Appalachian Community Histories – Lila, McDowell County: The North Fork Branch, a 1916 Post Office, and the O’Toole Connection
Some Appalachian communities left behind courthouses, business districts, newspapers, and shelves of written history. Others survive in a handful of houses, an old railroad alignment, a place name on a government map, and scattered references buried inside state reports. Lila, in McDowell County, West Virginia, belongs to the second group.
Today, Lila can be easy to overlook. It lies in the mountains near Anawalt and Jenkinjones, in a landscape crowded with the names of former coal camps, railroad stops, mining operations, hollows, and communities that once depended on the Norfolk & Western Railway. Yet the documentary record shows that Lila was more than a modern map label. It had become important enough to possess a post office by 1916, and many of the houses documented there more than a century later were estimated to have been built around 1915.
The timing was no accident. Lila developed just as a new Norfolk & Western branch pushed into the valley between Anawalt and Jenkinjones. The railroad came first, and the settlement followed the tracks.
Before Lila
The mountains surrounding Lila had existed for generations before anyone thought to place the community’s name on a postal directory. What changed the region was coal and the transportation network needed to carry it away.
McDowell County was transformed with remarkable speed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey found that the number of coal companies in the county increased from 31 in 1900 to 66 by the end of 1910, while the number of mines rose from 31 to 99. During the same decade, annual coal production jumped from approximately 4.6 million tons to 13.7 million tons. By 1923, 84 companies operated 138 mines in the county.
Those numbers represented more than industrial statistics. Every new mine required labor. Labor required houses, stores, schools, churches, roads, and access to rail transportation. In the narrow valleys of McDowell County, communities often formed in whatever strips of level ground could be found between a creek, a mountainside, and the railroad.
Lila emerged from precisely that kind of landscape.
The Railroad Comes Up the North Fork
The clearest starting point for Lila’s development appears in Norfolk & Western records from 1910.
In September of that year, material published in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported that right-of-way had been arranged for a new North Fork Branch of the Tug Fork Branch beginning at Jeannette, West Virginia. The proposed line measured 4.31 miles, with another 0.87-mile branch intended to reach projected coal operations.
Construction followed. By September 1911, the railroad reported that the North Fork Branch was under construction and expected to be completed around November of that year.
Work apparently continued longer than anticipated. In September 1912, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported that the North Fork Branch from Jeanette, now measured at 4.37 miles, had been completed and was operating. A congressional document from the same period independently described the Norfolk & Western’s North Fork extension as 4.37 miles long.
More than a century later, historians surveying McDowell County identified exactly which communities that line served. Their railroad table lists the North Fork Branch of the Tug Fork Branch as a 1910 to 1912 development associated with three places: Lila, O’Toole, and Jenkinjones.
That association provides one of the strongest clues to Lila’s beginnings. The community appears to have developed as part of the same burst of railroad construction and coalfield expansion that transformed the valley during the early 1910s.
A Post Office by 1916
Within only a few years of the railroad’s completion, Lila had acquired another marker of community identity.
The official West Virginia Blue Book for 1916 included Lila in its list of post offices in McDowell County. It appeared alongside better-known communities such as Anawalt, Gary, Keystone, Kimball, Welch, Jenkinjones, and Leckie.
That listing is especially significant because it comes from an official state publication produced while Lila was still a young settlement. It establishes that the name was already in formal use no later than 1916.
West Virginia’s historical place-name records provide another reference point. The state’s archival database lists Lila in McDowell County with the date 1920. That date should not be interpreted as the year the settlement was founded, especially since the 1916 Blue Book proves the name was already in use, but it confirms that Lila continued to be recognized during the opening years of the 1920s.
The surviving evidence therefore creates a fairly tight chronology. The railroad branch was planned in 1910, placed in operation by 1912, and Lila was officially recognized as a postal community by 1916.
The Houses Tell the Story
For a community with comparatively little written history, Lila possesses an unusually valuable architectural record.
During the McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey, historians documented numerous buildings in and around Lila. The dates assigned to those structures reinforce the story told by the railroad and postal records.
One property at 2022 Jenkinjones Road was identified as “Jenkinjones/Lila” and dated to approximately 1910. A property at 78 Anawalt Lake Road was recorded as being in Lila and dated to approximately 1915. Houses at 61 and 66 O’Toole Lane were also identified as Lila properties dating to approximately 1915. Other resources on Generosity Street and Jenkinjones Road received similar dates.
The later portion of the survey inventory adds even more. Houses at 967, 979, 935, 968, 980, 992, and approximately 1016 Jenkinjones Road were identified as Lila properties, with most dated to around 1915. Another at approximately 940 Jenkinjones Road was dated to around 1920, while one property at 955 was estimated at around 1930. Several additional houses on Generosity Street were dated to approximately 1915.
These entries matter because they reveal something that a simple dot on a map cannot. Lila was a built community.
The concentration of houses dating from around 1915 fits almost perfectly with the completion of the railroad only a few years earlier. Tracks entered the valley, coal development accelerated, a residential settlement grew along the corridor, and by 1916 Lila had a post office.
That sequence is characteristic of southern West Virginia’s coalfield development, but Lila preserves the pattern at an unusually intimate scale.
Lila and O’Toole
There is one problem in telling Lila’s story that should not be hidden behind a neat conclusion: the relationship between Lila and O’Toole.
Modern local histories sometimes describe the names as interchangeable. CoalCampUSA, for example, identifies a small coal settlement outside Anawalt as having been known as both O’Toole and Lila.
The historical-property survey gives some support to a close relationship between the names. It identifies houses on O’Toole Lane as being located in Lila, while another property receives the combined designation “Jenkinjones/Lila.” These records demonstrate just how fluid community boundaries could become in a narrow coalfield valley.
Yet another piece of the same Coal Heritage Survey complicates matters. Its railroad table lists Lila, O’Toole, and Jenkinjones as three separate communities served by the North Fork Branch.
The state government’s historical district listing also recognizes O’Toole as a community in Adkin District alongside Anawalt, Jenkinjones, Leckie, Gary, and other settlements. Lila is absent from that particular district list even though other state records preserve Lila as a historical place name.
The surviving evidence therefore does not justify simply declaring that Lila and O’Toole were always the same place. The safest interpretation is that they were closely associated communities, or possibly overlapping local identities whose boundaries and names shifted depending upon postal usage, railroad terminology, company ownership, or local custom. That uncertainty is also reflected in the research material gathered for this article.
Coalfield geography was rarely as tidy as modern maps suggest.
Life Between Anawalt and Jenkinjones
Lila did not exist in isolation. It occupied a corridor connecting two larger communities that supplied many of the commercial and industrial functions small settlements could not support themselves.
The Coal Heritage Survey identified Anawalt as one of McDowell County’s larger local commercial and social centers. Jenkinjones became closely associated with the Pocahontas Fuel Company, one of the county’s major coal operators during the 1920s.
Lila stood between those larger places along a railroad constructed specifically during McDowell County’s industrial expansion. Residents could have lived in Lila while working elsewhere along the same tightly connected mining corridor. Exactly which mines employed particular Lila households will require census schedules, mine employment records, company papers, and possibly Norfolk & Western records to establish family by family.
That distinction matters. It is tempting to assign every small coalfield settlement to one mine or company, but the surviving evidence for Lila does not yet support such a simple claim.
What can be established is that the community’s development coincided with the construction of the railroad and the rapid expansion of coal mining around it. The houses were built during the same years that mines, sidings, and company operations were reshaping the valley.
O’Toole Survives as a Community Name
While Lila became less prominent as a commonly used place name, O’Toole continued to appear in records well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Minutes from the West Virginia District of the Pilgrim Holiness Church continued to identify an O’Toole congregation. By 1963, O’Toole was still included among churches in the district’s Southern Zone alongside Bluefield and Bramwell.
Public utility records preserve the name as well. A West Virginia Public Service Commission proceeding identified an O’Toole Water Company among the local water systems operating in McDowell County.
That water system eventually became part of a much more recent chapter in the community’s history. In 2019, residents of O’Toole received widespread attention when a boil-water advisory that had lasted approximately seventeen years was lifted after the McDowell County Public Service District took control of the system. Contemporary reporting described the old system as having originated with the community’s coal-camp era.
The episode shows how infrastructure created during the coal years continued to shape life generations after the industry that built these settlements had declined.
What Remains of Lila
Perhaps the most remarkable part of Lila’s story is that physical evidence of its early years survived long enough to be systematically documented.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey examined more than 2,000 resources across McDowell County. Lila was specifically included among the communities surveyed, and the researchers documented houses and other properties representing the settlement’s early twentieth-century development.
Some individual Lila properties were judged ineligible for National Register listing, while at least one was recommended as potentially contributing to a multiple-property listing and another was recommended for additional research. Those classifications should not be mistaken for judgments about whether the buildings possess local historical value. National Register eligibility follows specific architectural and historical criteria. Even a heavily altered house can still reveal where people lived, how a settlement was arranged, and how closely residential development followed the railroad.
In Lila, the pattern is unusually clear. Houses dating mostly from about 1915 line roads that still preserve the geography of the old settlement. O’Toole Lane preserves one of the community names. Jenkinjones Road physically connects the settlement to the larger town farther up the valley. Generosity Street retains another cluster of early houses.
The mines and industrial structures may have been the economic reason for the community’s existence, but ordinary houses preserve the evidence that Lila was also a place where families built lives.
Why Lila Matters
Lila’s importance lies partly in how ordinary it once was.
During the great expansion of the Pocahontas coalfield, dozens of communities appeared in McDowell County. Some became towns known throughout the region. Others remained small clusters of houses beside tracks and mines. When coal employment declined, many of the smallest places lost their post offices, stores, schools, rail service, and eventually much of their population.
Their names began disappearing before their buildings did.
Lila offers a way to recover one of those communities from the margins of the historical record. Contemporary railroad reports document the construction of the line that opened the valley between 1910 and 1912. An official state directory proves that Lila possessed a post office by 1916. State place-name records preserve the name in 1920. A modern architectural survey then reveals a surviving cluster of houses whose construction dates match that same formative period.
Taken together, those scattered records tell a surprisingly coherent story.
Lila was born during one of the most dramatic periods of industrial expansion in Appalachian history. The railroad entered the valley, houses followed, a postal community appeared, and generations of residents lived along the narrow corridor between Anawalt and Jenkinjones. Even the uncertainty surrounding the names Lila and O’Toole tells us something important about Appalachian coal communities, where railroad stations, post offices, mining companies, and local memory could each draw the boundaries of a place differently.
Lila may never have become one of McDowell County’s largest coal towns. That is exactly why its history deserves attention. Appalachia was built not only by places like Welch, Gary, and Keystone, but by hundreds of smaller settlements whose houses stood beside branch lines and whose names once meant home to the families who lived there.
Sources & Further Reading
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
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Historic Property Inventory: Jenkinjones to McDowell. July 2018. https://www.aurora-llc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/CoalHeritage_Jenkinjones_to_McDowell_Index_by_SurveyNo.pdf
Campbell, Marius R. Pocahontas Folio, Virginia-West Virginia. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 26. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1896. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf26
Commercial and Financial Chronicle. September 17, 1910. Contemporary Norfolk & Western Railway report concerning right-of-way for the North Fork Branch of the Tug Fork Branch. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/cfc/cfc_19100917.pdf
Commercial and Financial Chronicle. September 9, 1911. Contemporary Norfolk & Western Railway report describing construction of the North Fork Branch. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/cfc/cfc_19110909.pdf
Commercial and Financial Chronicle. September 14, 1912. Contemporary Norfolk & Western Railway report announcing completion and operation of the North Fork Branch. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/cfc/cfc_19120914.pdf
Gillenwater, Mack H. “Company Towns.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Revised April 24, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1440
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006731317
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: A Study of Coal Mining and Related Resources in Southern West Virginia. Philadelphia: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1992. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/coal-mining-heritage.pdf
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Diagram of Pocahontas-Flat Top Coal Fields Showing Distances from Branch Line Mines to Gathering Points.” Office of the Chief Engineer, June 24, 1912. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives, HS-H10090. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=114604
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Proposed Water Line Crossing, Gertrude B. Goins, MP T18+475, O’Toole, W.Va.” Office of the Chief Engineer, 1959. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=216879
Schust, Alex P., and Mason Y. Cooper. Tug Fork: Norfolk & Western Branch Line. Roanoke, VA: Norfolk & Western Historical Society, 2012. https://search.worldcat.org/title/823620565
Trent, Virgil A., and Frank D. Spencer. Geologic Map of the Anawalt Quadrangle, West Virginia-Virginia. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-1668. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1990. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/geologic-map-anawalt-quadrangle-west-virginia-virginia
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection.” TopoView. Accessed September 12, 2026. Useful for comparing the Lila and Anawalt area across different periods. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Central Pocahontas Coal Co., Anawalt, WV.” Photograph, August 1931. Virginia Tech ImageBase. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/items/show/36324
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. Pocahontas Mines Collection, 1883-1997. Ms2004-002. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3408
Wallace, Joseph J., James J. Dowd, William H. Tavenner, John M. Provost, R. F. Abernethy, and D. A. Reynolds. Estimate of Known Recoverable Reserves of Coking Coal in McDowell County, West Virginia. Report of Investigations 4924. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1952. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc38590/
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1915. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Department of Mines, 1915. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde1914west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1918. Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1918. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde36west
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://archive.org/details/annualreportofde37west
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1916. The county directory lists Lila as a McDowell County post office. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1916.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/communities/districtplacenames.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Lila.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed September 12, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnaml.html
Author Note: Small places like Lila can disappear from common memory even while their houses, roads, and records remain. I wanted to bring those fragments together while preserving the uncertainty surrounding the historical relationship between Lila and O’Toole.