Appalachian Community Histories – Keystone, McDowell County: Coal, Black Political Power, Immigrant Merchants, and Cinder Bottom
Before there was a Keystone, West Virginia, there was a small settlement called Cassville tucked beside Elkhorn Creek in McDowell County. It stood in a mountain landscape that, only a few years earlier, had seemed too isolated for large-scale industrial development. That changed when the Norfolk & Western Railway pushed into the southern West Virginia coalfields.
In 1892 the railroad opened a depot at Cassville, and the Keystone Coal & Coke Company began mining nearby. Coal gave the settlement its new name, while the railroad gave it access to markets far beyond the mountains. Historian Deborah R. Weiner found that Keystone did not exist under that name in 1890, yet within eight years its population had climbed to slightly more than one thousand people.
Keystone was never simply another row of company houses surrounding a mine tipple. It developed into an independent commercial center serving miners and families scattered through the neighboring coal camps. Stores, saloons, boarding houses, professional offices, theaters, churches, banks, and wholesalers appeared along streets squeezed between the creek, railroad, and surrounding slopes.
The resulting town became one of the most complicated communities in the Appalachian coalfields.
Coal brought miners from Virginia, Kentucky, and other parts of Appalachia. Recruitment brought Black workers from the South. Immigration brought people from eastern and southern Europe and the Middle East. Jewish merchants established businesses almost as soon as trains began carrying coal out of the valley.
By the early twentieth century, Keystone had become a place where coal, race, immigration, politics, commerce, organized labor, religion, and vice existed within only a few blocks of one another.
Coal Beneath the Mountains
The Keystone Coal & Coke Company supplied the industrial foundation upon which the town grew. Mine openings, railroad sidings, coke operations, company housing, and related businesses transformed the narrow valley.
A 1911 bird’s-eye view by T. M. Fowler shows just how thoroughly industry had reshaped the landscape. Railroad tracks curved through the valley beside Elkhorn Creek while mine structures, houses, commercial buildings, and roads filled nearly every usable section of bottomland. The surrounding mountains rose abruptly behind them. It was a town physically shaped by coal.
Coal employment was dangerous from the beginning. One particularly revealing record reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia in 1916. Swope v. Keystone Coal & Coke Company concerned an eleven-and-a-half-year-old boy who had been employed underground as a trapper despite a state law prohibiting mine employment for boys under fourteen. He was killed in 1913 when falling slate struck him after a mine prop was knocked down. The complicated wrongful death case that followed became part of West Virginia legal history, but beneath the legal argument was a stark fact about coalfield life: a child had been working underground.
Keystone’s mines continued operating for generations. According to the Library of Congress record accompanying Carol M. Highsmith’s photographs of the town, Keystone No. 1 produced coal for ninety-four years before exhaustion in 1986.
By then, however, the world that had built Keystone was already disappearing.
Fifteen Thousand Miners Gather at Keystone
Keystone became important to labor history almost immediately.
On May 1, 1895, only three years after mining operations began, a massive gathering of striking miners assembled there. A contemporary report in The Engineering and Mining Journal stated that 15,000 miners met at Keystone while a strike shut down West Virginia operations along the Norfolk & Western. The miners were attempting to bring workers across the Virginia line into the movement as well.
The episode demonstrated how quickly Keystone had become more than a company settlement. It was already a gathering place where workers from the wider Pocahontas coalfield could organize.
Seven years later, Keystone again appeared near the center of a major labor confrontation.
During the 1902 strike in the Norfolk & Western fields, contemporary newspapers reported disturbances, threatened evictions from company housing, replacement labor, and fears that violence might follow. A June 8 dispatch from Keystone reported that operators planned to bring Hungarian miners into the field while striking miners declared that they would resist orders forcing them from company houses.
Mother Jones also traveled through the region during the strike campaign, addressing miners around Keystone as organizers attempted to shut down coal production.
These episodes complicate any attempt to remember Keystone solely through Cinder Bottom or its nightlife. Long before the town became famous for vice, it had become a meeting ground for some of the most important struggles surrounding labor, wages, housing, and industrial power in the southern West Virginia coalfields.
A Black Community in the Free State of McDowell
One of Keystone’s most significant characteristics was the size and influence of its African American population.
Black workers came into McDowell County during the great expansion of coal mining in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mining companies needed far more labor than the sparsely populated mountains could supply, and thousands of people followed recruiters, relatives, and railroad lines into the coalfields.
Keystone became one of the most important destinations.
According to Weiner’s study of census records, approximately 40 percent of Keystone’s population was Black by 1900. By 1910, Black residents formed slightly more than half of the population.
Those numbers mattered politically.
Keystone stood less than twenty miles from Jim Crow Virginia, and segregation certainly existed within the community. Housing, churches, social organizations, and much of public life remained divided by race. Yet Keystone also developed a substantial Black professional and business class, including attorneys, physicians, merchants, newspaper publishers, ministers, educators, and political leaders.
Historian Larry Scott Deaner’s study of Keystone describes the town as the capital of what became known as the “Free State of McDowell,” a phrase associated especially with Black political strength in the county.
M. T. Whittico helped popularize that expression. It represented a county where African Americans, though still facing discrimination, obtained political influence and professional opportunities that were unusual in much of the surrounding region. Whittico himself became a Republican Party leader and member of Keystone’s city council.
Keystone even became known for electing West Virginia’s first Black mayor, another indication of the extraordinary political environment that developed in the Elkhorn Valley.
The McDowell Times
If one institution captured Black Keystone in print, it was the McDowell Times.
Matthew Thomas Whittico came to Keystone around the beginning of the twentieth century after attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and teaching in Virginia. In 1904 he purchased an existing newspaper and transformed it into the McDowell Times.
Its purpose was explicit.
The newspaper described itself as being published in the interest of the Black population and its civil and political rights. It covered ordinary community life alongside politics, labor, churches, fraternal organizations, schools, deaths, advertisements, national events, and racial discrimination.
The Library of Congress describes the paper as a leading African American newspaper in West Virginia and preserves hundreds of digitized issues from its 1904 to 1941 run.
Reading the surviving pages reveals a Keystone that is difficult to reconstruct from later summaries alone.
There were political campaigns, church meetings, new businesses, visiting speakers, weddings, funerals, school activities, property sales, railway workers, mine developments, and advertisements directed toward Black customers. The newspaper also placed Keystone inside a larger Black America by covering national politics, civil rights issues, organizations such as the NAACP, and events far beyond McDowell County.
Whittico understood that political power depended partly upon controlling the way a community described itself.
The McDowell Times gave Black residents of the coalfields a newspaper that did not treat them merely as miners or statistics. They appeared as citizens, voters, professionals, business owners, ministers, teachers, parents, and organizers.
Jewish Merchants in the Coalfields
Keystone’s diversity extended well beyond its Black and white Appalachian populations.
Jewish immigrants began arriving almost as soon as the town developed. Weiner found that some of the earliest came in 1892 as peddlers connected with Baltimore wholesalers. They traveled into a newly industrializing region where miners with regular wages created enormous demand for clothing, household goods, food, entertainment, and services.
Their presence quickly became substantial.
By 1900, roughly one in ten Keystone residents was Jewish. At first, many merchants entered the saloon and clothing trades. An 1898 business directory showed Jewish ownership of five of Keystone’s seventeen saloons and all three clothing establishments. By 1904 Jewish merchants operated all eight clothing businesses listed in town.
These were not people merely passing through.
Jewish families established homes, raised children, participated in civic affairs, invested in real estate, and created religious institutions. During the 1890s they rented space for High Holiday services. In 1904 the community built a synagogue and became large enough to employ a full-time rabbi.
B’nai Israel remained Orthodox even as Jewish communities elsewhere in the region moved toward Reform Judaism. Families in neighboring Northfork also participated, with some residents remembered as walking along the railroad toward Keystone for religious services rather than riding on holy days.
The synagogue survived until the middle of the twentieth century. By 1952, with only two Jewish families remaining in Keystone, the building was sold to a church.
That arc from immigrant arrival to established congregation and eventual departure closely paralleled Keystone’s larger boom and decline.
Commerce Across Racial Lines
The relationships among Keystone’s Black, Jewish, immigrant, and white Appalachian residents were complicated.
The community was not free of segregation or prejudice. Social organizations were often divided along racial lines, and the broader legal and cultural environment remained deeply unequal.
Yet Keystone’s commercial life produced interactions uncommon in many contemporary Southern communities.
Weiner found evidence that Jewish merchants used Black attorneys, sometimes received treatment from Black physicians, and conducted real estate transactions with Black businesspeople. Advertisements in the McDowell Times reveal Jewish-owned businesses directly courting African American customers.
One theater advertisement emphasized fair treatment regardless of race or poverty. Another theater was praised in the newspaper for programming that did not encourage racial hatred during an era when The Birth of a Nation was spreading racist imagery across American theaters.
None of this made Keystone an integrated utopia. Residential patterns and social organizations remained divided.
What it did make Keystone was unusual.
The combination of a large Black population, immigrant merchants, industrial employment, independent commerce, Republican political organization, and relatively fluid economic relationships created a community that did not fit neatly into the racial patterns usually associated with the early twentieth-century South.
Cinder Bottom
No history of Keystone can avoid Cinder Bottom.
For decades, the district became almost synonymous with the town itself.
Cinder Bottom occupied a small portion of Keystone but developed a reputation for saloons, gambling, prostitution, violence, and nightlife that traveled far beyond McDowell County. Coal miners with money in their pockets came into town from nearby camps, and businesses emerged to separate them from that money.
In 1912 an anonymous writer using the name “Virginia Lad” published Sodom and Gomorrah of Today; or, The History of Keystone, West Virginia. The pamphlet presented Keystone as a place of extraordinary wickedness and treated Cinder Bottom as evidence of moral collapse. A surviving copy is preserved by West Virginia archival institutions.
It is an important primary source, but it must be used carefully.
The work is sensational, moralistic, and designed to shock readers. Its stories about prostitution, drinking, crime, corruption, and racial mixing reveal as much about the anxieties of its author as they do about everyday life in Keystone.
Later scholarship has confirmed that Cinder Bottom was a substantial red-light district. Gambling, liquor, prostitution, and violence formed real parts of the local economy. Historian Katherine R. Spindler notes that the district became famous well beyond West Virginia.
Yet focusing only on Cinder Bottom creates a distorted Keystone.
The same town contained churches, schools, a synagogue, newspapers, doctors, attorneys, miners, railroad workers, merchants, families, and political organizations. The coalfield’s most notorious entertainment district existed beside one of its most important centers of Black civic power.
That contradiction is precisely what makes Keystone historically interesting.
Politics and Minnie Buckingham Harper
Keystone’s political importance reached beyond McDowell County.
Among its residents was Minnie Buckingham Harper.
Born in Putnam County in 1886, Harper later moved into the McDowell coalfields and married E. Howard Harper, a Republican politician and member of the West Virginia House of Delegates.
When her husband died while holding office, the McDowell County Republican Executive Committee unanimously recommended Minnie to complete his term. Governor Howard Gore appointed her on January 10, 1928.
The appointment made Minnie Buckingham Harper the first Black woman known to serve in a state legislative body in the United States.
She did not seek election to a full term, but the significance of the appointment extends far beyond its length.
A Black woman from Keystone entered a state legislature at a time when American women had possessed the constitutional right to vote nationally for less than a decade and when African Americans across much of the South faced systematic exclusion from political power.
Her appointment was possible partly because Black voters and politicians in McDowell County had spent decades building influence.
Keystone helped create the political environment in which such an appointment could occur.
When Keystone Was Full
Historical maps and photographs make the scale of the boom difficult to ignore.
Sanborn fire insurance maps from the early twentieth century record stores, hotels, residences, theaters, industrial structures, and other buildings packed into the valley. The 1911 Fowler map presents a community sprawling along both sides of the railroad and Elkhorn Creek.
The West Virginia University historic buildings survey completed in 1987 and 1988 later documented the physical remains of that town through building inventories, street maps, photographs, interviews, and historical reports. The collection describes Keystone as a southern coal town containing neighborhoods associated with Black residents, immigrants, wealthy residents, and Cinder Bottom.
Keystone was incorporated as a city in 1909 according to the West Virginia Encyclopedia and other institutional histories. Some historical summaries refer to an earlier 1896 incorporation as a town, so the distinction should be treated cautiously until the original McDowell County municipal records settle the question completely.
Whatever municipal date is used, the larger story is clear.
Keystone had become a regional center rather than merely a mining camp.
By 1950 it contained approximately 2,500 residents. People living in surrounding camps came there to shop, conduct business, seek entertainment, attend religious services, meet political leaders, or catch trains.
The crowds that once filled its streets were products of an economy employing thousands of people underground.
When that employment disappeared, the crowds disappeared with it.
Mechanization and the Long Decline
The decline did not happen in a single year.
Some mines exhausted their coal. Others mechanized.
Machines could produce enormous amounts of coal with far fewer workers than the hand-loading era required. For communities such as Keystone, that difference was devastating.
Coal towns depended not merely upon coal production but upon coal employment. A machine could keep production high while eliminating the wages that supported houses, stores, restaurants, schools, churches, theaters, and professional offices.
As mining jobs disappeared, families left.
The businesses followed them.
By the second half of the twentieth century, saloons and entertainment establishments were closing alongside respectable merchants. Buildings deteriorated or disappeared through fire, flooding, demolition, and abandonment. The Jewish population had largely departed decades earlier. The McDowell Times had ceased publication in 1941.
Keystone No. 1 finally exhausted its coal in 1986, nearly a century after the operation that gave the town its name had begun.
The town that remained was carrying the physical infrastructure of a community built for thousands while supporting only a fraction of that number.
The First National Bank of Keystone
Then Keystone unexpectedly returned to national headlines.
On September 1, 1999, federal regulators closed the First National Bank of Keystone.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reported evidence of apparent fraud that had depleted the institution’s capital. Regulators found approximately $515 million in loans on the bank’s books that should have been removed after the loans had been securitized and sold. The bank reported roughly $1.1 billion in assets and $880.9 million in deposits shortly before its closure.
The FDIC became receiver.
For a small Appalachian community already associated with dramatic industrial decline, the collapse brought a different kind of attention. Congressional investigations, criminal cases, regulatory records, and years of reporting followed.
The episode became one of the strangest final chapters in Keystone’s twentieth-century history.
A town created by nineteenth-century coal capital had entered the twenty-first century through the collapse of a billion-dollar financial institution.
Keystone After Coal
The scale of Keystone’s demographic collapse can be measured plainly.
The community that contained approximately 2,500 people in 1950 had only 176 residents recorded by the 2020 census.
Numbers alone, however, cannot measure what disappeared.
They cannot show Saturday streets filled with miners coming in from surrounding camps. They cannot reproduce the sound of newspapers rolling from Whittico’s press, Jewish families walking toward synagogue, politicians arguing over Republican primaries, miners gathering for strikes, trains passing beside Elkhorn Creek, or music drifting from Cinder Bottom after dark.
Nor does decline erase the people who remained.
Keystone still occupies the narrow valley where Cassville once stood. Railroad tracks continue through the community. Brick buildings, houses, churches, streets, and fragments of the industrial landscape survive as evidence of a much larger past.
The archival record survives as well.
Few coal towns of similar size left behind such a remarkable combination of newspapers, maps, government records, court cases, census schedules, photographs, oral histories, architectural surveys, business directories, and scholarship.
That record makes it possible to reconstruct Keystone not as a stereotype but as a community.
Why Keystone Matters
Keystone deserves to be remembered for more than coal, and certainly for more than Cinder Bottom.
Its history contains nearly every major force that transformed industrial Appalachia.
There was the railroad that opened the mountains to outside capital. There were coal companies that created jobs while exposing miners to extraordinary dangers. There were labor struggles in which thousands of workers challenged operators over wages, housing, and union organization.
There was migration.
Black families from the South came searching for industrial wages and built political power in a place that became one of the most important African American communities in West Virginia. Jewish immigrants arrived with the railroad and created businesses and religious institutions in an Appalachian valley thousands of miles from the European communities many of their families had left behind.
There was vice, violence, exploitation, and corruption.
There were also newspapers, congregations, physicians, attorneys, merchants, educators, and elected officials.
From Keystone came the McDowell Times, one of the strongest surviving documentary windows into Black coalfield life. From Keystone came the political environment that placed Minnie Buckingham Harper in the West Virginia legislature. From Keystone came labor gatherings large enough to alarm officials across a state line.
Even Cinder Bottom tells a larger story when placed in context. Its fame reflected the enormous amounts of money and human movement generated by coal. Thousands of young workers entered the mountains, received wages from one industrial system, and spent those wages in another economy that developed around them.
Keystone was a boomtown in the fullest meaning of the word.
It grew rapidly because coal demanded people. It became diverse because the mines demanded more workers than the mountains could supply. It became commercially powerful because surrounding company towns created thousands of customers. It became politically unusual because migration changed the balance of power. Then, when the mines required fewer workers, the same forces that had created Keystone began pulling it apart.
Today the quiet streets can make the old Keystone difficult to imagine.
The records tell another story.
For generations, this narrow place beside Elkhorn Creek was one of the busiest, most diverse, most politically unusual, and most complicated coal towns in Appalachia. Its history belongs not only to McDowell County or West Virginia, but to the broader story of how industrialization transformed the Appalachian Mountains and the people who came there looking for work, opportunity, community, and a place to call home.
Sources & Further Reading
The McDowell Times. Keystone, WV, 1904–1941. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.
Fowler, T. M. Aero View of Keystone, West Virginia. 1911. Map. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Keystone, McDowell County, West Virginia. 1910. Map. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps Collection. Library of Congress Sanborn Maps Collection
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Keystone, McDowell County, West Virginia. 1918. Map. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps Collection. Library of Congress Sanborn Maps Collection
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Keystone, McDowell County, West Virginia. 1923. Map. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps Collection. Library of Congress Sanborn Maps Collection
Virginia Lad [pseud.]. Sodom and Gomorrah of Today; or, The History of Keystone, West Virginia. 1912. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. WVU archival copy
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. Keystone, Historic Buildings Survey, Records, 1987–1988. A&M 1151. Morgantown, WV. WVU finding aid
Deaner, Larry Scott. “Home in the McDowell County Coalfields: The African-American Population of Keystone, West Virginia.” Master’s thesis, Ohio University, 2004. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. OhioLINK thesis record
Weiner, Deborah R. “The Jews of Keystone: Life in a Multicultural Boomtown.” Southern Jewish History 2 (1999): 1–23. Southern Jewish Historical Society PDF
Weiner, Deborah R. Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. University of Illinois Press
Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Catalog record
Spindler, Katherine R. “From the Bottom Up: Cinder Bottom’s Red-Light District.” Goldenseal 43, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 56–61. West Virginia Archives and History
Battlo, Jean. “Cinder Bottom: A Coalfields Red-Light District.” Goldenseal 20, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 60–64. West Virginia Archives and History. Goldenseal subject index
McGehee, C. Stuart. “Keystone.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised April 11, 2024. e-WV Keystone
Myers, Mark S. “McDowell County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised April 23, 2026. e-WV McDowell County
Talbott, I. D. “Duke,” and Charles M. Murphy. “Minnie Buckingham Harper.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised February 8, 2024. e-WV Minnie Buckingham Harper
Library of Congress. “The McDowell Times (Keystone, W. Va.) 1904–1941.” Chronicling America. Accessed September 12, 2026. Library of Congress newspaper history
Highsmith, Carol M. “Buildings along the Railroad Line through the Distressed Appalachian Mountains Town of Keystone in Southern West Virginia.” Photograph, October 24, 2015. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress. Library of Congress photograph
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Court Records.” County Court Records Microfilm Holdings. West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. West Virginia State Archives county records
The Engineering and Mining Journal. Vol. 59, no. 18, May 4, 1895. Contemporary coverage of the miners’ gathering and strike at Keystone. Digitized issue
San Antonio Daily Express. “Situation at Keystone and in the Norfolk & Western Coal Fields.” June 9, 1902. Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries. Digitized newspaper issue
Swope v. Keystone Coal & Coke Co., 78 W. Va. 517, 89 S.E. 284 (1916). Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. Case record
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “FDIC Announces Receivership of First National Bank of Keystone, Keystone, West Virginia.” September 1, 1999. OCC release
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “FDIC Announces Receivership of First National Bank of Keystone, Keystone, West Virginia.” Press Release PR-49-99, September 1, 1999. FDIC archive
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “FDIC Approves Assumption of Insured Local Deposits of First National Bank of Keystone, Keystone, West Virginia.” Press Release PR-52-99, September 3, 1999. FDIC archive
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “OCC Enters into Agreements with Law Firm and Attorney That Represented First National Bank of Keystone.” May 23, 2003. OCC release
Author Note: Growing up in Harlan County, I have always been interested in how coal towns could become worlds of their own, shaped by people arriving from remarkably different backgrounds. Keystone is one of the clearest examples of that story, where coal, Black political power, immigration, labor, commerce, and community all met in one narrow Appalachian valley.