Appalachian Community Histories – Jolo, McDowell County: Coal, the Flood of 1977, and the Church of the Lord Jesus
Jolo is the kind of Appalachian place that can be easy to miss on a map and difficult to understand from a distance. Tucked into the mountains of McDowell County, West Virginia, it never became a large incorporated coal town like some of its neighbors. It did not grow around a courthouse or develop the commercial blocks that defined places such as Welch. Instead, Jolo took shape along the roads, creeks, hollows, homes, mines, churches, and family networks of the Sandy River country.
West Virginia Archives and History places Jolo in McDowell County’s historic Sandy River District alongside communities such as Bradshaw, Garland, Hull, Iaeger, Panther, Paynesville, and Litwar. The state’s historical place-name index records Jolo by 1933, although that entry should not be mistaken automatically for a founding date. Postal-history data places a Jolo post office in operation by 1930, suggesting that the community name had become formally established at least several years earlier.
That timing matters. Jolo entered the documentary record during the decades when McDowell County had been transformed by industrial coal mining. The mountains surrounding the community had been inhabited long before the twentieth century, but the arrival of commercial mining and the transportation systems that served it changed the scale and rhythm of life throughout the county.
Before Jolo Appeared on the Map
To understand Jolo, it helps to begin before the name itself regularly appeared in government records.
In 1915, geologist Ray V. Hennen and his colleagues published the massive West Virginia Geological Survey volume Wyoming and McDowell Counties. At 783 pages, the report documented the geology, topography, transportation routes, timberlands, settlements, and enormous coal resources of the two counties. Jolo had not yet emerged as one of the report’s prominent place-names, but the landscape that would produce the community was already being measured, mapped, and evaluated for its mineral wealth.
The wider transformation of McDowell County had begun decades earlier. Investors purchased coal lands in anticipation of railroad development, and by 1892 the Norfolk & Western Railway had crossed the county. Spurs soon pushed into additional mining districts. Mines opened, company communities expanded, and workers arrived from other parts of Appalachia, the American South, and Europe. McDowell became one of the great coal-producing counties in the United States.
Jolo developed within that world, but it was never simply a company town built around one enormous operation. Its surviving records instead reveal a community connected to smaller mines, nearby shipping points, local stores, a post office, schools, churches, and families whose lives were tied to the larger coal economy of southern McDowell County.
The Jolo Post Office and a Name That Lasted
One of the clearest signs that Jolo had become a recognized community came with the establishment of its post office.
Historical postal databases place the Jolo office’s beginning in 1930. The National Archives preserves the federal records that can take the story further. Its Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971 identifies postmasters by state, county, and office, while the Post Office Department’s reports of site locations can contain descriptions of roads, streams, neighboring offices, transportation routes, and occasionally hand-drawn maps. Those records provide a firmer foundation for Jolo’s early history than the naming stories repeated across modern websites.
A local tradition attributes the unusual name to the Lowe family. According to an account attributed to a descendant, Crockett Lowe operated a postal station associated with Bradshaw, and the name “Jolo” was formed around the name of his son Joe Lowe. That story has circulated widely, but the surviving federal appointment and site-location records should be treated as the final authority before every detail of the tradition is accepted as fact.
What can be stated more securely is that Jolo had become an established postal identity by the early 1930s. West Virginia’s place-name records list it in 1933, and postal records preserve a continuing Jolo office thereafter. Decades later, in 1954, a newspaper carried a small story about a man arranging to have Christmas cards mailed from Jolo by Postmaster Frank Lowe. It was a lighthearted item, but it provides another glimpse of how a small post office helped give an unincorporated mountain community an identity far beyond its boundaries.
Coal Beneath the Jolo Hills
Coal remained one of the strongest forces shaping life around Jolo.
A particularly valuable primary source appears in the Federal Register of April 16, 1942. In a wartime Bituminous Coal Division order, the federal government listed G. B. Hopkins as the operator associated with the Jolo Coal Company in McDowell County. The mine worked the Bradshaw seam and used Garland, West Virginia, as its shipping point on the Norfolk & Western Railway. The record even preserved federal price classifications for coal produced there.
It is an unusually precise documentary snapshot. In the spring of 1942, while the United States mobilized for World War II, coal taken from the hills around Jolo entered a regulated national fuel economy. The coal beneath McDowell County heated homes, moved trains, fueled industry, and supported wartime production far beyond West Virginia.
The county around Jolo reached the height of that industrial age at mid-century. The 1950 United States Census counted 98,887 people in McDowell County, its historical population peak. By then McDowell had become the nation’s leading coal-producing county, a position it held until neighboring Logan County surpassed it in 1955.
For Jolo, the coal economy was visible not only underground but in everyday life. Miners traveled to workings throughout the district. Trucks carried coal over mountain roads. Families depended directly or indirectly on mining wages. Company and independent operations came and went, yet the industry continued to leave its mark in mine maps, abandoned workings, roads, houses, and family histories.
Later mining records show that the name Jolo remained associated with coal long after the mid-century boom. State mine directories continued to identify operations and companies using Jolo names or addresses, evidence that mining persisted even as the number of workers needed to produce coal declined sharply.
Jolo from the Air in 1953
One of the most remarkable records of the community survives at West Virginia University.
The West Virginia and Regional History Center preserves the records of the McDowell County Evaluation Project, a countywide effort that produced working papers, maps, field surveys, school information, and aerial photography. Among the communities specifically identified in the collection is Jolo, which was photographed from the air in 1953.
That photograph is significant because 1953 places Jolo almost exactly at the crest of McDowell County’s coal-era population. From above, the photograph potentially preserves a landscape that written records describe only indirectly: houses pressed into narrow valleys, roads following the contours of the mountains, churches and community buildings occupying limited level ground, and a landscape altered by decades of timber cutting and mining.
For historians of small Appalachian communities, records like this can be as important as photographs of famous downtowns or major industrial plants. Jolo was never defined by monumental architecture. Its history was written across houses, hillsides, roads, mine openings, family cemeteries, schools, stores, and churches.
The Flood of 1977
In April 1977, Jolo became the location of one of the most extraordinary rainfall measurements ever recorded during a disastrous Appalachian flood.
From April 2 through April 5, torrential rain struck portions of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. According to the United States Geological Survey, rainfall totals across the affected region ranged from four inches to 15.5 inches. The maximum measurement came at Jolo, where 15.5 inches fell in approximately thirty hours. The USGS calculated that the amount was more than twice what would have been expected in a storm with a 100-year recurrence interval.
Water poured from steep hollows into creeks and rivers already hemmed in by mountains. Across the four-state region, twenty-two people died and property losses exceeded $400 million. Along the Tug Fork, communities from Welch toward the Kentucky border experienced devastating flooding.
Jolo’s place in the disaster was therefore more than incidental. It became the point where federal scientists recorded the storm’s greatest rainfall total. The measurement remains part of the official history of the 1977 Appalachian flood and demonstrates the vulnerability of communities built in the narrow watersheds of the coalfields.
For the people living there, however, rainfall figures could only describe part of the experience. Fifteen and a half inches of rain meant water roaring down mountainsides, roads disappearing beneath muddy runoff, bridges and culverts overwhelmed, homes threatened, and families waiting to see what would remain when the creeks finally fell.
The Church That Brought Outsiders to Jolo
Long after the coalfields began losing population, Jolo became known nationally for another reason.
The Church of the Lord Jesus developed into one of West Virginia’s best-known serpent-handling congregations. Its members belonged to a Holiness tradition that interpreted passages such as Mark 16 literally, including the reference to believers taking up serpents. Serpent handling had begun in the southern Appalachian religious world earlier in the twentieth century and spread into mining communities in Kentucky and West Virginia during the 1920s and 1930s.
The tradition never represented Appalachian religion as a whole. It was practiced by a small minority even within Pentecostal and Holiness communities. Yet in Jolo, the congregation became unusually well documented.
A 1977 color film preserved by the West Virginia and Regional History Center recorded two serpent-handling services as well as a rattlesnake hunt, the washing of snakes, an outdoor homecoming service, and an all-night prayer vigil held after a rattlesnake bite. Rather than relying on a later writer’s description, historians can see members of the congregation worshipping in their own time and place.
Only a year later, folklorist and artist Eleanor Dickinson brought her cameras to Jolo. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress preserves five separate videoreels recorded there on June 24, 1978. Her broader collection documents southern Appalachian revival traditions through film, sound recordings, interviews, photographs, and manuscripts. Jolo occupies a substantial place in that work.
These recordings turned Jolo into one of the best documented serpent-handling communities in Appalachia.
Bob Elkins, Dewey Chafin, and a Recorded Religious Community
The historical record becomes even richer during the late twentieth century.
Researchers Ralph W. Hood Jr. and W. Paul Williamson spent years studying serpent-handling congregations and preserved extensive recordings through the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Their Jolo materials document Bob and Barbara Elkins, Dewey Chafin, Lydia Hollins, and many other members not merely as subjects in a sensational story, but as people preaching, singing, praying, testifying, mourning, worshipping, and explaining their beliefs in their own words.
A surviving recording from 1989, for example, contains services led by Bob Elkins. The congregation sang, danced, testified, preached, and handled serpents. During the recording, Dewey Chafin discussed the practice and emphasized that it was not performed for entertainment.
In a September 1998 oral-history interview, Chafin identified himself as overseer of the Church of the Lord Jesus in Jolo. The recording lasts more than an hour and preserves his voice explaining his religious life and tradition directly to researchers. Another interview followed in 2004.
Recorded services from the 1990s and early 2000s preserve not only serpent handling but music, preaching, prayer, testimony, dancing, homecoming traditions, funerals, friendships, and the ordinary relationships within the congregation. A 1995 service shows men and women participating in worship while visitors from other serpent-handling churches preached. A 2001 recording captures a service in which congregants sang and prayed before serpent cages were opened and members began handling.
West Virginia University also holds the Anthony Feyer papers concerning the Jolo congregation. The collection includes slides, recordings, artwork, research material, the recording They Call Us Holy Rollers: Serpent Handling Southern Gospel from the Church of the Lord Jesus, Jolo, West Virginia, and copies of the short film Homecoming ’92.
Few small communities in the central Appalachian coalfields possess such a dense audiovisual record of one part of their religious life.
More Than the Serpents
The amount of documentation has created a problem of its own.
To outsiders, Jolo can easily become nothing more than “the snake-handling town.” Books, documentaries, journalists, photographers, researchers, and television crews have repeatedly arrived because of the Church of the Lord Jesus. Dennis Covington devoted a chapter of Salvation on Sand Mountain to Jolo, while scholars Ralph Hood and Paul Williamson later incorporated years of fieldwork into their study Them That Believe.
The church unquestionably belongs in Jolo’s history. Ignoring it would mean ignoring one of the community’s most thoroughly preserved cultural traditions. But allowing it to consume the entire story would flatten a much more complicated place.
Before cameras arrived to film worship services, people in Jolo were raising families, collecting mail, attending school, working mines, operating stores, building houses, burying relatives, driving mountain roads, and living within the larger rise and decline of industrial McDowell County. The archives themselves make that clear. The same historical record that preserves serpent handling also preserves aerial photographs, census schedules, postmasters, coal operators, mine maps, death certificates, highway maps, flood measurements, and the names of generations of residents.
Jolo was a community before it became a curiosity to outsiders.
Decline in the McDowell Coalfields
The decades after 1950 brought changes that affected nearly every community in McDowell County.
Mechanization allowed mines to produce coal with far fewer workers. Employment contracted, families left in search of work, stores closed, schools consolidated, and houses were abandoned. McDowell County fell from 98,887 residents in 1950 to fewer than 17,000 by the 2020 Census.
The decline was not the result of coal simply disappearing from the mountains. Production could continue even while employment collapsed because increasingly mechanized operations required fewer miners. The social consequences were enormous for places where generations of families had built their lives around mining wages.
Jolo endured that transition along with Bradshaw, Iaeger, Panther, Paynesville, and dozens of other communities scattered across southern McDowell County. Its population became harder to measure precisely because Jolo remained unincorporated, but the wider county statistics tell the unmistakable story of out-migration.
Still, the name survived. The post office survived. Families remained. Churches continued worshipping. Mining continued in changing forms. Jolo did not vanish simply because the industrial system that had helped shape it no longer employed people on the scale it once had.
What the Archives Preserve
For such a small place, Jolo has left an extraordinary documentary trail.
Federal postal records can trace the development of its post office. Census schedules preserve the households that made up the community. West Virginia vital records hold births, marriages, deaths, mine fatalities, occupations, and family connections. State and federal mining records document the companies operating in and around the community. Historical mine maps preserve workings hidden beneath today’s forests.
The 1953 McDowell County Evaluation Project preserves Jolo from the air. The USGS preserves its extraordinary 1977 rainfall measurement. West Virginia University preserves film of its religious community. The Library of Congress holds Eleanor Dickinson’s recordings. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga preserves decades of services and interviews.
Taken together, they offer something that many small Appalachian communities lack: the ability to reconstruct history from records created while people were actually living it.
Why Jolo Matters
Jolo’s history is not the story of a single mine, a single church, or a single disaster.
It is the story of how a small mountain community became part of one of the greatest coal-producing regions in the United States. It is the story of a post office that gave a scattered settlement a permanent name. It is the story of miners who worked beneath the surrounding ridges, families who remained through boom and decline, a catastrophic storm that placed Jolo in federal flood records, and a religious congregation whose worship attracted researchers from across the country.
The serpent handlers became the part of Jolo that outsiders photographed, filmed, and wrote about most often. The deeper historical record shows something larger.
Jolo belongs to the history of McDowell County itself, a history written in coal seams and census pages, in floodwater and mountain roads, in post offices and family names, and in churches where people understood faith in ways the outside world did not always comprehend.
A place does not have to become a city to possess a history worth remembering. Sometimes the strongest record survives in a hollow, in a government ledger, in an old aerial photograph, or on a reel of film made while a small congregation gathered in a mountain church.
Jolo left all of those behind.
Sources & Further Reading
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed September 12, 2026. Appalachian Regional Commission county list
Brown, Fred W., and Jeanne McDonald. The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 2000. Google Books record
Chafin, Dewey. Interview by W. Paul Williamson. September 5, 1998. Ralph W. Hood Jr. and W. Paul Williamson Holiness Churches of Appalachia Recordings. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Special Collections. Dewey Chafin interview
Covington, Dennis. Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. WorldCat record
Daugherty, Mary Lee. “Serpent Handling.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed September 12, 2026. e-WV entry
Dickinson, Eleanor. Eleanor Dickinson Collection. AFC 1970/001. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Library of Congress finding aid
Feyer, Anthony. Papers Regarding the Snake Handling Community in Jolo, West Virginia. A&M 4591. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. WVU collection finding aid
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. Digitized volume
Hood, Ralph W., Jr., and W. Paul Williamson. Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. University of California Press
Kerns, Andrew. “Protecting the Faithful from Their Faith.” West Virginia Law Review 116 (2013): 551–590. West Virginia Law Review article
Library of Congress. “McDowell Recorder, Welch, West Virginia.” Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries. Accessed September 12, 2026. Library of Congress record
Library of Congress. “The McDowell Times, Keystone, West Virginia, 1904–1941.” Chronicling America. Accessed September 12, 2026. Library of Congress record
McDowell County Historical Society. The Heritage of McDowell County, West Virginia, 1858–1995. War, WV: McDowell County Historical Society, 1995. WorldCat search record
McDowell County Evaluation Project. McDowell County Evaluation Project, 1953. A&M 1627. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. WVU archival finding aid
Runner, Gerald S., and Edwin H. Chin. Flood of April 1977 in the Appalachian Region of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1098. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980. U.S. Geological Survey publication
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. WorldCat record
United States Bituminous Coal Division. “Minimum Price Schedule, District No. 7.” Federal Register 7, no. 74 (April 16, 1942). Federal Register issue
United States Geological Survey. Bradshaw, West Virginia-Virginia. 7.5-Minute Series Topographic Map. 1:24,000. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1964. USGS historical topographic map
United States National Archives and Records Administration. “1940 Census Records.” Accessed September 12, 2026. National Archives 1940 Census resources
United States National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census.” Accessed September 12, 2026. National Archives 1950 Census
United States National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives postal site records
United States National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Microfilm Publication M841. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives postmaster records
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Jolo Serpent Handlers, 1977. A&M 4370, Box 1, Reel 448. West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV. WVU archival record
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Accessed September 12, 2026. West Virginia Archives and History
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: J.” Accessed September 12, 2026. West Virginia place-name index
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” Accessed September 12, 2026. West Virginia Vital Research Records
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “West Virginia Mine Information Database System.” Accessed September 12, 2026. West Virginia mine maps
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Accessed September 12, 2026. West Virginia Mine Map Archives
Author Note: As an Appalachian historian, I believe communities like Jolo deserve to be remembered for more than the unusual traditions that brought outsiders into their mountains. Its story is also one of coal, family, flooding, faith, and the generations who made a home in southern McDowell County.