Appalachian Community Histories – Maybeury, McDowell County: Coal Mines, the Norfolk & Western, and the 1937 Train Wreck
Along U.S. Route 52 in eastern McDowell County, Maybeury occupies a narrow mountain valley where the railroad, creek, highway, and community have long competed for space. Modern travelers can move through the area quickly, passing scattered homes and traces of an older industrial landscape without realizing that Maybeury once stood near the entrance to one of the most productive coalfields in the Appalachian Mountains.
Its history is closely connected to the development of the Pocahontas coalfield during the late nineteenth century. The arrival of the Norfolk & Western Railway transformed the region by providing coal operators with a practical connection to national markets. Mines opened along the railroad, company towns appeared in the hollows, and thousands of workers and their families came into southern West Virginia.
Maybeury became part of this network almost immediately.
West Virginia place-name records identify Maybeury as early as 1887. By the following year, industrial development was accelerating rapidly as the railroad penetrated the coalfield through the Flat Top Mountain region. The Norfolk Coal and Coke Company became one of the companies most closely associated with the community, while Shamokin Coal and Coke and other nearby operations contributed to the network of mines surrounding Maybeury.
The result was not simply a mining operation with a few houses nearby. Over time, Maybeury developed into a community with homes, stores, schools, churches, railroad facilities, roads, and public gathering places serving the people who lived among the mines.
The Railroad Opens the Coalfield
Coal had existed beneath the mountains of McDowell County for millions of years, but large-scale extraction depended upon transportation. Before the arrival of the railroad, the region’s steep terrain and relative isolation made it difficult to move tremendous quantities of coal to distant industrial markets.
The Norfolk & Western Railway changed that.
Railroad construction through the Pocahontas coalfield connected southern West Virginia with manufacturing centers and ports far beyond Appalachia. Once rail access reached the area around Maybeury, the value of the coal beneath the surrounding mountains changed dramatically. Coal companies could invest in mines, tipples, coke ovens, houses, stores, and other infrastructure because thousands of tons of coal could now be shipped efficiently from the mountains.
Historic Norfolk & Western maps preserve an unusually detailed record of this transformation. An early map of the New River Division and branches west of Bluefield shows Maybeury within the developing railroad system, while later engineering drawings document tracks, bridges, stations, tipples, roads, schools, churches, and other structures surrounding the community.
One 1917 railroad drawing is particularly valuable because it records the physical organization of Maybeury during the coal era. The map identifies the railroad alongside the school, church, post office, roads, and other buildings. Instead of viewing the town only through written descriptions, the drawing allows historians to see how closely daily life was arranged around the railroad.
By the middle of the twentieth century, another Norfolk & Western plan showed passenger and freight facilities, tracks, bridges, and coal infrastructure surrounding Maybeury. The railroad did not merely pass near the community. It ran through the center of its economic and physical development.
Norfolk Coal and Coke
Among the most important companies in Maybeury’s early history was the Norfolk Coal and Coke Company.
National Register research conducted for the Pocahontas Fuel Company Store records that Norfolk Coal and Coke operated five mines in the Maybeury area. These operations helped transform Maybeury into one of the many company-centered communities that emerged throughout southern West Virginia during the expansion of the coal industry.
Company towns filled a practical need for operators. Many mines were being developed in mountain valleys where there were few existing houses, businesses, or public institutions capable of supporting a large industrial workforce. Companies therefore constructed much of the community themselves.
Workers and their families needed housing. They needed food and clothing. Children needed schools. Communities needed churches, roads, medical services, postal facilities, and places where residents could gather.
The result was a landscape in which the employer could influence nearly every part of daily life.
Maybeury was one example of this larger system, although its relationship with neighboring communities makes its history particularly complex. Norfolk, Shamokin, Angle, Lick Branch, Switchback, Elkhorn, and other nearby operations were all part of an industrial district connected by coal seams, company ownership, roads, railroads, and family relationships.
For historians, that means Maybeury cannot always be studied within sharply defined modern boundaries. Records created by mining companies and government agencies frequently overlap with nearby Switchback and other communities.
The Maybeury Company Store
Perhaps no building better represented the company-town system in Maybeury than the large company store.
Norfolk Coal and Coke constructed the building before 1903, and surviving historical documentation confirms that it was operating by that year. The store served employees and families associated with five company mines in the Maybeury area.
It was far more than a place to purchase food.
The building contained a post office and payroll office, placing several essential community functions under one roof. Workers could conduct company business, receive wages, collect mail, purchase necessities, and encounter neighbors in the same building.
Its design reflected the importance of the railroad. The structure stood beside the tracks, allowing goods to be transported directly into the store. A basement entrance and freight elevator helped move merchandise arriving by rail into the building.
The store therefore represented the connection between industry and everyday life in Maybeury. Coal moved outward from the community while food, clothing, household goods, equipment, and other products moved inward.
During the 1910s, Norfolk Coal and Coke’s local holdings became connected with the Pocahontas Fuel Company. The Maybeury store eventually became known as the Pocahontas Fuel Company Store, preserving its role within the community even as corporate ownership changed.
For generations of residents, the building remained one of Maybeury’s most recognizable landmarks.
Homes, Schools, Churches, and Families
Mining companies created much of Maybeury’s physical infrastructure, but residents created the community that existed within it.
Company houses spread along the limited flat land available beside the creek, railroad, and mountain slopes. The geography of southern West Virginia forced mining communities into narrow patterns, with homes sometimes climbing into side hollows or following transportation corridors for considerable distances.
Historical descriptions of Maybeury emphasize this arrangement. Houses extended through the narrow valleys around the mining operations, producing a community whose shape was determined as much by geography as by company planning.
Schools were also present during the community’s early development. Newspaper records from the nineteenth century document educational activity in Maybeury, while later railroad maps specifically identify a school among the town’s prominent structures.
Churches became equally important gathering places.
Mining communities brought together people from different parts of the United States and from overseas. Families carried religious traditions, customs, foodways, music, and community practices with them into the coalfields. Although coal companies controlled much of the economic landscape, churches, schools, family networks, fraternal organizations, and neighborhood relationships gave residents social institutions that extended beyond the mine.
The McDowell County Evaluation Project later documented occupied homes, vacant structures, churches, and other buildings in Maybeury. Surviving school rosters provide another valuable source for understanding the children and families who lived there after the community’s earliest boom years.
These records help recover a side of Maybeury that cannot be measured in tons of coal.
Maybeury and Switchback
One of the most important considerations when studying Maybeury is its relationship with nearby Switchback.
The two communities frequently overlap in historical records. Mining operations, railroad facilities, company properties, and residential areas did not always conform to the community names later used by census officials or modern mapmakers.
Federal records eventually treated the area as Maybeury-Switchback for certain census purposes, demonstrating just how closely connected the settlements had become.
This overlap is especially important when examining Lick Branch.
Official mine-disaster records identify Lick Branch with Switchback, but the mines were part of the same industrial landscape surrounding Maybeury. Workers, railroad lines, company property, and families connected the communities closely enough that the history of one cannot be completely separated from the history of the other.
Understanding that relationship prevents the history of Maybeury from becoming artificially confined by modern boundaries.
Disaster at Lick Branch
The coal industry brought employment and rapid development to McDowell County, but it also exposed miners and their families to extraordinary danger.
Few events demonstrated those dangers more clearly than the explosions at Lick Branch.
On December 29, 1908, an explosion tore through the Lick Branch mine at Switchback. Official West Virginia mine-disaster records list fifty fatalities.
The community had barely begun to bury its dead when disaster struck again.
On January 12, 1909, another explosion occurred at Lick Branch. This time sixty-seven miners were killed.
Within approximately two weeks, more than one hundred men had died at the same mining operation.
The disaster produced an extensive documentary record. State mine inspectors investigated the explosions. Newspapers reported from the coalfield. Federal publications discussed the events, while later Bureau of Mines research preserved findings concerning the causes and spread of the explosions.
A February 1909 letter from the Lick Branch Mine Relief Committee provides particularly valuable evidence of the human consequences. Written shortly after the disasters, the document described the explosions, the deaths, the community, company housing, and the effort to provide assistance to surviving families.
The explosions officially belonged to Switchback, but their effects extended throughout the surrounding Maybeury district. Mining communities depended upon interconnected workforces and family networks. A disaster inside one mine could leave widows, children, relatives, coworkers, and neighbors mourning throughout several nearby settlements.
Lick Branch became one of the darkest chapters in the history of this portion of the Pocahontas coalfield.
Maybeury’s Railroad Landscape
Coal trains became part of the rhythm of daily life in Maybeury.
Locomotives hauled loaded cars through the valley while railroad employees maintained tracks, bridges, switches, stations, and other infrastructure required to keep coal moving. Passenger service connected residents with communities elsewhere in the coalfield, while freight trains brought goods into the district.
The railroad landscape surrounding Maybeury became increasingly elaborate.
Engineering drawings record bridges, sidings, tipples, coke ovens, freight facilities, passenger facilities, and proposed changes to the railroad grade. A 1919 Norfolk & Western drawing documented Bridge 861, the Shamokin tipple, coke ovens, and other industrial features around the community.
Later photographs preserved by the Norfolk & Western Historical Society show the enormous scale of the railroad infrastructure. One photograph from 1949 records a Class J locomotive crossing the high trestle at Maybeury, providing a dramatic visual reminder of the structures that once dominated the valley.
For residents, however, the railroad was not simply impressive machinery. It was part of everyday life, and its proximity carried risks.
In 1937, those risks became tragically clear.
The Maybeury Train Wreck of 1937
On June 30, 1937, a Norfolk & Western freight train approached Maybeury behind locomotive No. 2092.
The locomotive was an enormous articulated steam engine built for the difficult work of moving freight through the mountains. As the train reached the high trestle at Maybeury, the locomotive derailed and plunged from the structure.
Norfolk & Western records state that the locomotive fell approximately eighty-six feet.
When it struck below, its boiler exploded.
Engineer W. W. Snead, fireman Mack McHaffa, and head brakeman James Ball were killed. Historical accounts also record the death of a person beneath the bridge, bringing the known death toll to four.
The destruction was photographed extensively.
Virginia Tech Special Collections preserves a group of eighteen photographs and negatives documenting the June 30 wreck. The Norfolk & Western Historical Society also maintains photographs of the wreckage and cleanup.
Locomotive No. 2092 was so badly damaged that it never returned to service.
For Maybeury, the accident became one of the defining events in the community’s railroad history. The enormous trestle had represented the industrial power of the railroad and its ability to cross the difficult mountain landscape. The wreck demonstrated how quickly that power could become destructive.
Photographs of twisted metal beneath the trestle preserved the event long after the physical wreckage disappeared.
The Angle Mine and the Later Coal Years
Mining continued around Maybeury well into the twentieth century.
The Angle operation became one of the prominent mines associated with the area. Federal coal-analysis records contain samples from the Angle Mine approximately two miles northeast of Maybeury, providing direct evidence of the coal seams being worked in the district during the early twentieth century.
Norfolk & Western photographs later documented the Angle tipple and washer near Maybeury and U.S. Route 52. Photographs from 1949 and 1955 show the industrial facilities still operating during the postwar era.
By then, however, the coal industry was beginning to change.
Mechanization allowed companies to produce large quantities of coal with fewer workers. Improved highways gave families greater mobility. Residents were no longer as dependent upon company stores or houses located immediately beside the mine where they worked.
Some mines closed. Others consolidated.
The relationship between company and community gradually weakened.
The Decline of the Company Town
The decline of Maybeury was not caused by a single event.
Instead, the economic system that had created the community slowly changed around it.
Automobiles allowed residents to travel farther for shopping and employment. Improved roads connected previously isolated coal camps with larger towns. Mechanization reduced the number of miners required underground. Corporate consolidation changed the organization of local mining operations.
Pocahontas Fuel eventually ended major operations in the Maybeury area during the middle of the twentieth century.
The old company store survived.
After company control ended, the building entered private ownership and continued operating as a local market until 1980. A structure built during the early years of industrial coal mining therefore continued serving Maybeury residents for roughly eight decades.
Its survival made it an increasingly rare reminder of the original company-town landscape.
In 1991, historians prepared a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the building. The documentation described the store as one of the earliest surviving company stores in McDowell County and one of the few surviving wooden examples of its kind.
The Pocahontas Fuel Company Store was placed on the National Register in 1992.
Despite that recognition, it was eventually demolished.
Its disappearance represents a larger problem across the southern West Virginia coalfields. Many stores, schools, tipples, houses, railroad structures, offices, and other buildings associated with the coal era have disappeared through abandonment, demolition, fire, flooding, redevelopment, or simple deterioration.
In Maybeury, the loss of the company store removed one of the strongest physical connections to the community’s industrial beginnings.
Floods and a Changing McDowell County
The decline of coal employment was not the only challenge facing Maybeury and the communities of the Tug Fork region.
Flooding repeatedly damaged homes, roads, businesses, and public infrastructure throughout McDowell County. The devastating floods of 1977 became serious enough to produce federal congressional hearings concerning flood problems in the Tug Fork Valley.
A businessman from Maybeury, Dan Moore, appeared among those providing testimony connected with the region.
By this period, the problems facing Maybeury had become broader than the fortunes of individual coal mines. Communities throughout southern West Virginia were confronting population loss, declining employment, damaged infrastructure, flooding, and the long-term consequences of industrial development.
Many families left the region in search of work.
Businesses closed.
Schools consolidated.
Buildings disappeared.
The densely populated coal landscape of the early and middle twentieth century gradually became much quieter.
Remembering Maybeury
The population living in modern Maybeury is only a fraction of the number of people who once lived throughout the larger Maybeury-Switchback mining district.
Census boundaries have changed over time, which makes exact comparisons difficult. Earlier government records sometimes grouped Maybeury and Switchback together, while modern census geography defines Maybeury differently. Even with those limitations, the surviving records demonstrate a substantial decline from the period when thousands of residents lived in the connected mining communities along this section of the railroad.
Yet population decline does not erase historical importance.
Maybeury left behind one of the richer documentary records among McDowell County’s smaller coal communities.
Virginia Tech’s Pocahontas Mines Collection contains property maps, mining maps, engineering drawings, photographs, and records directly connected with Maybeury and Lick Branch. One surviving document maps the property of Pocahontas Fuel Company at Lick Branch and Maybeury, while another Maybeury Land Company map records parcels and U.S. Highway 52 through portions of Mercer and McDowell counties.
The Eastern Regional Coal Archives preserves photographs, company records, correspondence, railroad material, newspapers, and private collections documenting the larger Pocahontas coalfield. Among its holdings are photographs specifically identified with Maybeury, including wide views of the community dating to around 1930.
Norfolk & Western records preserve the railroad landscape.
State mine reports preserve production and accident information.
Federal geological reports preserve information about the coal itself.
Census schedules preserve families and occupations.
Vital records preserve births, marriages, and deaths.
Court records preserve disputes involving the companies that operated around Maybeury.
Together, those sources make it possible to reconstruct a community whose physical landscape has been greatly altered.
Why Maybeury Matters
Maybeury’s history represents much more than the history of one small community in McDowell County.
It tells the story of industrial Appalachia.
Within only a few decades, railroad construction transformed an isolated mountain landscape into part of a national industrial economy. Coal companies opened mines and constructed settlements. Workers arrived from across the United States and overseas. Houses, schools, churches, stores, railroad stations, tipples, and coke ovens appeared along the narrow valleys.
Families made homes among them.
The community experienced both the prosperity and danger of coal mining. Nearby Lick Branch suffered two catastrophic explosions within weeks of one another. The railroad that sustained the town produced its own tragedy when locomotive No. 2092 plunged from the Maybeury trestle in 1937.
Then the economic system changed.
Mines closed or consolidated. Mechanization reduced employment. Roads and automobiles weakened the isolation that had sustained company stores. Families moved away. Historic buildings disappeared.
Still, Maybeury endured.
That endurance is important because coal companies may have constructed much of the original physical settlement, but residents transformed it into something larger than a company town. They created families, churches, schools, friendships, traditions, and memories that survived changes in corporate ownership and the eventual decline of the mining economy.
Today, the railroad corridor, surviving homes, altered hillsides, old foundations, archival photographs, engineering plans, mining records, and family histories continue to reveal pieces of the community that once existed there.
Maybeury may occupy only a small place on a modern map, but its history reaches into some of the largest themes in Appalachian history: coal, railroads, migration, industrialization, company control, disaster, community, decline, and survival.
Like so many places scattered through the southern West Virginia coalfields, Maybeury is evidence that the size of a community today tells us very little about the importance of the history beneath it.
Sources & Further Reading
Chambers, S. Allen, Jr. “Maybeury.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://sah-archipedia.org/essays/WV-01-0003-0002-0001
Chambers, S. Allen, Jr. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Store.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/WV-01-MD1
Chatman, Jay. McDowell County Coal and Rail. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. https://books.google.com/books/about/McDowell_County_Coal_and_Rail.html?id=xn2VEQAAQBAJ
Edwards, Richard E. Coals and Cokes in West Virginia: A Hand-Book on the Coals and Cokes of the Great Kanawha, New River, Flat Top, and Adjacent Coal Districts in West Virginia. New York, 1892. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Coals_and_cokes_in_West_Virginia%3B_a_hand-book_on_the_coals_and_cokes_of_the_Great_Kanawha%2C_New_River%2C_Flat_Top%2C_and_adjacent_coal_districts_in_West_Virginia_%28IA_coalscokesinwest00edwarich%29.pdf
Lick Branch Mine Relief Committee. Letter concerning the Lick Branch Mine explosions. February 24, 1909. Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Bluefield, West Virginia. Transcription available at https://www.wvgw.net/wvcoal/branch.html
McDowell County Evaluation Project. McDowell County Evaluation Project, 1953–1968. A&M 1627. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/wvmturhc_repositories_2_resources_5021
National Coal Heritage Area. Coal Heritage Survey Update. National Park Service. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
National Park Service. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Store, Maybeury, McDowell County, West Virginia.” National Register of Historic Places, NRIS 92000324. April 17, 1992. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/92000324
National Park Service and West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500726_text
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Angle Tipple Near Maybeury.” Photograph PA00089. July 28, 1949. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=129404
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Diagram of Pocahontas-Flat Top Coal Fields.” June 24, 1912. HS-H10090. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=114604
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Line from Bluestone to Ennis with Projected Low Grade Tunnel Line, Bluestone to Maybeury.” December 4, 1906. HS-F02468. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=211801
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Little Fork of Elkhorn Branches, Proposed Change of Track for County Road, Maybeury.” October 22, 1917. HS-C03618. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=202627
Norfolk and Western Railway. “New River Division and Branches West of Bluefield.” Office of the Chief Engineer. February 13, 1888. HS-CC10077. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=99344
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Plan Showing Territory in Vicinity of Maybeury West Va.” May 8, 1945. HS-D00095. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=98366
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Angle Tipple, Maybeury.” Photograph NW08371. 1955. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=167554
Norfolk and Western Railway. “Proposed Grade Change at Maybeury.” January 30, 1919. HS-D11166. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=161103
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Locomotive No. 2092.” Norfolk & Western Steam Locomotive Roster. https://www.nwhs.org/data/steam/view.php?ID=2188
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “N&W Clean Up of Derailment at Maybeury, WV.” Photograph NW08071. June 30, 1937. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=126003
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/appalachian-collection/appalachian-studies-bibliography/appalachian-studies-bibliography-1994-2012/coal-industry-labor-railroads-transportation
Sone, Stacy. “Pocahontas Fuel Company Store.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office and National Park Service, 1991. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/279178f6-43e8-46ab-b43b-6719fbab29ba
United States Bureau of Mines. Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States, 1810–1958. Bulletin 586. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12740/m1/39/
United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census of Population: West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/pc-08/pc-8-47.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Bramwell Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1924. Historical Topographic Map Collection. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/PDF/WV/62500/WV_Bramwell_253366_1924_62500_geo.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Mineral Resources of the United States, Calendar Year 1909. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911. https://apps.usgs.gov/minerals-information-archives/mineral-resources-1893-1933/mr-1909-nonmetals.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1915. Bulletin 632. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0632/report.pdf
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Norfolk and Western Railway Train Wreck in West Virginia, 1937.” Named/Individual Photograph Collections, Photographs-002. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/66762
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
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “McDowell County-Maybeury.” Oral History Collections. West Virginia University. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/oral-history/index
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Maybeury Train Wreck, 1937.” Box 1, Folder 19. William Archer Research Papers regarding McDowell and Mercer Counties, A&M 4388. West Virginia University. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/wvmturhc_repositories_2_resources_6481_c03_c13
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “Contested Election of 1888.” West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/government/1888/1888election2.html
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. McDowell County Circuit Court Case Files. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “Maybeury.” Place Names in West Virginia. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamm.html
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. West Virginia Vital Research Records. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Disasters, 1884 to Present.” Charleston, WV. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
Author Note: Maybeury is one of the many McDowell County communities whose modern size can hide the remarkable industrial history beneath the landscape. This article was written to preserve the stories of the miners, railroad workers, families, businesses, and institutions that made Maybeury a community rather than simply a coal camp.