Appalachian Community Histories – Leckie, McDowell County: William Leckie, West Virginia Pocahontas Coal, and the Tug Fork Branch
Leckie sits in the mountains of southeastern McDowell County, close to Anawalt and near the upper reaches of the Tug Fork watershed. Today it is easy to pass the name on a map without realizing how directly the community was tied to one coal operator, one company, and one branch of the Norfolk and Western Railway.
The surviving record points strongly to a community that took shape during the first decade of the twentieth century around the West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company. The corporation was organized in 1907, contemporary mining journalism was reporting shipments from a second mine by 1910, and West Virginia records soon recognized Leckie as both a place and a post office. By the 1920s, photographs preserved in the Eastern Regional Coal Archives were documenting a coal community that had become firmly established in the narrow McDowell County landscape.
Leckie was never one of the great cities of the Pocahontas coalfield. It did not become another Welch, Keystone, or Gary. Its importance lies in something more typical of the southern West Virginia coal story. It was a small industrial community created because coal lay beneath the mountains and a railroad had finally provided a way to carry that coal out.
Before Leckie
The landscape that became Leckie belonged to a part of McDowell County transformed almost beyond recognition between the late nineteenth century and the First World War.
McDowell County had remained thinly populated through much of the nineteenth century. Steep mountains, narrow stream valleys, poor roads, and isolation limited large-scale development, even though enormous coal deposits lay beneath the surface. That changed when the Norfolk and Western pushed into the Pocahontas coalfield and investors began combining mineral leases, railroad construction, capital, and labor into a new industrial economy.
The scale of that transformation was extraordinary. McDowell County’s population increased from 18,747 in 1900 to 47,856 in 1910. At the end of 1910, the county contained 66 coal companies operating 99 mines, compared with 31 companies and 31 mines only a decade earlier. Coal production increased from about 4.6 million tons to 13.7 million tons during the same period.
Leckie emerged squarely within that expansion.
The Railroad Reaches the Upper Tug Fork
Coal alone did not create communities such as Leckie. A mine could have millions of tons beneath the mountain and still be commercially useless if there was no economical way to move the product.
The Norfolk and Western Railway supplied that connection.
A modern historic survey prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways traces construction of the main Tug Fork Branch between 1902 and 1909. Along that route developed Havaco, Wilcoe, Gary, Venus, Thorpe, Pageton, Anawalt, and Leckie. The branch placed isolated coal properties within a transportation network stretching through Welch and ultimately toward national markets.
Later Norfolk and Western track charts describe the route simply as the Tug Fork Branch from Welch to Leckie and its branches. The Norfolk and Western Historical Society likewise describes a network running from Welch through Gary and Wilcoe to endpoints that included Filbert, Leckie, Jenkinjones, and Munson. Its history of the branch estimates that the system served 26 commercial mines and carried more than 410 million tons of coal before the largest underground operations disappeared late in the twentieth century.
Leckie’s position near the end of that railroad system is central to understanding why the community existed. The track did not merely pass through town. The industrial settlement grew because the railroad and the mine met there.
William Leckie and the Pocahontas Coalfield
The man whose name became attached to the community had already spent much of his life around coal before arriving in McDowell County.
William Leckie was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1857, the son of a miner. An early West Virginia biography reported that he worked on a farm and in Scottish coal mines before immigrating to the United States as a young man. After years in Pennsylvania mining, he came to the Pocahontas coalfield in 1901 and became superintendent of the Pocahontas Collieries Company.
That placed him in McDowell County during one of the greatest periods of industrial expansion in its history.
In 1907, Leckie went into business for himself. The West Virginia Secretary of State’s surviving corporate record shows that the West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company was organized on September 3, 1907. Its principal office was listed at Welch. The company initially carried $50,000 in capital stock, and an amendment in 1911 increased its capitalization to $100,000.
Leckie was not simply another superintendent managing someone else’s operation. He had become a coal operator building a network of his own companies.
Later biographical accounts list the West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company at Leckie among several businesses he controlled, along with operations at Panther in McDowell County, Aflex in Kentucky, and Fireco in Raleigh County. He also became a prominent banker, serving as president of the First National Bank of Anawalt and holding interests in banking institutions at Bluefield and Welch. The 1917 West Virginia Blue Book independently identifies William Leckie as president of the First National Bank at Anawalt.
His influence therefore extended well beyond the hollow that carried his name.
The West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company
The strongest evidence for the beginning of industrial production at Leckie comes from contemporary mining publications.
On December 3, 1910, the Engineering and Mining Journal reported that the West Virginia-Pocahontas Coal Company, describing W. Leckie of Welch as its principal owner, had begun shipping coal from a second mine on the Norfolk and Western’s Tug Fork Branch. The brief notice is important because it catches the Leckie operation while it was still expanding rather than reconstructing its development decades later.
State mining records provide another firm connection. The West Virginia Department of Mines’ 1919 annual report identified the West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company with the Leckie No. 1 and No. 2 mines. The surviving research trail therefore shows that Leckie was not simply a residential settlement that happened to sit near a coal property. Its identity was directly connected to a pair of named mines belonging to the company.
Trade sources from the period indicate that the operation had grown considerably by the middle of the 1910s. Contemporary material later cited from The Black Diamond and its industry directory placed annual production around 300,000 long tons by 1915 and described a combination of machine and pick mining with electric, rope, and mule haulage. The operation reportedly employed about 150 men. Because those details come from coal-industry publications closely connected to the operators they described, they should be read as valuable contemporary evidence rather than as neutral social surveys.
Even so, they reveal something important. By the middle of the decade, Leckie was no experimental opening in an isolated mountain. It had become a substantial working coal operation.
Electricity Comes to the Coalfields
The industrial system developing around Leckie was increasingly modern.
An electrical-industry account from 1912 described Appalachian Power’s expansion through southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. Among the mining concerns that had contracted for central-station electrical power was the West Virginia-Pocahontas Coal Company.
Electricity mattered enormously to coal operations. It could power haulage, pumps, machinery, lighting, and associated surface facilities. The change did not eliminate mules, manual labor, or dangerous underground work, but it linked a community such as Leckie to the larger technological transformation occurring across the Pocahontas field.
The mine, railroad, electric grid, company housing, and commercial system were pieces of the same industrial landscape.
Building a Community Around the Mine
When mining companies opened remote properties in McDowell County, they faced a basic problem. There were not enough existing towns to house the enormous number of workers needed underground and on the surface.
Companies therefore built communities.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey explains that operators commonly constructed worker housing and public buildings because little infrastructure existed beyond the railroad. Company towns might include repeated house designs, boarding houses for unmarried workers, schools, churches, stores, social halls, and recreational facilities. Housing frequently reflected occupational status, with managers, engineers, physicians, and other higher-ranking employees receiving larger homes than ordinary mining families.
Leckie’s precise arrangement deserves further reconstruction from company maps and photographs, but the surviving archival evidence provides an unusually promising route toward doing so.
The Eastern Regional Coal Archives at Craft Memorial Library in Bluefield holds a collection specifically described as photographs of Leckie, West Virginia, from approximately the 1920s. The archives also preserve a William Leckie collection containing photographs, manuscripts, memorabilia, and records concerning the southern West Virginia coal operator.
Those photographs may ultimately tell as much about Leckie as surviving corporate records. A mine report can identify the operator and mine. A photograph can show where people lived, how closely houses stood together, where the tracks ran, how the mountains enclosed the settlement, and how industrial structures dominated the narrow usable ground.
Leckie Becomes a Recognized Place
Coal camps could appear quickly, change names, and sometimes disappear almost as rapidly when the mine ceased operating. Leckie left a stronger paper trail than many such places.
The West Virginia State Archives’ place-name records list Leckie in McDowell County by 1911.
State government records soon go further. The 1916 West Virginia Legislative Handbook included Leckie among the post offices in McDowell County. The state continued listing it in 1917, 1919, and 1921.
A post office was more than a name on a list. It meant that Leckie had developed enough permanence to function as a recognized mailing address for miners, families, merchants, company officials, and anyone conducting business from the community.
By 1940, Leckie was still sufficiently distinct that the Bureau of the Census named it in the official description for Enumeration District 24-11 in Adkin Magisterial District. The district included Leckie along with portions of Anawalt and Jenkinjones.
The population schedules behind that enumeration are among the best sources still available for recovering the human side of the town. Household by household, they can identify miners and other workers, wives and children, ages, birthplaces, educational levels, occupations, wages, and migration patterns. Corporate histories tell us why Leckie was built. Census records can help tell us who actually lived there.
William Leckie’s Death
William Leckie did not live to see the full twentieth-century history of the community carrying his name.
On November 16, 1920, a West Virginia newspaper reported that the prominent coal operator and banker had died. A later biography placed his death at his recently completed home in Bluefield.
His sons and associates continued portions of the family’s coal business, but the community name remained behind as perhaps the most visible reminder of his early McDowell County operation.
That persistence is significant. Across the coalfields, company officials gave their names to mines, stations, hollows, and settlements. Some names vanished with the corporation that created them. Leckie survived as a geographical name long after William Leckie himself was gone.
Not Every Leckie Mine Was at Leckie
One complication deserves special attention because it can easily distort the community’s history.
William Leckie controlled mining properties in several places. Records referring to a “Leckie mine” or “Leckie coal company” therefore do not automatically concern Leckie in McDowell County.
In particular, the Leckie Fire Creek Coal Company operated at Fireco in Raleigh County. William Leckie also had interests in Leckie Collieries at Aflex, Kentucky, and other companies elsewhere in the region. Material from those operations sometimes appears in searches alongside records for the West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company at Leckie.
The distinction matters. The mines most firmly tied to the McDowell County community are the West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company’s Leckie operations, including Leckie No. 1 and No. 2. The Fireco mines belong to a different county, a different railroad setting, and a separate community, even though the same operator stood behind both.
The Long Decline of a Coal Community
Leckie’s later history is harder to trace cleanly than its beginnings.
The corporate record provides one useful boundary. The West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company remained registered until November 4, 1960, when it underwent voluntary dissolution. That should not automatically be treated as the exact date mining ended at Leckie, since the legal life of a corporation and the working life of an individual mine are not always identical. Still, it marks the end of the company that had been formally organized more than half a century earlier.
The company record also shows a major reduction in capital stock in 1937. Combined with the broader collapse of coal employment during the Depression, mechanization, consolidation among operators, and later exhaustion or abandonment of older workings, the amendment belongs to a period when the industrial structure that created many McDowell County communities was changing rapidly.
The railroad landscape eventually changed as well. Tracks once constructed to reach producing mines lost their original purpose as operations closed. Houses disappeared, industrial structures were dismantled, and vegetation reclaimed places that had once been crowded with machinery and workers.
Yet Leckie did not disappear entirely.
Coal Written Into the Landscape
Even after the underground mining era receded, the mountains around Leckie continued carrying physical evidence of extraction.
A United States Geological Survey study of Puncheoncamp Branch at Leckie documented later surface-mining disturbance in the watershed. Investigators described two benches cut into the steep slopes before 1968, exposed highwalls, and areas where reclamation had not been performed. The small basin contained roughly 1,000 feet of relief between its lower and upper elevations, a reminder of how dramatically mining operations had to adapt themselves to the terrain.
The setting helps explain the original coal camp as well. In a broad plain, a company could spread houses, tracks, stores, and industrial facilities outward. In McDowell County, everything competed for a narrow strip of usable ground between water and mountain.
The result was the familiar geometry of the southern coalfields: railroad beside creek, houses pressed along the valley, mine openings entering the slope, and roads following whatever space remained.
From Post Office to Place Name
One of the clearest signs of Leckie’s transition from working coal community to surviving place name came through the postal system.
United States Postal Service records show that the Leckie post office and ZIP Code 24856 were discontinued on October 4, 1996. In 2005, Leckie was formally retained as an acceptable place name using the Anawalt ZIP Code 24808.
That administrative change says something larger about the history of many Appalachian coal camps.
A community does not necessarily disappear when its post office closes, its mine shuts down, or its railroad traffic fades. People remain. Roads retain names. Families continue identifying with places whose industrial reason for existence disappeared generations earlier.
Leckie became one of those places.
Remembering Leckie
The history of Leckie is not the story of a single spectacular mine disaster, famous labor battle, or great surviving company store. It is instead the history of how hundreds of Appalachian communities were created during the coal boom.
A railroad was driven through a mountain valley. An operator formed a corporation. Mines opened. Coal began moving out. Workers arrived. Houses and community institutions followed. A post office gave the settlement an official identity. Children grew up in a place that, only a few years earlier, had scarcely existed as a town at all.
Then the industrial system changed.
What survives is scattered through corporate charters, mine reports, railroad drawings, census schedules, old maps, postal records, and photographs stored in an archive at Bluefield. The Eastern Regional Coal Archives’ photographs of Leckie from the 1920s are especially important because they preserve a visual record of a community otherwise in danger of being reduced to a name beside a road.
Leckie’s story also reminds us why small coal camps deserve the same careful attention given to larger places such as Gary, Keystone, Welch, and Coalwood. The Pocahontas coalfield was not built from a handful of famous towns. It was built from scores of communities like Leckie, each connected by steel rails, company capital, underground labor, and families who made permanent lives in places originally created to extract something from beneath the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
American Historical Society. History of West Virginia, Old and New and West Virginia Biography. Vol. 2. Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1923. https://electricscotland.com/history/world/bios/leckie_william.htm
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways. November 15, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Black Diamond Company. The Black Diamond’s Year Book and Directory. Chicago: Black Diamond Company, 1912. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?amode=&author=&c=x&title=The+Black&tmode=start
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Eastern Regional Coal Archives Accession List.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. Lambert Collection. Accession 05-368. “Photographs of Leckie, West Virginia, ca. 1920s.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. Perkinson, Sharon L., Collection. Accession 95-237. William Leckie photographs, manuscripts, memorabilia, and records, ca. 1890–1950. Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV. https://studylib.net/doc/7510872/eastern-regional-coal-archives
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6496287M/West_Virginia_place_names
Norfolk and Western Railway. Tug Fork Branch, Pocahontas Division, Welch, W. Va., to Leckie, W. Va., and Branches. Track chart. Originally dated August 1, 1927, with later revisions. https://www.multimodalways.org/docs/railroads/companies/N%26W/N%26W%20Track%20Charts/N%26W%20Pocahontas%20District%20Track%20Chart%201-1-1968.pdf
Schust, Alex, and Mason Y. Cooper. Tug Fork: Norfolk & Western Branch Line. Roanoke, VA: Norfolk and Western Historical Society. https://www.nwhs.org/commissary/books-nwhs.html
United States Bureau of the Census. “1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions, West Virginia, McDowell County, Enumeration District 24-11.” Records of the Bureau of the Census. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://dp.la/item/31814b327df67ebb3862e1941ced3626
United States Geological Survey. Analysis of Characteristics of Surface-Mined Coal Basins in Southern West Virginia. Water-Resources Investigations Report 84-4151. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1984. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/1984/4151/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Pocahontas Special, West Virginia-Virginia. Topographic map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1909. https://pastmaps.com/map/pocahontas-special-mcdowell-county-wv-usgs-topo-1909
United States Geological Survey. Pocahontas Special, West Virginia-Virginia. Topographic map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1911. https://store.yellowmaps.com/products/usgs-5415796-pocahontas-special-1911-historical-topographic-map
United States Postal Service. “Post Office Changes.” Postal Bulletin. 2005. https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2005/html/pb22168/postoffice.html
West Virginia. Legislative Hand Book and Manual and Official Register of the State of West Virginia. Charleston, WV, 1916. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1916.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1917. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1917.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1919. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1919.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Pocahontas Operators Association Records, 1941–1973.” A&M 2796. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/899
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Smokeless Coal Operators Association Historical Records, 1886–1961.” A&M 0049. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2381
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Smokeless Coal Operators Association Records.” A&M 1830. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5450
West Virginia Archives and History. “McDowell County History Sources.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnaml.html
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1919. Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1919. https://books.google.com/books?id=SkpOAAAAYAAJ
West Virginia Secretary of State. “West Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company.” Business Organization Detail. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://apps.sos.wv.gov/business/corporations/organization.aspx?org=112368
“West Virginia-Pocahontas Coal Company.” Engineering and Mining Journal 90, no. 23 (December 3, 1910). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1910-12-03-_Vol_90_Iss_23_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1910-12-03_90_23%29.pdf
“William Leckie, the Man, and Good Selling.” The Black Diamond, January 9, 1915, 26. https://abandonedonline.net/location/abandoned-communities-in-west-virginia/
Author Note: Leckie is one of the many McDowell County coal communities whose history survives through mine reports, railroad records, maps, photographs, and family memories. Preserving its story helps restore the people and places behind the enormous industrial system that once defined southern West Virginia.