Appalachian Community Histories – Kirk, Mingo County: The Norfolk & Western, Kirkland Coal, and a Mountain Community
Kirk is the kind of Appalachian community whose history can be easy to overlook because no single courthouse file or published town history tells its story from beginning to end. It was never a large incorporated town, and much of what once made the place recognizable has disappeared or changed. Yet Kirk left an unusually rich trail through railroad surveys, coal reports, photographs, postal records, bridges, family histories, schools, stores, churches, and even field recordings of traditional mountain songs.
Along the West Fork of Twelvepole Creek in Mingo County, the community became closely tied to the Norfolk & Western Railway and the small coal operations that appeared beside it. By the early twentieth century Kirk had a railroad station. By the 1920s the Kirkland Coal Company was shipping coal from a mine bearing the community’s name. A photograph taken in 1932 shows an abandoned coal operation beside Kirk’s highway and railroad, while records from the following decade preserve something far more personal: the voice of a local woman singing old ballads into a recording machine brought into the mountains by a West Virginia University professor.
Kirk’s history is therefore not simply another story of coal. It is also a story about the roads and railroads that determined where communities formed, the confusing ways Appalachian place names changed, and the families who continued calling a place home after the mine, station, and post office had disappeared.
Before Mingo County
Kirk lies in Mingo County today, but researchers looking for its nineteenth-century history have to begin somewhere else.
Mingo County did not exist until January 30, 1895, when the West Virginia legislature created it from the southern portion of Logan County. It became the youngest county in West Virginia. The creation of the county came during a period of enormous change in the southern coalfields as the Norfolk & Western Railway pushed into the region and opened new possibilities for commercial coal and timber development.
Anything concerning the future Kirk area before 1895 may therefore appear in Logan County deeds, tax books, court records, marriage records, land surveys, or other documents. Earlier descriptions may not use the name Kirk at all. Mountain land was commonly identified through creeks, branches, ridges, neighboring families, and property lines rather than by a formally recognized community name.
There is evidence, however, that the Kirk name had connections to the area before Mingo County was created. A delayed West Virginia birth record identifies Russell Bailey as having been born at Kirk on March 23, 1888, to John Bailey and Rebecca Lackey. Because this was a delayed certificate rather than a record necessarily created at the time of birth, it should not be treated as absolute proof that officials were using Kirk as a formal place name in 1888. It does show that the family later identified the place of birth as Kirk and suggests that the community’s identity reached deeper into the nineteenth century than its better documented railroad period.
The Railroad Put Kirk on the Map
The clearest early picture of Kirk comes from the railroad.
In 1911 the United States Geological Survey published its Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1909 and 1910. The federal surveyors followed railroads across the state while establishing elevations and permanent benchmarks. Their notes provide an accidental directory of stations, bridges, settlements, and industrial places that existed at the time.
Kirk appears plainly in those records.
The survey lists “Kirk, in front of station; top of rail” at an elevation of approximately 873 feet. Other entries were measured from Kirk, including benchmarks 1.4, 2.4, and 3.4 miles away and an aluminum benchmark installed at railroad bridge 948 only two tenths of a mile east of the community. These were not later recollections. They were measurements made by federal survey crews working along the railroad when Kirk was an active station.
This distinction matters. Kirk was not simply a name later attached to a cluster of houses along a road. By 1909 or 1910 it was sufficiently established for federal surveyors to identify a railroad station by that name and to use Kirk as a reference point for other locations.
The railroad itself shaped the geography of the community. Historic documentation prepared for the Twelvepole Creek line explains that the route was constructed to reach coal and timber lands along the West Fork of Twelvepole Creek. Heavier coal traffic eventually required improvements to the line and its bridges. One surviving structure documented near Kirk, known as the Kirk Thru Truss, was built for the Norfolk & Western Railway in 1911.
The railroad provided more than transportation. It created a dependable corridor through the narrow valley. Mines could ship coal, merchants could receive goods, residents could travel, mail could move, and communities such as Kirk could become recognizable stations in a network extending toward larger towns and industrial centers.
Kirk and Buttercup
One of the most interesting problems in Kirk’s history is the name Buttercup.
Modern references frequently describe Buttercup as an earlier name for Kirk. West Virginia University’s Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields also describes Kirk as formerly Buttercup and associates the older name with a 1911 map. That would seem to make the matter straightforward.
The primary evidence complicates the story.
The same 1911 United States Geological Survey bulletin that records Kirk station also records “Buttercup, in front of station; top of rail” immediately after it. Kirk was measured at about 873 feet and Buttercup at about 867 feet. Federal surveyors were therefore treating Kirk and Buttercup as separate railroad locations during the same period rather than simply recording one as the old name of the other.
West Virginia Archives material creates the same problem. Its list of communities in Harvey District includes both Buttercup and Kirk, alongside places such as Breeden, Dingess, Lowney, McCloud, Parsley, and Trace.
This does not necessarily mean the tradition connecting Kirk and Buttercup is wrong. Appalachian place names often overlap. A railroad station, post office, mining settlement, creek neighborhood, and cluster of houses might carry different names even when local residents considered them parts of the same general community. Names could also move as post offices or stations were relocated.
What the evidence does mean is that it would be premature to say simply that Buttercup was renamed Kirk. For at least part of the early twentieth century, official records recognized both names.
The federal Post Office Department’s site-location reports and postmaster appointment registers may ultimately provide the clearest answer. Until those are compared with early railroad maps and deeds, Kirk and Buttercup should be treated as closely connected but historically complicated places.
The Kirkland Coal Company
Coal soon became another defining part of Kirk’s documentary record.
An official West Virginia Department of Mines report from the early 1920s identifies the Kirkland Coal Company and its Kirkland mine, giving Kirk as the company’s post-office address. The state production figures credit the Kirkland Coal Company with 12,065 tons of coal during the reporting period.
Compared with the enormous companies operating elsewhere in the southern West Virginia coalfields, Kirkland was a modest operation. Some Mingo County companies produced hundreds of thousands of tons during the same era. Kirkland’s smaller output is useful precisely because it reminds us that the coalfields were not composed only of famous company towns and massive corporate mines.
Smaller mines existed beside the better-known operations. They employed local miners, used railroad sidings and bridges, purchased supplies, shaped nearby settlements, and sometimes disappeared after only a relatively brief productive period.
For Kirk, the mine connected the community’s name directly with the coal industry. The railroad had made commercial extraction possible, while the mine gave at least some residents another reason to settle near the tracks and West Fork Twelvepole Creek.
The early 1920s were also a turbulent period throughout Mingo County. Mine workers, coal companies, union organizers, private guards, law officers, and state authorities had recently been drawn into the confrontations now remembered as the West Virginia Mine Wars. Kirk does not appear to have occupied the central role played by Matewan or other major conflict sites, but its miners lived within the same regional coal economy.
An Abandoned Mine in 1932
One of the most remarkable surviving records of Kirk was created on August 26, 1932.
A photographer documented an abandoned coal operation there. West Virginia University’s History OnView collection describes the scene as an abandoned coal operation on the west side of the highway and railroad at Kirk, looking west. The photograph still survives.
It is an unusually important image because it fixes Kirk’s industrial landscape at a precise moment.
The railroad and highway appear together as reference points, while the old mine site already belonged to the community’s past. Only about a decade separated the Kirkland Coal Company’s appearance in state mining records from this photograph of an abandoned operation at Kirk.
The catalog does not identify the abandoned site specifically as the Kirkland mine, so the two should not automatically be treated as the same operation without additional mine maps or property records. What the photograph does prove is that commercial mining had already left abandoned workings in Kirk by 1932.
That was not unusual in the coalfields. Mines opened when coal seams, capital, transportation, labor, and market conditions made them profitable. They could close just as quickly when production costs increased, seams proved disappointing, companies failed, or coal prices fell.
At Kirk, the abandoned operation became part of a landscape that was itself about to change.
When the Railroad Became the Road
The railroad that had helped establish Kirk eventually surrendered part of its path to automobiles.
Historic documentation of the Twelvepole line reports that the railroad proved unprofitable and that the tracks were removed in 1933. The former railroad corridor was transferred to the State Road Commission and converted for highway use. Portions of the old alignment became county roads through Mingo County and adjoining Wayne County.
The timing is striking.
In August 1932, a photographer stood at Kirk and described an abandoned coal operation in relation to both the highway and the railroad. Within roughly a year, according to the historic transportation study, the railway itself was being removed from that corridor.
The change did not erase the route. Instead, the transportation system was repurposed.
Automobiles and trucks followed a path shaped by railroad engineers. Bridges constructed for trains became part of the road landscape. The narrow corridor beside West Fork Twelvepole Creek continued carrying people through Kirk even after locomotives no longer defined everyday movement through the valley.
This is one reason old Appalachian roads sometimes seem to fit the landscape differently from ordinary highways. Some were not originally designed for automobiles at all. They inherited the grades, curves, cuts, bridges, and river crossings of earlier railroads.
At Kirk, the road itself became an artifact of the community’s railroad age.
Rhoda Nelson and the Songs of Kirk
Coal reports and railroad surveys tell us where Kirk stood and what industries operated there. Rhoda Browning Nelson helps us hear what life there sounded like.
On August 28, 1940, West Virginia University English professor Louis Watson Chappell traveled to Kirk carrying aluminum-disc recording equipment. He was collecting traditional music from the southern West Virginia coalfields, preserving songs that had often survived through families rather than through printed books or commercial recordings.
At Kirk he recorded Rhoda Nelson.
Nelson sang twenty-seven songs for Chappell, including old English and Scottish ballads whose histories reached back centuries. Her repertoire included versions of “Matty Groves,” “Barbara Allen,” “The House Carpenter,” “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” “The Cherry Tree Carol,” and other traditional songs that had crossed the Atlantic and become part of Appalachian musical culture.
The importance of those recordings reaches far beyond Kirk. They preserve evidence of how old ballads continued living within twentieth-century Appalachian communities shaped by railroads, mines, wage labor, stores, and government work programs.
Rhoda herself represented that changing world.
She had been born at Harts Creek in Lincoln County in 1885. By 1900 her family was living in Mingo County, where her father worked as a freight hand in Harvey District. Her husband, George Nelson, worked as a railroad laborer by 1910, as a coal loader by 1920, and later on a truck farm. In 1940, when Chappell recorded Rhoda, George was working for the Works Progress Administration.
One family had therefore participated in several phases of the region’s economic history: railroad work, coal mining, farming, and New Deal employment.
Yet inside their home and community survived songs far older than the industries surrounding them.
Bailey School, Stores, and Community Life
The Nelson material also opens a window into parts of Kirk that government reports barely mention.
Family information gathered by the WVU folk-music project records that Rhoda took singing lessons from traveling preacher Wallace Meade at Bailey School in Kirk. The small school was associated with Tilda Meade, and the story suggests that music education, religion, and community gatherings overlapped in ways familiar throughout rural Appalachia.
Rhoda and George Nelson also operated a small store in Kirk.
That detail may seem minor beside railroad construction and coal production, but stores were among the most important institutions in unincorporated mountain communities. They were places where residents purchased groceries, heard news, exchanged information, waited for deliveries, and encountered neighbors who might otherwise live miles apart along creeks and branches.
Kirk also had Bailey Baptist Church. Later West Virginia legislative records identify Thomas D. Beckett Sr. as a deacon there, confirming that organized church life remained part of the community during the middle twentieth century.
These fragments help rebuild a more complete Kirk.
There was a station and a mine, but there were also children going to school, families attending church, customers entering small stores, people singing traditional songs, miners returning home from work, and households scattered along the branches feeding into West Fork Twelvepole Creek.
Thomas Beckett and the Kirk Post Office
One of the best documented residents of later Kirk was Thomas D. Beckett Sr.
According to records preserved by the West Virginia Legislature, Beckett was born at Kirk on October 14, 1909, to John J. Beckett and Polly Bailey. He entered coal mining while still young and later married Brookie Dillon. Around 1939 the family returned to Kirk and lived at Mudlick Branch.
Beckett served in the United States Army during World War II before returning to the community.
On May 15, 1946, he was appointed postmaster at Kirk. He also operated Beckett Grocery. The business reportedly began on the front porch of his home, and a small building was eventually constructed in front of the house to contain both the grocery and post office.
That arrangement placed two of the community’s most important functions under one roof.
Residents could collect mail, purchase food, exchange local news, and maintain their connection with the wider world through a small store at Mudlick Branch.
Beckett was Kirk’s final postmaster.
The Kirk Post Office was formally discontinued on January 27, 1956, with the closure taking effect on February 24. The legislative record preserves those unusually precise dates and provides one of the clearest markers for the end of Kirk’s postal era.
The closure did not mean that Kirk ceased to exist. It meant that another institution that had once given the community official recognition was gone.
Kirk After the Coal Mine and Post Office
By the middle of the twentieth century, Kirk had already experienced several transitions.
The railroad station that placed it on federal survey maps belonged to an earlier transportation system. The old railroad corridor had become a road. Coal workings had opened and closed. The post office finally disappeared in 1956.
Yet Kirk remained.
The name survived in local directions, family histories, bridges, cemeteries, churches, government records, and maps. Modern geographic records continue to identify Kirk as an unincorporated community in Mingo County along the Upper West Fork Twelvepole Creek watershed.
More importantly, people continued to remember the places that made up Kirk internally. Mudlick Branch, Bailey School, Bailey Baptist Church, the Nelson store, Beckett Grocery, the old railroad corridor, and the surviving bridges preserve smaller geographies within the larger community.
WVU researchers visiting the area decades after Chappell’s 1940 recording session were still able to speak with residents and descendants who knew where Rhoda Nelson had lived. Her grandson Frank Nelson remained in Kirk, and local residents could point toward the places associated with the people Chappell had recorded generations before.
That continuity matters because Appalachian communities do not always disappear when their official institutions close.
Sometimes they become quieter.
What Kirk’s History Preserves
Kirk never became one of the famous towns of the West Virginia coalfields. It did not grow into Williamson, become the scene of a nationally remembered confrontation like Matewan, or develop into one of the enormous company towns associated with the state’s largest coal corporations.
Its importance is different.
Kirk preserves the history of the smaller Appalachian community, the kind of place that existed between the larger towns and industrial centers and whose residents nevertheless participated in nearly every major transformation of the region.
The railroad arrived and created a station. Coal companies opened mines. Bridges crossed West Fork Twelvepole Creek. The railroad vanished and its path became a road. Small stores served families scattered through the hollows. A school provided a place where a traveling preacher could teach singing. A Baptist church gathered neighbors. A grocery became a post office. Eventually the post office closed too.
And in August 1940, while much of that transformation was still unfolding, Louis Chappell carried his recording equipment into Kirk and asked Rhoda Nelson to sing.
She answered with songs that were already centuries old.
Those recordings may be Kirk’s most unexpected historical legacy. Coal production can be counted in tons and railroad locations measured in feet, but communities were made from more than industry. They were made from the people who lived between the tracks and mountains, remembered old songs, taught children, worshiped, kept stores, carried mail, worked underground, and continued calling the valley home.
That is the history Kirk left behind.
Sources & Further Reading
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1909 and 1910. Bulletin 477. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911. U.S. Geological Survey. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0477/report.pdf
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1915, Inclusive. Bulletin 632. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. U.S. Geological Survey. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b632
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Microfilm Publication M841. Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “The Twelvepole Line Today.” The Arrow 1, no. 6 (November–December 1985). https://www.nwhs.org/arrowdb/issueList.php?issue_id=78
The Mingo Republican. Williamson, WV, 1904–1951. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092084/
U.S. Geological Survey. Trace, West Virginia. 7.5-Minute Series Topographic Map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1963. https://store.usgs.gov/product/925430
Van Meter, Linda. “Mingo County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Last modified April 23, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1772
West Virginia Archives and History. “Department of Mines: Fatal Accident Reports, Non-Fatal Accident Reports, and Inspection Reports.” West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/wvsaarch.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Compiled by Kim Johnson from The New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia. Charleston: West Virginia Archives and History, 2004. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Birth Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_bcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Death Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_dcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Marriage Records.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1923. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_(IA_annualreportofde41west).pdf
West Virginia Division of Highways. State Level Historic Documentation: Twelvepole Line. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Highways. https://www.highwaysthroughhistory.com/Content/roads/TwelvepoleLine/docs/State_Level_Historic_Documentation.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. Journal of the House of Delegates of the State of West Virginia. March 5, 2022. Charleston: West Virginia Legislature, 2022. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bulletin_Board/2022/RS/h_journal/hdj2022-03-05-53.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. “Senate Concurrent Resolution 19.” 85th Legislature, Regular Session, 2022. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=SCR19+INTR.htm&billtype=CR&houseorig=S&i=19&sesstype=RS&yr=2022
West Virginia Legislature. “Senate Concurrent Resolution 28.” 85th Legislature, Regular Session, 2021. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/bill_status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=SCR28+INTR.htm&billtype=cr&houseorig=s&i=28&sesstype=RS&yr=2021
West Virginia Legislature. Senate Journal. February 21, 2019. Charleston: West Virginia Legislature, 2019. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/bulletin_board/2019/rs/s_journal/sdj2019-02-21-44.pdf
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Charleston: State of West Virginia. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Matewan Massacre Records, 1914–1934. A&M 2962. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1090
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Samuel Davis Stokes Papers, ca. 1915–1925. A&M 2542. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/606
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Topographic Maps of West Virginia, 1909–1924, undated. A&M 4046. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/3362
West Virginia University Libraries. “Abandoned Coal Operation, Mingo County, W. Va.” August 26, 1932. West Virginia History OnView. West Virginia and Regional History Center. https://onview.lib.wvu.edu/catalog/013316
West Virginia University Libraries. “Mrs. George (Rhoda) Nelson.” Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields. West Virginia University. https://omekas.lib.wvu.edu/home/s/folkmusic/page/mrs-george-rhoda-nelson
Author Note: As someone working to document the smaller communities of Appalachia, I find Kirk especially interesting because its history survives across railroad surveys, mine records, photographs, music, and family memory. I hope bringing those scattered records together helps preserve a Mingo County community whose story extends far beyond the coal mine that once operated there.