical records ever created for a McDowell County coal community.
In 1946, photographer Russell Lee traveled through American coalfields as part of a federal effort documenting miners and their families. The survey followed a major national coal dispute and eventually produced thousands of photographs from mining communities in thirteen states. Lee reached McDowell County that summer and photographed extensively around the Kingston-Pocahontas operations at Exeter and Warwick.
His photographs transform Hemphill from names in mine reports into a visible community.
One photograph shows members of the Exeter-Warwick mining camp baseball team gathered beside a bus. Painted prominently on the vehicle is the name “HEMPHILL, W. VA.” The image includes Black miners and preserves a moment of recreation and companionship far removed from the underground workings where most official industrial records placed them.
Another photograph taken at Exeter shows a row of company houses lining an unpaved road. Small porches face the street. Utility lines run overhead. Chickens wander through the foreground while wooded mountains rise immediately behind the settlement. The image captures the geographical compression of a McDowell County coal camp, where homes were placed wherever the narrow valley provided enough room to build.
Other Lee photographs show the company store, coal cars, tipple structures, Sunday school, miners’ homes, families, and people carrying groceries. One federal caption was unusually direct in its description of Warwick: “All streets are unpaved, no sidewalks, no camp maintenance.”
Lee even photographed a half-month pay slip from the Exeter operation. Such an image may seem ordinary beside a towering tipple or a line of coal cars, but it reaches directly into the household economy. Pay determined rent, groceries, clothing, savings, and whether a family could withstand an illness or interruption in work. A single pay document could shape everything that happened between one payday and the next.
Churches, Children, and Life Beyond the Mine
Coal companies built Hemphill around production, but the people who lived there created something larger than an industrial site.
The 1946 photographic record includes Sunday school and religious life at Warwick. Children appear not as statistics in census tables but as residents moving through a community of houses, churches, stores, roads, and railroad tracks. The larger federal photographic series also documents church services and company-supported religious facilities associated with the Kingston-Pocahontas camps.
Baseball offered another form of community identity. Coalfield teams allowed miners to compete under the names of their camps and companies, creating rivalries that could matter intensely in places where work already connected almost every household. The Hemphill name painted on the Exeter-Warwick team bus shows that the community possessed an identity larger than any single mine opening.
Families likewise made company houses into homes. Laundry appeared on porches. Chickens moved through yards. Children played close to railroad tracks and industrial structures. People carried groceries along dirt streets. Churches filled on Sundays. Those details matter because they show the limits of describing Hemphill simply as a coal camp.
The mines explain why Hemphill expanded, but they do not completely explain the community that developed around them.
The End of the Exeter Mines
The photographs of 1946 captured Hemphill near the end of an era.
Mechanization, changing mining economics, consolidation, and the exhaustion or increasing expense of older workings transformed the southern West Virginia coalfields after World War II. Operations that had once required large workforces could produce coal with fewer miners, while some older mines became uneconomical altogether.
For Exeter, the end can be dated firmly. A later U.S. Geological Survey investigation states that the Exeter Mines, which worked the Pocahontas No. 3 and No. 4 seams, were abandoned in 1949.
That date gives Lee’s photographs added importance. Only three years before abandonment, he had photographed the houses, miners, stores, roads, recreational life, and industrial structures attached to the operation. His camera preserved a functioning coal community shortly before the economic foundation beneath it changed permanently.
Local histories remember the wider Hemphill mining system declining through the following years, with the traditional camp economy disappearing as the mines shut down and company-owned houses passed into private hands. The companies that had once maintained houses and controlled large portions of the community gradually withdrew. Residents who remained inherited a landscape built for an industry that no longer employed people on the same scale.
When the Coal Mines Became a Reservoir
The Exeter Mines did not become useless after the last coal was removed.
Underground workings below drainage level gradually filled with water. What had been an industrial space became an enormous underground reservoir beneath the same mountains where generations of miners had worked.
In 1992, U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Gloria M. Ferrell published a detailed study of the abandoned Exeter Mines. The report found that the flooded workings in the Pocahontas No. 3 and No. 4 seams had become the principal source of public water for Welch and the communities of Hemphill and Capels. During the study period, water was being withdrawn at approximately 1.6 to 1.8 million gallons per day.
Ferrell estimated that the void space created by mining could contain roughly 3.1 billion gallons of water. The exact hydrology was complicated because abandoned mines, fractures, surface water, neighboring workings, and the Tug Fork could interact underground, but the larger transformation was striking. A mine built to remove coal from beneath Hemphill had become part of the infrastructure supplying water to the surrounding communities.
Few details better illustrate the long afterlife of the coal industry in Appalachia. Mining altered the mountain permanently. Even after production stopped, the underground spaces created by miners continued influencing the lives of people above them.
What Remains of Hemphill
Modern Hemphill is far quieter than the community Russell Lee encountered in 1946, but its landscape still carries evidence of the world built around coal.
The Norfolk & Western route survives as part of the modern railroad system. The Hemphill tunnels remain physical reminders of the massive engineering required to force a mainline railroad through the Tug Fork country. Company residences survive in portions of the community, including brick houses specifically recognized in the National Coal Heritage survey. Beneath the surface, the flooded Exeter workings remain part of the region’s water history.
The photographs preserve what the landscape alone cannot. They show men sitting beside the Hemphill baseball bus, children attending Sunday school, families living along dirt streets, coal cars standing beneath industrial structures, and houses crowded between railroad and mountain.
Hemphill’s history is therefore not simply the story of three mines named Exeter, Warwick, and Orkney. It is the story of what happened when railroad construction, outside investment, coal seams, and Appalachian geography came together beside the Tug Fork. A community emerged because coal companies needed labor, but generations of residents gave that community an identity of its own.
The mines eventually closed. The company system weakened. Employment disappeared. Yet the tracks, tunnels, houses, photographs, and even the water beneath the ground continued carrying pieces of Hemphill’s coalfield past forward.
Sources & Further Reading
Lee, Russell. “Bringing Home Groceries. All Streets Are Unpaved, No Sidewalks, No Camp Maintenance. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Warwick Mine, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 1946. National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives Identifier 540742. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bringing_home_groceries._All_streets_are_unpaved%2C_no_sidewalks%2C_no_camp_maintenance._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal…_-_NARA_-_540742.jpg
Lee, Russell. “Home of Miner Who Lives in Company Housing Project. Note Washing Machine on Front Porch. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Exeter Mine, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 6, 1946. National Archives and Records Administration. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Home_of_miner_who_lives_in_company_housing_project._Note_washing_machine_on_front_porch._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal…_-_NARA_-_540687.jpg
Lee, Russell. “House. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Exeter Mine, Big Sandy Housing, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 13, 1946. National Archives and Records Administration. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:House._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal_Company%2C_Exeter_Mine%2C_Big_Sandy_Housing_Welch%2C_McDowell_County%2C_West_Virginia._-_NARA_-_540797.jpg
Lee, Russell. “Loading Tipple, Coal Cars and Store. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Warwick Mine, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 10, 1946. National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives Identifier 540776. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Loading_tipple%2C_coal_cars_and_store._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal_Company%2C_Warwick_Mine%2C_Welch%2C_McDowell_County%2C_West…_-_NARA_-_540776.jpg
Lee, Russell. “Part of Company Housing Project. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Exeter Mine, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 6, 1946. National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives Identifier 540686. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Part_of_company_housing_project._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal_Company%2C_Exeter_Mine%2C_Welch%2C_McDowell_County%2C_West_Virginia._-_NARA_-_540686.jpg
Lee, Russell. “Pay Slip for a Half Month Period. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Exeter Mine, Big Sandy Housing Camp, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 10, 1946. National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives Identifier 540749. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pay_slip_for_a_half_month_period._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal_Company%2C_Exeter_Mine%2C_Big_Sandy_Housing_Camp%2C_Welch…_-_NARA_-_540749.jpg
Lee, Russell. “Railroad Tracks Running Past the Houses and Company Store. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Exeter Mine, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 13, 1946. National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives Identifier 540783. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Railroad_tracks_running_past_the_houses_and_company_store._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal_Company%2C_Exeter_Mine%2C_Welch…_-_NARA_-_540783.jpg
Lee, Russell. “Sunday School. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Warwick Mine, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 10, 1946. National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives Identifier 540774. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunday_school._Kingston_Pocahontas_Coal_Company%2C_Warwick_Mine%2C_Welch%2C_McDowell_County%2C_West_Virginia._-_NARA_-_540774.jpg
National Archives and Records Administration. “Russell Lee: Coal Survey Photographs.” Solid Fuels Administration for War, 1946–1947. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://visit.archives.gov/galleries/russell-lee-community
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1923. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_%28IA_annualreportofde41west%29.pdf
West Virginia Department of Mines. “Coal Mine Fire and Disaster Reports.” West Virginia State Archives, including Kingston-Pocahontas Coal Company, Exeter Mine No. 4, September 9, 1937, and Kingston-Pocahontas investigation of complaint, Hemphill, February 20, 1948. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar1519-1536.html
West Virginia Geological Survey. List of Coal Mines in West Virginia, July 1, 1921. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1921. West Virginia University Libraries. https://pec.lib.wvu.edu/catalog/55%2Ffa%2Ff1%2F57%2F55faf157-447a-4e63-9689-dc061ec945da
“Spikes Placed on Rail May Have Caused Wreck.” McDowell Recorder, September 30, 1936. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/crime/hemphill01.html
“Boy Admits Costly ‘Thrill’ Wrecking of N. & W. Freight.” McDowell Recorder, October 7, 1936. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/crime/hemphill01.html
“Lad Sentenced to Reform School for Wrecking of Train.” McDowell Recorder, October 14, 1936. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/crime/hemphill01.html
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 69th Cong., 1st sess., December 1925–January 1926. Postmaster nomination of Rufus B. Scott of Hemphill, West Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1926-pt1-v67/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1926-pt1-v67-21-1.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia: Municipal Charters. Charleston, WV, 1929. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/acts/Acts_1929_MunicipalCharters.pdf
United States Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population Schedules, Browns Creek District, McDowell County, West Virginia. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1920. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Browns Creek District, McDowell County, West Virginia, Enumeration District 24-39. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1940. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
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United States Geological Survey. Welch Quadrangle, West Virginia-Virginia. Topographic map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1926. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
National Archives and Records Administration. “Railroad Valuation Maps: Norfolk and Western Railway.” Record Group 134, Records of the Interstate Commerce Commission. https://www.archives.gov/research/cartographic/railroad-list
The McDowell Times. Keystone, WV, 1904–1941. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/
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National Coal Heritage Area. Coal Heritage Survey Update: Final Report, McDowell County, West Virginia. National Coal Heritage Area, 2010. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Gray, Trula Vandell, with John Vandell. A Coal Camp Chronicle: Rememberin’ My Raisin’. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 2011. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%22A+Coal+Camp+Chronicle%22
Solins, Mrs. Samuel, and Mrs. Paul Jones. McDowell County History: A Pictorial History of McDowell County, West Virginia. Fort Worth, TX: University Supply and Equipment Company, 1959. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
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Friedl, Joseph. A History of Education in McDowell County, West Virginia, 1858–1976. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1975. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
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West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia: Brown’s Creek District, McDowell County.” Accessed September 13, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/communities/districtplacenames.html
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West Virginia and Regional History Center. “McDowell County Histories, A&M 3244.” West Virginia University Libraries. Accessed September 13, 2026. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1543
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United States Geological Survey. Engineering Geology Investigation in the Welch Area, McDowell County, West Virginia. Open-File Report 50-36. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1950. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1950/0036/report.pdf
Author Note: As someone from the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky, I find communities like Hemphill familiar even when their individual histories are distinctly West Virginian. Preserving the stories of Exeter, Warwick, Orkney, and the families who lived among them helps preserve the larger history of the Appalachian coalfields.