Appalachian Community Histories – Irondale, Wise County: Iron Mines, Wallen Ridge, and the Community South of Big Stone Gap
Just south of Big Stone Gap, where U.S. Route 23 follows the folds of Wise County toward the Lee County line, the name Irondale still survives on maps and along local roads. It is easy to pass through the area today without realizing that the name once belonged to one of a small group of iron mining localities that federal geologists considered important enough to record alongside the better known coal operations of Southwest Virginia.
Irondale was never Big Stone Gap, Appalachia, or Norton. It did not grow into a major town, and the surviving documentary record is thinner than that of the large coal camps farther north. Yet what remains tells a remarkable story. Federal geological surveys identified an Irondale mine on Wallen Ridge, analyzed its iron ore, and later recorded underground workings hundreds of feet into the mountain. Business directories connected those workings to the Intermont Coal & Iron Company, while maps, postal records, newspapers, and government documents show that Irondale continued as a named community long after its iron mining era faded.
The history of Irondale is therefore not simply the story of a vanished mine. It is a reminder that before coal completely dominated the industrial identity of Wise County, investors and geologists were also looking toward the mountains for iron.
The Mineral Boom Around Big Stone Gap
Irondale’s emergence cannot be separated from the extraordinary wave of speculation that swept through the Big Stone Gap region during the late nineteenth century.
The mineral wealth of Southwest Virginia had attracted attention for decades. Charles Rufus Boyd described the iron, coal, zinc, copper, and lead resources of the region in his 1881 Resources of South-west Virginia. By the later 1880s, promoters were increasingly convinced that the mountains around Big Stone Gap could support a major industrial center.
That optimism reached its peak during the boom years between roughly 1888 and 1899. The National Register nomination for the Big Stone Gap Downtown Historic District describes investors arriving from Kentucky, the northern United States, and Great Britain as reports of coal and iron deposits circulated. Railroad construction reinforced the excitement. The South Atlantic & Ohio and Louisville & Nashville reached Wise County in 1891, linking previously difficult mountain country to larger markets.
Big Stone Gap became the center of this speculation, but the resources investors wanted were scattered across the surrounding ridges and valleys. Irondale developed only a few miles away, in precisely the landscape that geologists identified as containing workable Clinton iron ore.
The surviving research trail is particularly strong because several federal surveys independently identified the Irondale operation. The 1909 U.S. Geological Survey report, followed by national mineral inventories in 1914 and 1917, repeatedly listed Irondale among the recognized Wise County iron mines.
The Iron Ore of Wallen Ridge
The geology underneath Irondale explains why mining came there in the first place.
In the early twentieth century, geologists commonly referred to the iron-bearing rock of this part of Southwest Virginia as the Clinton or Rockwood formation. The iron occurred largely as hematite, including what mining reports called “fossil ore.” In this kind of deposit, iron minerals could replace or surround fragments of ancient marine organisms preserved in the sedimentary rock. Later Virginia geological work described the Clinton ores of Lee and Wise counties as particularly distinctive because they could be fossiliferous or oolitic in texture.
This was not merely a geological curiosity. The ore was mined.
A 1906 account of Virginia’s mining industry reported that two beds of Clinton red fossil ore in Lee and Wise counties were being worked and described them as roughly three feet thick and averaging around 40 percent metallic iron. The same account identified mining interests operating around Big Stone Gap and the regional furnace industry that developers hoped would transform the area into an iron-producing center.
The most important direct description of Irondale came only a few years later.
The Irondale Mine in 1909
In 1909, U.S. Geological Survey geologist E. C. Harder published “The Iron Ores of the Appalachian Region in Virginia” in Bulletin 380. His report provides some of the clearest primary evidence for Irondale’s industrial importance.
Harder wrote that the Clinton iron-bearing formation extended southwestward from Big Stone Gap for approximately twenty five miles through Wise and Lee counties. He identified two principal mining areas. The first lay on Wallen Ridge and in Powell Valley, stretching roughly three or four miles south of Big Stone Gap.
Within that relatively short corridor were four mines: Yeary, Irondale, Keystone, and Oreton.
That description places Irondale inside a concentrated iron mining district rather than treating it as an isolated prospect.
Harder’s report becomes even more valuable because it included chemical analyses of ore from the district. The sample identified as coming from the “Irondale mines,” analyzed by the Union Iron and Steel Company, contained 40.14 percent metallic iron and 27.98 percent silica, along with smaller quantities of phosphorus and calcium oxide.
Those numbers give Irondale’s history a level of detail that is often missing from small Appalachian mining communities. The federal record does not merely tell us that someone once dug for iron there. It preserves the composition of the rock miners were following into Wallen Ridge.
Irondale Among the Working Mines of Wise County
Federal officials continued to recognize Irondale after Harder’s report.
In 1914, Samuel Sanford and Ralph Walter Stone published the U.S. Geological Survey’s Useful Minerals of the United States. Under Virginia’s fossil hematite deposits, the authors noted that workable ore occurred in Alleghany, Lee, and Wise counties. For Wise County, they specifically stated that fossil ore south of Big Stone Gap, on Wallen Ridge and in Powell Valley, was being mined at Yeary, Irondale, Keystone, and Oreton.
A revised federal inventory appeared in 1917 under Frank C. Schrader, Ralph W. Stone, and Samuel Sanford. The continued appearance of Irondale in federal mineral reporting is important. It shows that the name was not simply attached to an abandoned prospect discovered during the excitement of the 1890s. Irondale had become an established mining locality within the geological vocabulary of Southwest Virginia.
The community itself was also appearing on maps.
A Rand McNally map of Wise County from 1911 labels Irondale south of Big Stone Gap alongside Oreton, Imboden, Inman, Appalachia, Stonega, Norton, and other settlements created or transformed during the county’s industrial expansion. The map is especially valuable because it records Irondale as a place, not merely as the name of a mine.
A Post Office That Barely Lasted
One of the more unusual pieces of Irondale’s history comes from postal records.
The historical U.S. Post Offices dataset assembled from the research of postal historian Richard W. Helbock lists an Irondale post office in Wise County as opening in 1899 and closing during that same year. Helbock spent decades compiling post office information largely from the Post Office Department’s records of postmaster appointments, although the modern dataset’s creators caution that establishment and discontinuance dates do not always represent the literal birth and death of a community.
In Irondale’s case, that caution is especially important.
A post office that lasted only briefly might suggest a failed settlement, but the later evidence tells a different story. Irondale appeared on the 1911 map, federal geologists continued recording its mine, and twentieth-century government maps continued using the community’s name.
The post office disappeared. Irondale did not.
The Intermont Coal & Iron Company
At some point in Irondale’s industrial development, the surviving record becomes closely associated with the Intermont Coal & Iron Company.
A 1917 Virginia business directory listed the Intermont Coal & Iron Company at Big Stone Gap under “Mines-(Coal-Iron),” placing it among a dense network of companies that included Keystone Coal & Iron, Virginia Coal & Iron, Stonega Coal & Coke, and numerous other Wise County enterprises.
An industry directory similarly listed “Intermont Coal & Iron Co., Bigstone Gap” among Wise County operators.
Regional historian Lawrence J. Fleenor, working from contemporary newspapers, chancery cases, and other records, connected Intermont directly to iron mines at Irondale and Harvey. His research also places the company within a much larger industrial system involving coal mining, coke production near Josephine, corporate offices in Big Stone Gap, and interests associated with the Big Stone Gap iron furnace.
This interconnectedness was typical of the period. Coal, coke, iron ore, railroads, land companies, and furnaces were not separate stories. Investors hoped each part would support the others, creating an industrial region capable of competing beyond the mountains.
For Irondale, however, the most striking evidence of Intermont’s presence comes not from a business directory or newspaper.
It comes from inside the mine.
Five Hundred Feet Into the Mountain
In 1937, U.S. Geological Survey chemist Roger Clark Wells published Analyses of Rocks and Minerals from the Laboratory of the United States Geological Survey, 1914-36. Buried among the hundreds of laboratory records are two samples from Irondale collected by geologist J. B. Eby.
Both were attributed directly to the Intermont Coal & Iron Company.
Sample C came from the “Old Mule drift, vein 3, 500 feet in.”
Sample D came from the “South drift, 500 feet in.”
Those few words may be the most evocative surviving description of the Irondale operation.
They reveal that miners were not simply scraping hematite from shallow surface exposures. At least some of Irondale’s ore was being reached through named underground drifts extending hundreds of feet into the workings.
The chemical differences between the samples were considerable. The Old Mule drift sample contained 60.48 percent ferric oxide and 18.54 percent silica, while the South drift sample contained 54.06 percent ferric oxide but 38.01 percent silica. Such variation mattered greatly to operators trying to decide whether a particular section of ore could be profitably mined and smelted.
More importantly for local history, the laboratory record preserves something close to the language of the miners themselves. “Old Mule drift” sounds less like the terminology of a distant geological survey and more like the vocabulary of a working mine, a named passage familiar to men who entered Wallen Ridge day after day.
The names of many of those miners have yet to be recovered. The workings they entered, however, left a documentary footprint all the way to Washington.
Irondale and the Wider Industrial Network
Intermont was not a company confined to a single mountainside.
Research into the firm’s history connects it with coal and coke operations elsewhere in Wise County, particularly around Josephine. Contemporary corporate and newspaper records indicate that company interests were woven into the shifting ownership surrounding the Big Stone Gap furnace and other mineral properties during the 1910s.
A 1911 Big Stone Gap Post report, preserved through later research, described a reorganization involving “large and valuable iron ore interests” as well as the mining and coking properties of the Intermont Coal and Iron Company.
The company’s name also survived into Virginia case law. In 1927, the Supreme Court of Virginia considered Intermont Coal & Iron Co. v. Nichols alongside another workers’ compensation case. The dispute concerned a worker injured while using blasting fuse, rather than the Irondale mine itself, but it demonstrates that Intermont remained an active employer well into the 1920s.
This broader corporate history helps explain Irondale’s place within Wise County. The mine was one piece of an industrial landscape whose corporate offices might be in Big Stone Gap, whose coke ovens might operate elsewhere, and whose mineral holdings spread across several mountain communities.
Why Irondale’s Iron Industry Faded
The dream of turning the Big Stone Gap region into a great iron center never developed on the scale its late nineteenth-century boosters imagined.
Coal would become the dominant extractive industry of Wise County, while the importance of local iron deposits declined.
The reason was not that the ore suddenly disappeared. Economics changed.
Wise County’s own comprehensive plan notes that low-grade iron ore had historically been mined from the Clinton formation on Wallens Ridge at Irondale and Oreton. It explains that local iron mining and smelting became uneconomical as the enormous deposits of the Lake Superior region were developed and major iron and steel centers expanded elsewhere in the East and Midwest.
Irondale therefore illustrates one of the central realities of Appalachian industrial history. A mineral deposit could be real, workable, and extensively explored without remaining competitive forever.
Transportation costs, ore grade, furnace technology, corporate consolidation, labor costs, and access to richer deposits elsewhere could determine the fate of a mountain mine just as decisively as the amount of ore underground.
The iron remained in Wallen Ridge. The market moved on.
Irondale After the Mines
What is especially interesting about Irondale is that the community name survived the decline of the industry that had made it visible.
Historic mapping continued to identify the place during the twentieth century. A 1935 map of the area labels Irondale among the settlements south of Big Stone Gap and shows it in relation to U.S. Highway 23, Wallen Ridge, Wildcat Creek, Powell River, Oreton, and neighboring communities. Later mapping continued to preserve the Irondale name.
By 1959, Irondale was sufficiently established as a geographic reference that it appeared in a presidential proclamation redefining boundaries of national forests. The federal description followed local roads to “the junction of Route 609 and U.S. Highway 23 at Irondale” before continuing through Wise County.
That document provides an unusually precise mid-century anchor for the community.
A few years later, geologists returned to the same landscape for an entirely different purpose.
Irondale Church and Wildcat Valley
In 1963, U.S. Geological Survey geologists measured a rock section near Irondale while studying what became known as the Wildcat Valley Sandstone.
The official USGS geological names database places the formation’s type section two miles south-southeast of Big Stone Gap, on a spur overlooking Wildcat Creek and only 0.15 mile south of Irondale Church on U.S. Highway 23.
That description is important because it shows the transition of the Irondale landscape.
Half a century earlier, federal scientists came looking for iron ore and documented active mines. By the 1960s, geologists were still coming to Irondale, but they were using its church and highway as landmarks while studying the ancient rock formations exposed around Wildcat Valley.
Historic topographic mapping also preserves an Irondale Church cemetery, another reminder that communities such as Irondale were never simply industrial installations. People worshipped there, buried family there, traveled its roads, and continued calling the place home after mining companies disappeared.
A Small Place in a Much Larger Story
Irondale never became the industrial city that late nineteenth-century promoters imagined for the Big Stone Gap region. There were no endless rows of furnaces or a sprawling steel metropolis beneath Wallen Ridge.
Instead, Irondale followed a more familiar Appalachian pattern.
A valuable resource drew attention to a mountain landscape. Companies acquired mineral interests. Miners followed beds of ore underground. Geologists sampled the rock. Businessmen connected the mines to furnaces, coke plants, railroads, and investment schemes. Maps gave the place a name. Then changing markets gradually made the original industry less important.
Yet the community endured beyond the economic reason outsiders first had for noticing it.
That is what makes Irondale worth remembering.
Federal records preserve the Irondale mine beside Yeary, Keystone, and Oreton. Laboratory reports take us five hundred feet into the Old Mule and South drifts. Maps carry the name through the twentieth century. A presidential proclamation fixes Irondale to the junction of mountain roads. Geological studies locate formations by measuring their distance from Irondale Church.
Taken together, those records allow a small Wise County community to emerge from the shadow of its much larger neighbors.
Big Stone Gap became famous for coal, railroads, literature, and industrial ambition. Irondale tells another part of that same story. Beneath Wallen Ridge, before coal completely defined the public image of the Virginia coalfields, men were tunneling into the mountain for iron.
Sources & Further Reading
Harder, E. C. “The Iron Ores of the Appalachian Region in Virginia.” In Contributions to Economic Geology, 1908, 215–254. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 380. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0380e/report.pdf
Wells, Roger Clark. Analyses of Rocks and Minerals from the Laboratory of the United States Geological Survey, 1914–36. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 878. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937. Particularly important for the Irondale samples from the “Old Mule drift” and “South drift.” https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b878
Sanford, Samuel, and Ralph Walter Stone. Useful Minerals of the United States. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 585. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b585
Schrader, Frank Charles, Ralph Walter Stone, and Samuel Sanford. Useful Minerals of the United States. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 624. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b624
Eckel, Edwin C. “The Oriskany and Clinton Iron Ores of Virginia.” In Contributions to Economic Geology, 1905, 183–189. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 285. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0285e/report.pdf
Campbell, Marius R. Geology of the Big Stone Gap Coal Field of Virginia and Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 111. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b111
Harder, E. C. “Iron Ores, Pig Iron, and Steel.” In Mineral Resources of the United States, Calendar Year 1908, Part I, Metallic Products, 61–134. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909.
Clarke, Frank Wigglesworth. Analyses of Rocks and Minerals from the Laboratory of the United States Geological Survey, 1880 to 1914. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 591. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b591
Miller, Ralph L., Leonard D. Harris, and John B. Roen. “The Wildcat Valley Sandstone (Devonian) of Southwest Virginia.” In Geological Survey Research 1964, B49–B52. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 501-B. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964. The type section was measured only 0.15 mile south of Irondale Church. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_27452.htm
Miller, Ralph L. Geologic Map of the Big Stone Gap Quadrangle, Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-424. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1965. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq424
U.S. Geological Survey. “Wildcat Valley Sandstone.” Geolex. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Geolex/Units/WildcatValley_4406.html
Gooch, Edwin O. Iron in Virginia. Mineral Resources Circular 1. Charlottesville: Virginia Division of Geology, 1954. https://energy.virginia.gov/commercedocs/MRC_1.pdf
Virginia Department of Energy. “Iron.” Virginia Energy. Accessed September 11, 2026. https://energy.virginia.gov/geology/Iron.shtml
Boyd, Charles Rufus. Resources of South-west Virginia: Showing the Mineral Deposits of Iron, Coal, Zinc, Copper and Lead; Also the Staples of the Various Counties, Methods of Transportation, Access, Etc. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1881. https://archive.org/details/resourcesofsouth00boydc
Boyd, Charles Rufus. “The Economic Geology of the Bristol and Big Stone Gap Section of Tennessee and Virginia, Pursuing the General Course of the South Atlantic and Ohio Railroad.” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 15 (1887): 114–121. https://onemine.org/
Wise County, Virginia. Wise County Comprehensive Plan. Wise County, VA, 2020. Particularly useful for its official discussion of historic Clinton iron-ore mining at Irondale and Oreton. https://wisecounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/166/2020-Wise-County-Comprehensive-Plan-PDF
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Big Stone Gap Downtown Historic District.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places, 2018–19. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/101-5002/
National Park Service. Big Stone Gap Downtown Historic District, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2018. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/101-5002_BigStoneGapDowntownHD_2018_NRHP_FINAL.pdf
Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Proclamation 3294: Redefining the Boundaries of the Allegheny, George Washington, and Jefferson National Forests.” May 22, 1959. The proclamation uses the Route 609 and U.S. 23 junction at Irondale as a boundary reference. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3294-redefining-the-boundaries-the-allegheny-george-washington-and-jefferson
Library of Virginia. John B. Payne Jr. v. Big Stone Gap Improvement Co. et al. Wise County Chancery Cause 1892-072, original case no. 927. Richmond: Library of Virginia. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=195-1892-072
Library of Virginia. Virginia Coal & Coke Co. v. Cranes Nest Coal & Coke Co. Wise County Chancery Cause 1904-097, original case no. 2347. Richmond: Library of Virginia. The indexed parties include the Intermont Coal & Iron Company. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=195-1904-097
Library of Virginia. “Wise County Microfilm Inventory.” County and City Records. Richmond: Library of Virginia. Particularly useful for deed books, charter books, and county records from Irondale’s formative period. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA297
Hill Directory Company. Virginia Business Directory and Gazetteer. Vol. 2. Richmond: Hill Directory Company, 1917. Wise County section. Lists the Intermont Coal & Iron Company among regional coal and iron concerns. https://ldsgenealogy.com/VA/books/Virginia-business-directory-and-gazetteer-1917-v-2-part-75.htm
Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. King v. Empire Collieries Co.; Intermont Coal & Iron Co. v. Nichols. 148 Va. 585, 139 S.E. 478. 1927. https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/supreme-court/1927/148-va-585-1.html
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical dataset. The Irondale entry records a Wise County post office in 1899. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/data-biography/
Fleenor, Lawrence J., Jr. “Corporate History of Josephine, Virginia and the Big Stone Gap Iron Furnace.” 2017. Useful principally as a research guide to Intermont Coal & Iron Company records and contemporary newspapers. https://www.bigstonegappublishing.net/Josephine%20Virginia.pdf
Author Note: Growing up in the Appalachian coalfields, I have always been interested in the smaller communities whose industrial histories are easily overshadowed by larger towns nearby. Irondale shows that Wise County’s story was shaped not only by coal, but also by the miners, companies, and iron deposits beneath Wallen Ridge.