Appalachian Community Histories – Maitland, McDowell County: Houston Collieries, Koppers, and the Long Life of a Coal Mine
Along Elkhorn Creek between the coal towns of Superior and Welch, Maitland developed in one of the most intensely industrialized sections of southern West Virginia. The mountains crowd closely around the valley there, leaving little level ground for houses, roads, railroad tracks, and the machinery of a coal operation. Like many communities in McDowell County, Maitland grew because coal could be reached beneath the surrounding ridges and because the Norfolk and Western Railway could carry that coal away.
The railroad came first. The Norfolk and Western’s Ohio Extension pushed westward through the Elkhorn Valley between 1890 and 1892, connecting places that would become Northfork, Keystone, Kimball, Superior, Maitland, Welch, and other communities with the larger Pocahontas coalfield. The line transformed narrow creek bottoms into industrial corridors where coal companies could sink shafts, build tipples, construct company housing, and ship enormous quantities of Pocahontas coal to distant markets. A modern architectural survey of McDowell County places Maitland directly along that historic railroad corridor.
For Maitland, however, some of the best evidence for the community’s beginnings is not found in a local history book. It survives in federal tax investigations, mining reports, company correspondence, photographs, court cases, and government safety records. Taken together, those records allow the history of a relatively small McDowell County community to be followed across much of the twentieth century.
Houston Collieries and the Maitland Lease
One of the most revealing early records appeared in a 1925 United States Senate investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Federal investigators examining coal-property valuations described Houston Collieries Company’s Maitland lease as containing approximately 1,150 acres. The company had acquired the lease from Watson Coal Company before 1913, paying a royalty based on the amount of coal mined.
The report identified the Pocahontas No. 4 seam as the principal seam being worked and described it as averaging about five feet thick. Access was provided through a shaft approximately 190 feet deep. Federal valuation records estimated millions of tons of recoverable coal beneath the property, demonstrating that Maitland was not a marginal prospect but part of a substantial underground reserve being developed during the early years of industrial coal mining in McDowell County.
Other contemporary records make the community more visible. A 1916 employment notice listed Houston Collieries Company at “Maitland or Kimball,” while the West Virginia Department of Mines later listed Houston Collieries Company’s Maitland Mine at Maitland in its official mine records. These references are important because they place Maitland firmly within the Houston company’s network well before the great consolidation of coal properties that transformed the Elkhorn Valley during the late 1920s.
By the 1920s, Maitland was part of a wider Houston coal empire that included operations around nearby Carswell and Kimball. Coal companies in this part of McDowell County did more than extract coal. They created settlements around their mines, providing housing and other services while exercising enormous influence over the economic lives of their employees.
Scrip and Life in the Company Town
One surviving piece of Maitland’s company-town economy comes from an unexpected source. Business records preserved by the Newman Numismatic Portal document an order for metal scrip for Houston Collieries Company at Maitland in 1926. Correspondence that June referred specifically to an order for “Houston Collieries Co. Maitland” and indicated that the company urgently needed the shipment.
Scrip was inseparable from the company-town system that developed across the southern West Virginia coalfields. Rather than functioning only as a mine operator, a coal company might own the houses in which miners lived, operate the store where their families purchased food and clothing, provide utilities, and deduct various expenses from a miner’s wages. McDowell County’s coal heritage survey describes communities where repetitive company houses filled narrow hollows and where workers used company-issued money in company stores. Housing often reflected a worker’s place within the industrial hierarchy, with larger residences reserved for officials, foremen, doctors, engineers, and other higher-status employees.
Maitland belonged to that world. The surviving scrip records provide something more tangible than a general description of company-town life. They show Houston Collieries ordering the physical currency that circulated through the local economy, linking the underground mine to the everyday purchases made by miners and their families.
Koppers Comes to Maitland
The Houston years did not last indefinitely. During the late 1920s, Koppers interests began taking control of Houston coal properties in the Elkhorn Valley. Historian Talmage A. Stanley, drawing heavily on contemporary reporting in the Welch Daily News, describes intense local interest in the transition during 1928.
Rumors circulated that a new by-product plant might be constructed at Maitland and that substantial improvements were planned there. By March 1928, Koppers had sent railroad cars loaded with new mining machinery into McDowell County while company officials inspected Houston mines, tipples, stores, houses, and other properties. The change represented more than a new company name. It connected Maitland to a much larger industrial corporation with holdings that extended far beyond southern West Virginia.
Federal records confirm Maitland’s place within the Koppers system during the following decades. By 1945, the Federal Register identified Maitland Mine, mine index 114, as one of the West Virginia operations associated with the Koppers Coal Division of Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates. Carswell and Keystone appeared alongside it, illustrating how several neighboring McDowell County mining communities had become pieces of the same corporate network.
The Abandoned Coke Ovens of 1938
Few surviving records capture Maitland as vividly as the photographs taken by Marion Post Wolcott in September 1938. Working as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, Wolcott traveled through the coalfields documenting communities during the final years of the Great Depression.
At Maitland she photographed rows of abandoned coke ovens cut into the hillside. In another image, the dark arches of the old ovens stand in the foreground while a mine tipple rises behind them. The photographs are especially valuable because they capture two periods of Maitland’s industrial history in the same landscape. Older coke-making infrastructure had already fallen into disuse while the coal-mining complex remained an unmistakable presence behind it.
The photographs also illustrate the speed with which industrial landscapes could change. Coal camps were built rapidly when a seam was profitable, but structures associated with an earlier method of production could become obsolete within a generation. The ovens photographed by Wolcott had already become ruins by 1938, even though Maitland’s connection with coal mining was far from over.
They remain among the strongest visual primary sources for the community because they allow Maitland to be seen rather than merely reconstructed from production figures and corporate records.
School, Community, and a Changing McDowell County
Mining was the economic reason Maitland existed, but a coal community was never only a mine. Families raised children there, attended churches, traveled between neighboring communities, and sent their children into the McDowell County school system.
The history of Superior-Maitland Elementary School places the community within one of the major social changes of twentieth-century Appalachia. Historian Alice E. Carter’s study of school desegregation in McDowell County records that Superior-Maitland Elementary was among several county schools damaged by arson during February and March 1958. Carter cautions that there is no strong evidence proving the fires were connected to the struggle over integration, even though they occurred during a period of racial change in the county’s schools.
School zoning records from 1964 show how closely Maitland and Superior were connected. The Superior-Maitland district included children from Superior, Maitland, Belcher Mountain, and Big Four. Early language in the district regulations still distinguished where Black pupils could attend school. Later that year the county rewrote the regulation and removed the racial designation, part of a larger process that culminated in the merger of McDowell County’s segregated school systems. By the fall of 1966, African American students throughout the county were attending integrated schools.
Maitland’s history therefore extends beyond corporate ownership and production statistics. The families living beside the mine also experienced the broader transformations reshaping Appalachian communities after World War II.
Maitland Mine in the Modern Coal Era
The Maitland Mine remained significant during the modern era of underground mining. Federal records from the early 1970s identify it as a Pocahontas Fuel Company operation within Consolidation Coal Corporation’s system. A Bureau of Mines survey for 1973 listed the mine in McDowell County working the Pocahontas Nos. 3 and 4 seams and releasing an average of approximately 1.1 million cubic feet of methane each day.
Those technical figures hint at the conditions miners faced underground. Methane, roof stability, electrical equipment, ventilation, coal dust, and moving machinery were constant concerns in a deep mine. By this period, federal regulation had also created a much larger documentary record of what happened beneath the surface.
One of those records arose after federal inspector Donald C. Phillips entered the Maitland Mine on October 8, 1974. Phillips discovered a trailing electrical cable on a shuttle car damaged badly enough that power conductors were exposed. He issued a withdrawal order under federal mine-safety law. The dispute eventually reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, leaving behind an unusually detailed legal record of a routine mine inspection at Maitland.
Another federal proceeding concerned conditions observed in 1977. An inspector reported loose and unsupported roof and ribs at several locations along Maitland’s mantrip and supply-track haulage system. The resulting enforcement case against Consolidation Coal Company eventually involved a negotiated civil penalty. Such records provide a different picture of a coal town than photographs of houses and company stores. They preserve the underground environment where the community’s economic life was actually produced.
A Miner, Black Lung, and the Meaning of a Job
Federal litigation involving miner Howard Mullins provides an unusually personal view of work at Maitland during the 1970s. Mullins had originally worked for Pocahontas Fuel Company at the Kepler Mine in Virginia. When Kepler closed, employees were offered work at other company operations, and Mullins transferred to Maitland.
He arrived in January 1974 expecting work connected to his previous roof-bolter classification, but no permanent roof-bolting position was available. He instead became a general inside laborer at lower pay, although the company repeatedly assigned him temporary roof-bolting work. The resulting disagreement over his proper rate of pay became part of a long administrative and federal court dispute.
The case is important because it records details often missing from broad histories of the coal industry. Corporate histories tell us which company owned a mine. Production reports tell us how much coal came out. Mullins’s case shows what happened when one individual miner arrived at Maitland, what his job classification meant, how temporary assignments worked, and how a relatively small difference in hourly pay could become the subject of years of litigation.
The Gasoline Strike That Began at Maitland
Maitland also found itself at the beginning of a much larger labor disturbance during the energy crisis of 1974.
In February, West Virginia Governor Arch Moore imposed restrictions intended to conserve scarce gasoline. According to contemporary reporting, a miner finishing his shift at Consolidation Coal Company’s Maitland 1G Mine discovered that his automobile had run out of fuel before he could leave the company parking lot. Unable to obtain gasoline under the restrictions, he reportedly spent the night there.
Other miners protested, and what began at Maitland spread far beyond McDowell County. At its height, the wildcat strike affected approximately 25,000 miners across nine West Virginia counties and removed hundreds of thousands of tons of coal from daily production. The irony was difficult to miss. During a national energy shortage, miners producing the coal needed by American industry stopped working partly because they could not reliably obtain enough gasoline to drive home.
For a small community, it was an extraordinary moment. Maitland briefly stood near the center of a labor dispute whose effects traveled across the West Virginia coalfields and reached national news.
The Last Years of the Mine
By the beginning of the 1980s, Maitland Mine was still operating under Consolidation Coal Company, but the surviving records increasingly point toward the end of an era.
A federal historical survey of mine explosions records an electrical explosion at Maitland Mine on April 3, 1982. The mine was identified by federal number 46-01409 and operated by Consolidation Coal Company. The event produced no fatalities or injuries in the federal summary, but its appearance in the national record illustrates that Maitland remained an active industrial site more than seventy years after the earliest surviving documentation of mining there.
Then came layoffs.
A 1987 decision of the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds states that the workers involved had performed classified work for Consolidation Coal Company at Maitland Mine until they were laid off in April 1983. Their later dispute concerned benefit coverage, but the simple statement buried in the case record marks a major turning point in Maitland’s history.
For generations the mine had organized life around shifts, payrolls, company houses, railroad cars, and the movement of men underground. As employment disappeared, the reason for maintaining much of that industrial and community infrastructure disappeared with it.
What Remains of Maitland
The physical Maitland that survives today is only a fragment of the landscape created during the coal boom. The 2016 fieldwork behind the McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey documented Maitland among the historic communities examined by architectural historians. Across McDowell County, hundreds of buildings recorded during an earlier 1991 survey had disappeared by the time researchers returned. Maitland was part of this larger landscape of demolition, abandonment, alteration, and survival.
Some company-era houses remained, including buildings dating from approximately the 1920s and 1940s. Their survival matters because coal-camp houses can reveal aspects of community history that mine records cannot. They show where families lived, how closely homes were packed into the available creek-bottom land, and how industrial planning shaped the appearance of an Appalachian settlement.
The setting also continues to be defined by Elkhorn Creek, the railroad corridor, and the steep mountains that once made coal extraction both profitable and difficult. Those features explain why Maitland developed where it did and why the community could never spread outward like towns built on flatter ground.
Why Maitland Matters
Maitland’s history resembles that of many coal communities in southern West Virginia, yet the unusually strong documentary record makes it especially revealing.
Federal investigators recorded the value of the coal beneath Maitland before World War I. State reports listed the mine. Company correspondence recorded orders for scrip. Koppers brought a new era of corporate ownership. Marion Post Wolcott photographed abandoned coke ovens during the Great Depression. School records connected Maitland to the difficult history of segregation and integration. Federal inspectors documented electrical hazards and dangerous roof conditions underground. Court cases preserved the working life of individual miners. A gasoline dispute that began outside the mine spread into a massive wildcat strike. Finally, union benefit records documented the layoffs that accompanied the closing years of the operation.
Few coal towns leave behind one single document explaining their rise and decline. Their histories have to be assembled from fragments.
In Maitland, those fragments stretch across nearly the entire industrial age of the Pocahontas coalfield. They show a place created by geology, railroad access, outside investment, and generations of labor. They also show how quickly the system built around a mine could contract when the jobs that sustained it disappeared.
The old coke ovens photographed in 1938 were already ruins while men were still going underground nearby. In that image lies much of Maitland’s story. One industrial generation could disappear while another continued working behind it, until eventually the tipples, company institutions, and crowded coal-camp landscape began disappearing as well.
What remains is a community along Elkhorn Creek and a documentary trail scattered through archives across the country. Read together, those records restore Maitland to its place in the history of McDowell County and the Pocahontas coalfield.
Sources & Further Reading
Carter, Alice E. “Segregation and Integration in the Appalachian Coalfields: McDowell County Responds to the Brown Decision.” West Virginia History 54 (1995). https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh54-5.html
Federoff v. Rutledge. 332 S.E.2d 855 (W. Va. 1985). https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1985/16332-5.html
Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission. Pocahontas Fuel Co. v. Secretary of Labor/MSHA and United Mine Workers of America. Docket HOPE 75-680. https://www.fmshrc.gov/sites/default/files/decisions/alj/81102308.PDF
Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission. Secretary of Labor/MSHA v. Consolidation Coal Company. Docket HOPE 78-569-P. 1979. https://www.fmshrc.gov/sites/default/files/decisions/alj/79101606.PDF
Ingle-Schierloh Company. “Houston Collieries Co., Maitland.” Business correspondence and scrip-order records, 1926. Newman Numismatic Portal, Washington University in St. Louis. https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/advancedsearch?fullsearchterm=coal&page=201
Mullins v. Andrus. 664 F.2d 297 (D.C. Cir. 1980). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/664/297/198487/
National Archives and Records Administration. 1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions: West Virginia, McDowell County, ED 24-33. Record Group 29. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-_West_Virginia_-_McDowell_County_-_ED_24-29,_ED_24-30,_ED_24-31,_ED_24-32,_ED_24-33_-_NARA_-_5888417.jpg
National Centers for Environmental Information. “Storm Events Database: Flash Flood, July 29, 2001.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/eventdetails.jsp?id=5261959
National Coal Heritage Area. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Historic Property Inventory Form Index: McDowell County, Jenkinjones to McDowell. 2018. https://www.aurora-llc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/CoalHeritage_Jenkinjones_to_McDowell_Index_by_SurveyNo.pdf
Pocahontas Fuel Company v. Andrus. 590 F.2d 95 (4th Cir. 1979). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/590/95/224854/
Stanley, Talmage A. The Poco Field: An American Story of Place. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p078392
Svoboda. “Houston Collieries Co., Maitland or Kimball.” September 19, 1916. https://archive.svoboda-news.com/wp-content/uploads/Svoboda-1916-113.pdf
United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds. “ROD Case No. 84-373.” June 10, 1987. https://www.umwafunds.org/rods/84-373
U.S. Bureau of Mines. Methane Emission from U.S. Coal Mines in 1973: A Survey. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/161404/cdc_161404_DS1.pdf
U.S. Bureau of Mines and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Historical Summary of Coal Mine Explosions in the United States, 1981–1994. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/206407/cdc_206407_DS1.pdf
U.S. Congress. Congressional Record. February 3, 1967. https://www.congress.gov/90/crecb/1967/02/03/GPO-CRECB-1967-pt2-7.pdf
U.S. Congress. Senate. Hearings Concerning Coal Mine Health and Safety. 1970. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-91shrg51998/pdf/CHRG-91shrg51998.pdf
U.S. Department of the Interior. “Pocahontas Fuel Co.: Petition for Modification of Application of Mandatory Safety Standard.” Federal Register 39, no. 102 (May 24, 1974): 18308. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1974-05-24/pdf/FR-1974-05-24.pdf
U.S. Department of the Interior. Federal Register. November 11, 1970. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1970-11-11/pdf/FR-1970-11-11.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. Interim Report on Investigation of Flooding in Tug Fork Basin of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Open-File Report 80-1188. 1980. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1980/1188/report.pdf
U.S. Senate. Investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Part 16. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925. https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/68.Bureau.pdf
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Department of Mines, 1923. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_%28IA_annualreportofde41west%29.pdf
West Virginia Division of Culture and History. Annual Report, 2011–2012. Charleston, WV: West Virginia Division of Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/annualreport/annualreport1112.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Historical Sources.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Newspapers on Microfilm.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/newspapers/mcdowell.html
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “McDowell County Histories, A&M 3244.” West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1543
Wolcott, Marion Post. Old Abandoned Coke Ovens. Maitland, West Virginia. Photograph. September 1938. Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8c29718/
Wolcott, Marion Post. Old Abandoned Coke Ovens with Mine Tipple in Background, Maitland, West Virginia. Photograph. September 1938. Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017752605/
Author Note: Maitland’s history survives in federal investigations, mine reports, court cases, company records, photographs, and the memories embedded in the remaining landscape along Elkhorn Creek. Together, those records preserve the story of a McDowell County community whose fortunes followed the coal beneath its mountains.