Appalachian Community Histories – Hull, McDowell County: A Norfolk and Western Station in the Tug Fork Coalfields
Hull is one of those McDowell County communities whose history survives less through a town charter or a single famous event than through scattered records left behind by railroads, federal surveyors, mapmakers, and census takers. Today it remains an unincorporated community, still recognized among the communities of McDowell County, but the surviving documentary trail reaches back into the opening years of the twentieth century.
For years, a West Virginia place-name index seemed to suggest that Hull entered the historical record around 1911. Earlier evidence tells a different story. A West Virginia business directory published in 1904-05 already identified Hull plainly as a station on the Norfolk and Western Railway, placing it twenty-two miles west of Welch. Only a few years later, the railroad itself used Hull as the starting point for a major double-tracking project, while United States Geological Survey crews measured the elevation directly in front of the station. Together, those records reveal a small community that occupied an identifiable place within one of the most important railroad and coal corridors in Appalachia.
Before Hull Appeared in the Records
To understand why Hull appeared where it did, it is necessary to understand what was happening across McDowell County during the generation before the community entered the written record.
McDowell County had been created in 1858 from part of Tazewell County, Virginia. For much of the nineteenth century, its steep mountains and narrow valleys limited large-scale settlement and commercial development. The county had only 1,535 residents in 1860, and much of its coal remained commercially inaccessible because there was no inexpensive way to carry enormous quantities of it to distant markets.
That began changing rapidly during the final decades of the century. Investors acquired mineral lands while railroad developers pushed deeper into the Pocahontas coalfield. By 1892 the Norfolk and Western Railway had crossed McDowell County, and branches soon reached many of the mining districts that opened during the industrial boom. Coal that had once been trapped beneath remote mountains could now move toward steel mills, factories, ports, and cities hundreds of miles away.
The results were dramatic. McDowell County’s population rose from 18,747 in 1900 to 47,856 by 1910. Communities formed beside mines, railroad sidings, stations, creek mouths, and narrow patches of usable land squeezed between the tracks and mountains. Some became large company towns. Others remained much smaller places whose names were nevertheless familiar to railroad crews and the people living along the line. Hull belonged to this transformed landscape.
Hull Was a Railroad Station by 1904
The strongest early documentary evidence for Hull comes from R. L. Polk & Company’s West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1904-05.
The entry is remarkably brief, but that brevity tells us something about the nature of the place. The directory described Hull simply as a station on the Norfolk and Western Railway in McDowell County, twenty-two miles west of Welch. It did not provide a population, list merchants, identify churches, or describe municipal government. Hull’s defining characteristic in this earliest direct source was the railroad.
That places Hull firmly in existence several years before 1911, the year associated with Hull in the West Virginia State Archives place-name index. The archival date is therefore useful as evidence that the name was officially recognized, but it should not be treated as the community’s founding date. Hull was already established well enough to appear in a statewide commercial directory by 1904-05.
Exactly when the station received the name Hull, and why that name was chosen, remains less certain. Earlier McDowell County deeds, land surveys, railroad engineering records, and Norfolk and Western correspondence may eventually provide an answer. What can be established from the surviving published record is that Hull was part of the railroad geography of western McDowell County by the opening years of the twentieth century.
The Norfolk and Western Expands at Hull
Five years after the Polk directory, Hull appeared in one of the most important primary sources for understanding its railroad history.
The Norfolk and Western Railway Company’s 1909 annual report described improvements then under construction across its system. Among them was seven miles of double track running from Hull, West Virginia, to Wyoming, West Virginia. The railroad reported that the roadbed was approaching completion and expected the new section to enter operation during the fall of 1909.
That small entry is significant.
Railroad companies normally described construction according to recognized operating points, stations, junctions, or other established locations along their systems. By using Hull as the endpoint of a seven-mile double-tracking project, the Norfolk and Western demonstrated that Hull had become more than a name known only to nearby residents. It was an identifiable point within the railroad’s operating geography.
Double tracking also speaks to the growing demands placed upon the line. Southern West Virginia’s coal industry was expanding rapidly, and the Norfolk and Western had built much of its regional business around moving Pocahontas coal toward national markets. Additional track allowed trains moving in opposite directions to pass more efficiently and increased the amount of traffic that a railroad corridor could handle.
The 1909 report does not prove that Hull itself contained a large coal operation, and it would be misleading to portray the community as another Gary or Keystone without additional evidence. What it does establish is that Hull sat directly along infrastructure being improved during the height of McDowell County’s industrial expansion.
Federal Surveyors Stop at Hull
At almost the same time that Norfolk and Western crews were improving the track, federal surveyors passed through the community and left one of the most precise descriptions of early Hull.
The United States Geological Survey conducted spirit leveling across West Virginia in 1909 and 1910. These surveys established reliable elevations that engineers, railroad companies, government agencies, and mapmakers could use. Results were published in 1911 in USGS Bulletin 477 and later incorporated into a larger federal compilation.
When the survey crew reached Hull, it recorded the elevation directly in front of the station. The top of the rail stood at approximately 961 feet above sea level. About 350 feet east of the station and fifty feet north of the railroad, surveyors placed an aluminum benchmark in the west end of a sandstone culvert. Its measured elevation was 959.414 feet. Another surveyed point stood 1.7 miles east of Hull near railroad milepost 424.
These measurements provide more than elevations. They give us a fragmentary picture of the community’s physical landscape.
Hull had a station, a railroad corridor, numbered mileposts, a substantial sandstone culvert, and other pieces of permanent railroad infrastructure. The survey continued toward Iaeger, where the main line met the Norfolk and Western’s Dry Fork branch. Hull therefore occupied a position along a connected industrial transportation network rather than at the end of an isolated mountain road.
More than a century later, those dry federal measurements offer some of the clearest evidence of what a traveler would have encountered at Hull in the early twentieth century.
Between Panther and Iaeger
Hull developed in a part of McDowell County where geography controlled nearly everything.
The mountains leave comparatively little level ground, forcing roads, homes, railroads, and communities into narrow valleys shaped by the Tug Fork and its tributaries. The early Iaeger topographic maps show the Norfolk and Western following the river corridor through this rugged country, connecting settlements such as Panther and Iaeger while branches and roads disappeared into surrounding hollows.
Hull stood within that transportation landscape.
The 1911 Rand McNally map of McDowell County specifically included Hull among the communities along with Iaeger, Panther, Bradshaw, Welch, Gary, Keystone, and dozens of other settlements created or enlarged during the coalfield boom. The map provides independent confirmation that Hull was an established place name only a few years after the railroad directory and federal survey records.
Its location helps explain why the railroad dominates the earliest sources. In many Appalachian communities, the post office, church, store, or courthouse provided the central point around which a settlement was described. At Hull, the records that survive most clearly point toward the station.
A railroad station could connect a small mountain community to places far beyond McDowell County. Residents could travel to larger commercial centers, mail and freight could arrive by rail, workers could move between communities, and the surrounding coal economy depended upon trains for nearly every connection to outside markets.
Hull in the Coalfield Era
Hull’s history cannot be separated from the astonishing growth taking place around it.
The Pocahontas coalfield contained some of the most commercially valuable coal in the country. Mining expanded rapidly once the Norfolk and Western provided access to distant markets, and McDowell County became home to a complicated mixture of native-born Appalachian families, Black migrants from the South, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe recruited to work in the mines.
By the middle of the twentieth century, McDowell County had become the nation’s leading coal-producing county before neighboring Logan County surpassed it in 1955. The county population reached 98,887 in 1950. Towns, camps, stations, schools, churches, stores, and small settlements filled valleys that had contained comparatively few residents only two generations earlier.
Hull existed within that world, but the documentary record available online does not support describing it as a major company town controlled by a single operator. That distinction matters. McDowell County contained everything from enormous corporate developments such as Gary to much smaller railroad locations and scattered communities.
Hull appears to have belonged to the latter category. Its historical importance came partly from being one of the many small places that collectively formed the human and transportation geography of the coalfield.
The 1940 Census Finds Hull
By 1940, federal census records provide evidence that Hull was more than a railroad name.
The Census Bureau divided McDowell County into enumeration districts, each describing exactly which territory census takers were expected to cover. Hull appeared in two of them.
Enumeration District 24-57 covered the Sandy River Magisterial District outside Iaeger, east and north of Tug Fork, and specifically included part of Hull. Enumeration District 24-59 also included part of Hull within territory south of Tug Fork and bounded by Dry Fork, Route 83, Panther Creek, and Hurricane Branch.
The repeated phrase “Hull (Part)” is revealing.
Rather than sitting neatly inside the boundaries of an incorporated town, Hull extended across the lines census officials used to divide the countryside. It was a community understood locally and recognized by federal enumerators even though its boundaries were not those of a municipality.
The original census population schedules offer an even deeper path into Hull’s history. They can identify individual households, occupations, ages, education, places of birth, home ownership or rent, and where residents had lived in 1935. For a community that left relatively few published histories of its own, those household-by-household records may ultimately provide one of the best ways to reconstruct everyday life.
A Community Built Around Movement
Hull’s surviving records repeatedly return to movement.
The first known description calls it a railroad station. The Norfolk and Western’s annual report uses it as the starting point of a major track improvement. Federal surveyors record the rails, culvert, station, and mileposts. Maps place Hull among other railroad communities. Census records later show a settlement that spread beyond a single compact municipal boundary.
That pattern is representative of a particular kind of Appalachian community.
Not every place in the coalfields developed a downtown, a bank, a city hall, and blocks of businesses. Some existed because a station, siding, creek mouth, mine opening, school, or handful of families gave a section of valley a recognizable identity.
For generations, people did not need incorporation papers to know when they had reached Hull.
What Happened After the Boom
The larger forces that reshaped McDowell County after the middle of the twentieth century also changed the landscape around Hull.
Mechanization reduced the number of miners needed underground. Coal employment fell, families left for industrial cities and other regions, businesses closed, schools consolidated, and many once-crowded coalfield communities became shadows of their former size. McDowell County’s population, which had peaked at nearly 99,000 in 1950, fell to 19,111 by the 2020 census.
Railroad operations changed as well. Passenger service that had once made small stations important disappeared, while coal transportation increasingly required fewer local facilities and workers. A community whose earliest historical identity had been tied closely to a station therefore experienced not only the decline of coal employment but a transformation in the meaning of the railroad itself.
Hull nevertheless remained a recognized place. The State of West Virginia still includes Hull among the communities of McDowell County. The name that appeared beside the Norfolk and Western more than a century ago has survived even as much of the industrial world that created early twentieth-century McDowell County has vanished.
What We Still Do Not Know About Hull
The historical record surrounding Hull also contains important unanswered questions.
The origin of the name remains uncertain. The exact date the Norfolk and Western established the station deserves further investigation. Early landownership around the site has not yet been completely reconstructed, and the surviving easily accessible records do not identify a single coal company responsible for creating Hull in the manner seen in better documented company towns.
Those questions may be answerable.
McDowell County deed indexes extend back into the nineteenth century. State archival collections contain land surveys, court records, naturalization files, county records, and material associated with the Virginia Pocahontas Land Company. Virginia Tech preserves extensive Norfolk and Western collections containing maps, engineering plans, correspondence, legal documents, train orders, financial records, and other material dating across the period when Hull first appeared.
Local newspapers may provide another layer. The McDowell Recorder, McDowell Times, Industrial News, McDowell Republican, and later Welch Daily News covered the county during different parts of Hull’s history. Weddings, deaths, railroad accidents, school events, flooding, mining news, property sales, and community gatherings may survive in their pages even when Hull never received a formal published history of its own.
Why Hull Matters
Hull illustrates why the history of Appalachia cannot be written only through its largest towns, famous mines, and celebrated events.
The community enters the documentary record quietly. There is no grand founding account. Instead there is a railroad directory calling Hull a station, an annual report announcing seven miles of new double track, a federal surveyor measuring the rail in front of the depot, a mapmaker printing the name, and a census taker being instructed to count families living in “Hull (Part).”
Taken separately, those records can seem insignificant. Put together, they recover the outline of a community.
Hull belonged to the transportation system that helped turn McDowell County into one of America’s great industrial coal regions. Trains passed through its valley while coalfield populations multiplied, mines opened throughout the surrounding mountains, and families built lives in settlements crowded between river, track, road, and hillside.
The station may no longer carry the importance it possessed when federal surveyors stood beside the rails in 1909, but the name survives.
So does the history.
Sources & Further Reading
R. L. Polk & Co. West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1904–1905. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., 1904. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/127444
Norfolk & Western Railway Company. “Thirteenth Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1909.” Commercial and Financial Chronicle, September 4, 1909. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/cfc/cfc_19090904.pdf
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1909 and 1910. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 477. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0477/report.pdf
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1909 and 1910. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 477. U.S. Geological Survey Publications Warehouse. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/results-spirit-leveling-west-virginia-1909-and-1910
United States Geological Survey. Iaeger Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1910. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
United States Geological Survey. Iaeger Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1912. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview
United States Geological Survey. Iaeger Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1914. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview
United States Geological Survey. Iaeger Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1916. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview
United States Geological Survey. Iaeger Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1927. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview
United States Geological Survey. Iaeger, West Virginia, 7.5-Minute Quadrangle. Surveyed 1964, printed 1965. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. https://store.usgs.gov/product/925123
Rand McNally & Co. Map of West Virginia. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1911. McDowell County section.
United States Bureau of the Census. “1940 Census Enumeration District 24-57, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 1940. National Archives and Records Administration, Identifier 5888424.
United States Bureau of the Census. “1940 Census Enumeration District 24-59, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 1940. National Archives and Records Administration, Identifier 5888425.
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1910. Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1910. https://books.google.com/books/about/Annual_Report_of_the_Department_of_Mines.html?id=dkBOAAAAYAAJ
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Department of Mines, various years. The surviving series is particularly valuable for McDowell County mine operators, production, employment, inspections, and accidents. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=annrepdepminwv
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. County Geologic Report 30. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://books.google.com/books/about/Wyoming_and_McDowell_Counties.html?id=MsgbAAAAMAAJ
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Publications, Maps, & Data Catalog. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Includes Hennen and Gawthrop’s 783-page Wyoming and McDowell Counties and its accompanying topographic and economic geology maps. https://downloads.wvgs.wvnet.edu/pubcat/docs/WVGES_Publication_Catalog.pdf
Sowers, Auburn Daniel. Facts About McDowell County, West Virginia. 1912. West Virginia State Archives and History Library. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
McDowell County, West Virginia, The Nation’s Coal Bin. N.p., n.d. West Virginia State Archives and History Library. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
Welch West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia. N.p., n.d. West Virginia State Archives and History Library. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
McDowell County Centennial, 1858–1958. N.p., 1958. West Virginia State Archives and History Library. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
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
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
Evans, Norma Pontiff. First Families of McDowell County, West Virginia. N.p.: Author, 1981. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Norfolk & Western Railway and Associated Companies Collection, 1851–1978. Ms2009-037. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/2456
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Norfolk & Western Railroad and Railway Company Records, 1876–1935. Ms2017-015. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3193
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Norfolk & Western Financial Documents, 1882–1954. Ms2003-004. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/digital_objects/157
The McDowell Times. Keystone, WV, 1904–1941. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092050/
West Virginia State Archives and History. “McDowell County History Sources.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
West Virginia State Archives and History. Place Names in West Virginia. Entry for Hull, McDowell County. The archival index gives 1911, although the 1904–05 Polk directory establishes that Hull was already recognized as an N&W station several years earlier.
West Virginia, State of. “McDowell.” The state’s current community list includes Hull among McDowell County’s recognized places. https://www.wv.gov/local-government/mcdowell
Author Note: Hull is one of the small coalfield communities whose history can easily disappear between the stories of McDowell County’s larger towns. By following railroad reports, maps, federal surveys, and census records, I hope this article helps preserve the story of a place that mattered to the people who called it home.