Appalachian Community Histories – Lando Mines, Mingo County: No. 1, No. 2, and Life in a Pigeon Creek Coal Community
Lando Mines sits in the steep country of Mingo County, West Virginia, only a short distance from Delbarton, Puritan Mines, and Ragland. Today it is identified as an unincorporated community on the Delbarton quadrangle, about 833 feet above sea level. Upper Curry Branch and other narrow streams cut through the surrounding hills, creating the kind of confined terrain in which homes, roads, mine entrances, and industrial buildings had to compete for every usable strip of bottomland.
There is no clear surviving record establishing a single founding day for Lando Mines. What the evidence does show is that the community and the Lando Coal Corporation emerge together in the historical record at the beginning of the 1940s. Postal histories place the opening of the Lando Mines post office in 1941, while a federal coal pricing schedule from July of that same year already listed the Lando Coal Corporation and its Lando mine in Mingo County.
From there, a trail of federal documents, mine maps, architectural records, postal records, company scrip, and later topographic maps allows much of the community’s story to be reconstructed. The surviving evidence is particularly strong for the 1940s through the early 1960s, when Lando Coal Corporation was cutting its way through the surrounding seams and Lando Mines was becoming a recognizable place in its own right. The mine map records assembled for this research are especially important because they trace Lando workings from 1942 into the 1960s.
Lando Coal Corporation Appears in 1941
One of the earliest firm records comes from the Federal Register of July 23, 1941. The federal government was then regulating bituminous coal prices under a complicated system dividing the nation’s coalfields into districts and subdistricts. Under Sub-District No. 8, Williamson, the schedule listed Mingo County operators and mines.
Among them was “Lando Coal Corporation, c/o H. L. Thompson.” Its mine was simply identified as Lando and was assigned Mine Index No. 694.
That entry is small, but historically it is extremely valuable. By the summer of 1941, Lando was not merely a local name or a proposed operation. It was a federally recognized producing coal mine within the Williamson coal district.
The wording also associates H. L. Thompson with the company, although the document does not by itself establish that Thompson founded, owned, or managed Lando Coal Corporation. It simply lists the corporation in his care. More detailed corporate records would be required before assigning him a larger role.
The timing is significant. The United States had not yet entered World War II when the July schedule appeared, but American industry was already expanding rapidly. Within months, the attack on Pearl Harbor would transform coal into an even more important wartime commodity. Lando Mines entered the historical record at almost exactly the moment when the nation’s demand for fuel was accelerating.
Mapping Lando Beneath the Mountains
Mine maps provide a much clearer picture of how quickly the operation developed.
West Virginia’s mine map records include several Lando Coal Corporation maps dated 1942. One identifies the underground Lando mine with the Cedar Grove/Thacker designation. Others identify Lando No. 1 and No. 2 workings in the Upper Thacker seam around Pigeon Creek, Upper Curry Branch, and the surrounding drainage system.
Additional maps survive from 1944 and 1945, including records for the Lando Mine and Lando No. 2. By 1954, separate records existed for Lando No. 1 and for Lando Nos. 1 and 2 together. A 1957 map identified Mine No. 2 of the Lando Coal Corporation at Delbarton. Another map from 1962 recorded Lando Coal Company workings in the Upper Cedar Grove area near Low Gap Branch of Mate Creek.
Taken together, those maps show an operation that lasted far beyond a brief wartime boom. Lando Coal Corporation was working this part of Mingo County across at least two decades of enormous change in the American coal industry.
They also reveal how misleading a simple dot on a modern map can be. Lando Mines was not just a cluster of buildings beside a road. Beneath and around the community lay a much larger industrial landscape of entries, underground workings, haulage routes, coal seams, branches, and adjoining mining properties.
The seam terminology itself requires care. The surviving records use names including Upper Thacker, Cedar Grove/Thacker, and Upper Cedar Grove. Without a detailed geological comparison of each map, those terms should be preserved as they appear rather than treated as interchangeable names for precisely the same coal bed.
Lando Mines During World War II
The war brought another extraordinary record of Lando into the federal archives.
In 1943, amid wartime labor conflict in the nation’s coalfields, the federal government temporarily assumed control of coal mines. The Coal Mines Administration appointed operating managers to work on behalf of the United States while government possession remained in effect.
When that arrangement was being terminated later in the year, the October 29, 1943 Federal Register printed a lengthy list of operating managers and companies whose appointments were ending.
Among them was F. P. Smith of Lando Coal Corporation, Lando Mines, West Virginia.
For a community that can otherwise be difficult to locate in national records, this is a remarkable connection to wartime history. Lando’s coal operation had become part of a federal system created to keep American mines producing during one of the most consequential labor and industrial crises of the war.
It also tells us something about the importance of coal communities like Lando. Large steel mills, railroads, shipyards, electrical plants, military industries, and factories depended on the work performed in hundreds of places that rarely appeared in national headlines. Lando Mines was one of them.
Men went underground in Mingo County while the government in Washington worried about whether enough coal would reach the rest of the nation.
Lando No. 1 and Lando No. 2
The appearance of Lando No. 1 and Lando No. 2 in mine mapping is another indication that the operation had developed beyond a single small opening.
Maps from the 1940s and 1950s repeatedly identify the numbered mines. A 1945 map specifically records Lando No. 2. By 1954, the surviving map index includes both Lando No. 1 and a combined record for Lando Nos. 1 and 2. The 1957 Mine No. 2 map was drawn at a scale of one inch to one hundred feet, suggesting the detailed engineering documentation necessary for an established underground operation.
The workings followed the geography rather than any tidy town plan. Pigeon Creek, Upper Curry Branch, Rockhouse Fork, Low Gap Branch, and adjoining hollows appear repeatedly in records associated with the company.
That was typical of the southern West Virginia coalfields. Communities were shaped by the mountains first and by industry second. Houses could be strung along a creek while a portal opened into the hillside above them. Roads followed streambeds because there were few other places to put them. Mine workings underground could extend far beyond the visible settlement.
Lando was therefore both a community and an industrial system, with the two layered over one another.
Building a Company Store
By the late 1940s, Lando Coal Corporation was investing in more than underground workings.
The Harding & Cogswell Records preserved by the Indiana Historical Society contain an especially revealing entry from 1948. Job No. 1045 identifies contractor Gracie & Son and describes the project as a “Store Building for Lando Coal Corp.” at Delbarton, West Virginia. The material is preserved with the firm’s architectural and construction records.
The record is important because company stores were central institutions in many Appalachian coal communities. They supplied food, clothing, tools, household necessities, and other goods in places where larger commercial centers could be difficult to reach.
Surviving Lando Coal Corporation scrip provides another piece of that story. Numismatic records document Lando Coal Corporation trade pieces associated with Delbarton, including cataloged examples that have circulated among collectors of West Virginia coal scrip.
The combination of a documented company store project and surviving company scrip leaves physical evidence of an economic world that once surrounded the mine.
A miner’s relationship with the company did not necessarily end when his shift ended. In coal communities throughout Appalachia, the company might influence housing, shopping, transportation, and other parts of daily life. How completely that familiar company town system applied at Lando still deserves additional research through deeds, payrolls, store ledgers, and oral histories, but Lando’s surviving scrip shows that the corporation issued its own trade currency.
Those little pieces of metal are now collector’s objects. In their own time, they belonged to the everyday economy of the coalfield.
A Post Office Gives Lando Mines an Identity
The post office may be one of the clearest dividing lines between Lando as a mine and Lando Mines as a community.
Postal reference records give the Lando Mines post office a span from 1941 to 1968.
That beginning date closely matches the first federal record of the Lando mine. The coincidence strongly suggests that the settlement expanded or acquired its recognizable identity during the same period that Lando Coal Corporation was developing its operation.
The original federal postal records offer the possibility of learning much more.
National Archives Microfilm Publication M1126 contains Post Office Department reports of site locations from 1837 to 1950. These forms were prepared to help the Post Office Department map its network and can include information about roads, streams, railroads, nearby communities, and the placement of an office. Mingo County is contained on Roll 648.
Another National Archives series, M841, preserves appointments of postmasters through September 1971. Those records can provide establishment and discontinuance dates, names and appointment dates of postmasters, name changes, and sometimes changes in office location. Mingo County falls within West Virginia Roll 140.
Those records are especially promising for Lando because there is an oddity in at least one postal index. Both “Land Mines” and “Lando Mines” appear for Mingo County with the same 1941 to 1968 date range. Whether “Land Mines” represents a transcription error, a temporary postal spelling, or duplication should not be settled without examining the original Post Office Department records.
Life Between Delbarton, Puritan Mines, and Ragland
Lando did not exist in isolation.
Its location placed it within a closely packed group of coal communities around Delbarton. Modern geographic records place Puritan Mines less than a mile west of Lando Mines and Ragland roughly a mile east. Upper Curry Branch lies only a short distance away.
Coal company listings also connect Lando Coal Corporation with Delbarton, while identifying several other operators in the same district. Puritan Coal Corporation, Pearl Coal Company, Landstreet Downey Coal Company, and others formed part of a much larger industrial network around the neighboring hollows.
For families living there, the borders between one named coal community and the next were probably far less important than they appear on a modern map. Work, kinship, churches, schools, stores, roads, and transportation connected the hollows.
A man might be described in one record as living at Lando, another as working near Delbarton, and another as having ties to a neighboring mining settlement. That overlapping geography is one reason reconstructing individual coal camp histories can be difficult.
The communities were separate places, but they were part of the same coalfield world.
Lando Mines in the 1950s and Early 1960s
The documentary trail continues well after World War II.
The mine maps dated 1954 and 1957 show Lando No. 1 and No. 2 still important enough to require detailed mapping. The 1962 record for Lando Coal Company workings demonstrates continued association between the company name and mining around the Upper Cedar Grove area.
A 1963 United States Geological Survey map of the Delbarton quadrangle also preserved Lando Mines as a named place in the landscape. Later reproductions of that topographic sheet show the community within the dense coalfield geography surrounding Pigeon Creek, Delbarton, Matewan, and neighboring mining settlements.
By then Lando had survived long enough that its name no longer depended solely on a company payroll.
That distinction matters. Coal camps sometimes disappeared almost as quickly as they were created. Others survived the companies that built them, their names continuing through families, roads, churches, cemeteries, postal routes, and local memory.
Lando Mines became one of those places.
The End of the Post Office
The Lando Mines post office closed in 1968, nearly three decades after postal records first place it in operation.
It would be tempting to use 1968 as the closing date for the mining operation itself, but the available evidence does not justify that conclusion. A post office can disappear while residents remain, and a mine can close before or after the postal service does.
Determining the precise final years of Lando Coal Corporation will require a closer year by year examination of West Virginia Department of Mines annual reports, Mingo County deeds, corporate records, and newspaper coverage.
What can be said with confidence is that by the late 1960s the community was moving beyond the period documented most heavily by Lando Coal Corporation’s mine maps and wartime records.
The economic landscape of the Appalachian coalfields was changing. Mechanization had reduced the number of miners required to produce coal, transportation had improved, small company stores were losing their former importance, and families increasingly traveled farther for work and shopping.
The old coal camp system was fading even where coal mining itself continued.
What the Abandoned Workings Left Behind
Closing a coal mine does not erase it.
Long after miners leave, underground entries, shafts, pillars, water, subsidence, mine drainage, and buried infrastructure remain part of the landscape. Modern studies of underground mine pools continue to identify abandoned Lando Coal Corporation workings among the extensive mine networks beneath southern West Virginia. One later dataset identifies a Lando Coal Corporation Mine No. 2 among large underground workings considered in mine water studies.
West Virginia’s Office of Abandoned Mine Lands and Reclamation exists because thousands of places across the state inherited those physical consequences from earlier mining. Its work addresses hazards and environmental problems left by mining that occurred before modern reclamation law.
At Lando, the underground history is therefore not entirely past tense.
The same mines that created the community continue to exist beneath the hills in another form, mapped, sealed, flooded, collapsed, or incorporated into later reclamation records.
A Place That Outlived the Company
Even after the post office disappeared, the name remained.
West Virginia’s official place name collection includes Lando Mines in Mingo County, while modern geographic databases continue to identify it as a populated place on the Delbarton quadrangle.
That survival is meaningful.
The word “Mines” became part of the community’s permanent name. It tells anyone willing to ask where the place came from.
Many Appalachian coal settlements have similar names, but each represents a separate group of families and a separate industrial landscape. Their histories are easily flattened into the larger story of “the coalfields.” Looking closely at Lando shows why that can be a mistake.
Here was a place with its own corporation, numbered mines, post office, store project, company scrip, federal mine index, wartime operating manager, underground workings, and decades of community identity.
Why Lando Mines Matters
Lando Mines is not one of the famous names of Mingo County.
It did not produce an event remembered like the Battle of Matewan, nor did it become a major city like Williamson. Its historical record is scattered among federal registers, mine maps, postal microfilm, architectural collections, scrip catalogs, and maps.
That is exactly why it matters.
Most people who built the Appalachian coalfields did not live in famous places. They lived in communities like Lando, where a mine opening could bring a post office, a company store, work for dozens or hundreds of families, and a new name to a narrow valley.
In 1941 the federal government recorded a mine called Lando.
In 1942 engineers were mapping its underground workings.
In 1943 Lando Coal Corporation appeared in the records of wartime federal control of the nation’s mines.
By 1948 somebody was designing a store building for the company.
Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, maps continued to record Lando No. 1, Lando No. 2, and the community that had developed around them.
Then the industrial system gradually receded, leaving behind the name.
Lando Mines remains on the map because the mine did more than remove coal from a mountain. For a generation, it helped create a community.
Sources & Further Reading
Harding & Cogswell. “Job No. 1045: Store Building for Lando Coal Corp., Delbarton, West Virginia.” 1948. Box 6, Folder 19. Harding & Cogswell Records, ca. 1913–1999. Indiana Historical Society. https://indianahistory.org/wp-content/uploads/harding-cogswell-records-ca-1913-1999.pdf.
Miller, J. W., and T. R. Jolley. Preparation Characteristics of Coal from Mingo County, W. Va. Report of Investigations 5278. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1956. https://www.onemine.org/search/?Organization=NIOSH&page=601.
Mingo County Clerk. Deed Books, Plats, Leases, and Property Records. Williamson, WV. Various years.
Mingo County Genealogical Society. Heritage of Mingo. Williamson, WV: Mingo County Genealogical Society, 1985–.
Mingo Republican. Williamson, WV. Various issues, especially 1941–1951.
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. Mingo County, West Virginia, Roll 648. 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. West Virginia, Roll 140, Mason through Raleigh Counties. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html.
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” National Archives. Accessed July 25, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices.
Newman Numismatic Portal. “Lando Coal Corporation, Delbarton, West Virginia.” Washington University in St. Louis. Accessed July 25, 2026. https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/advancedsearch?fullsearchterm=coal&page=4.
Smith, Nancy Sue. An History of Mingo County, West Virginia. Williamson, WV: Williamson Printing Company, 1960. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html.
Smith, Nancy Sue. History of Logan and Mingo Counties, Beginning in 1617. Williamson, WV: Nancy Smith, 1966. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html.
United States. Federal Register. Vol. 6, no. 142. July 23, 1941. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Includes the federal coal price schedule listing Lando Coal Corporation, Lando Mine, Mine Index No. 694. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1941-07-23/pdf/FR-1941-07-23.pdf.
United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines. Annual Reports and Technical Publications Relating to Coal Mining in West Virginia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, various years.
United States Department of the Interior, Coal Mines Administration. “Order Terminating Appointment of Operating Managers.” Federal Register 8, no. 215 (October 29, 1943). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1943-10-29/pdf/FR-1943-10-29.pdf.
United States Geological Survey. Delbarton Quadrangle, West Virginia. 7.5-minute topographic map. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1963.
Wallace, Joseph J., James J. Dowd, William H. Tavenner, R. F. Abernethy, and D. A. Reynolds. Estimate of Known Recoverable Reserves of Coking Coal in Mingo County, West Virginia. Report of Investigations 5068. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1954. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc38615/.
West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, Office of Abandoned Mine Lands and Reclamation. “Office of Abandoned Mine Lands and Reclamation.” Accessed July 25, 2026. https://dep.wv.gov/dlr/aml.
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines of West Virginia. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Department of Mines, various years, especially 1941–1968.
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Mine Map Archives.” Accessed July 25, 2026. https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/coal/minemaparchives.htm.
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. “Scanned West Virginia Mine Maps Available Online.” Accessed July 25, 2026. https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/coal/wvminemaps.htm.
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Accessed July 25, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/.
West Virginia State Archives. “County Records at the West Virginia State Archives.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed July 25, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/countyrecords.html.
West Virginia State Archives. “Mingo County History Sources.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed July 25, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html.
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Lando Mines, Mingo County.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed July 25, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnaml.html.
What’s the Matter with Mingo? Williamson, WV: Mingo Republican Print, 1938. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html.
Williamson Daily News. Williamson, WV. Various issues, 1940s–1960s.
Wolfson, D. E., C. Ortuglio, and J. H. Lynch. Carbonizing Properties of Coals from Logan and Mingo Counties, W. Va. Report of Investigations 6899. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1967. https://onetunnel.org/documents/ri-6899-carbonizing-properties-of-coals-from-logan-and-mingo-counties-w-va-.
Four Wing News. Mingo County, WV. Various issues, 1942–1949.
Author Note: Lando Mines is one of those Mingo County communities whose history survives more clearly in mine maps, federal records, and company artifacts than in a single written account. Bringing those scattered records together helps preserve the story of a coal community whose name remained long after its industrial peak.