Mohegan, McDowell County: From Deegans and Monarch to Pando No. 7

Appalachian Community Histories – Mohegan, McDowell County: From Deegans and Monarch to Pando No. 7

Few small coal communities in McDowell County were documented as closely by federal photographers as Mohegan. In September 1938, Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott traveled through the area and photographed miners, their wives and children, abandoned company houses, a former boarding house, slag heaps, roads, and the remains of a coal tipple. Eight years later, another major documentary photographer, Russell Lee, arrived with a federal coal survey and again pointed his camera toward Mohegan, this time recording the company housing of Pando Coal Company’s No. 7 mine. Pasted markdown

Those two photographic visits capture only part of the story. Mohegan had already passed through several names and several coal companies before Wolcott arrived. State records remember the place as Deegans, then Monarch, and finally Mohegan. Court records trace coal leases through New Pocahontas Coal Company, Monarch Smokeless Coal Company, and Welch Pocahontas Coal Company, while later federal records place Pando Coal Company at Mohegan during the 1940s. The result is an unusually well documented example of how a southern West Virginia coal camp could change names, operators, and fortunes while families continued living among the remains of earlier mining booms.

Before Mohegan Was Mohegan

The West Virginia State Archives preserves one of the simplest clues to the community’s complicated identity. Its historical place name index lists Mohegan in McDowell County and identifies it as formerly Deegans and Monarch. A separate entry for Monarch simply directs researchers back to Mohegan. The record places the Mohegan name in use by 1930, although it does not explain exactly when each transition occurred.

Deegans belonged to the first phase of the community’s coal history. West Virginia mining records identify New Pocahontas Coal Company with a mine at Deegans, and the state’s 1923 Department of Mines report lists the company among McDowell County operators. Contemporary Bluefield newspaper material from the same period also connects New Pocahontas Coal Company with Deegans.

The name itself may have been connected to W. E. Deegans, who appears in later court records as one of several people who had held interests in the coal leases before they passed to New Pocahontas Coal Company. The surviving court opinion does not explicitly state that the community was named for him, however, so the connection should remain a possibility rather than a certainty. What the case does establish is that W. E. Deegans, W. H. McCulloch, William Brown, and O. C. Huffman had been associated with the leaseholds before 1912. Those interests were eventually assigned to New Pocahontas.

By the early 1920s, the operation was substantial enough to attract a new round of corporate interest. On January 1, 1923, Bankers Pocahontas Coal Company and New Pocahontas Coal Company entered a new agreement extending existing leases for thirty years. The agreement fixed royalties at eight cents per ton and established a minimum annual royalty of $5,000. The leased properties covered roughly 1,350 acres in McDowell County.

From Deegans to Monarch

The next major change came quickly. On January 14, 1924, New Pocahontas Coal Company assigned its interests in the property to Monarch Smokeless Coal Company. According to the West Virginia Supreme Court’s later account of the transaction, Monarch paid $300,000 through cash and installments and assumed the obligations attached to the leases.

The company name soon became attached to the place itself. The state archives’ sequence of Deegans, Monarch, and Mohegan suggests that the coal camp followed the identity of its operator, a common pattern in company towns where the mine, post office, store, railroad siding, and settlement could all become associated with the corporation controlling local employment.

By 1931, newspapers were using the name Mohegan while still identifying the operation with Monarch Smokeless Coal Company. On June 30, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported that Edwin C. Wade had been elected president of Monarch Smokeless, succeeding the late D. H. Barger. More important for reconstructing Mohegan itself, the newspaper described Monarch’s plant as operating at Mohegan on the Norfolk and Western main line and gave the plant a capacity of approximately 18,000 tons per month. Its coal was handled by Bluefield Coal and Coke Company.

The railroad connection was vital. Like dozens of communities scattered through the Pocahontas coalfield, Mohegan existed within a landscape shaped by rail transportation. Coal had to move quickly from mine to tipple to waiting cars, then outward toward industrial consumers far beyond McDowell County. A place that appeared isolated on a mountain road could therefore be tied directly into one of the largest industrial networks in the nation.

The Collapse of the Monarch Operation

Monarch’s period at Mohegan did not last.

On April 27, 1932, Monarch Smokeless Coal Company transferred its lease to Welch Pocahontas Coal Company for $15,000. Bankers Pocahontas Coal Company, which owned the underlying interest, later claimed that it had not consented to the transfer. Welch Pocahontas assumed the lease obligations but eventually fell behind on its payments.

By November 1934, Welch Pocahontas Coal Company had entered receivership in McDowell County Circuit Court. Its property was ordered sold, and on June 1, 1936, Bankers Pocahontas purchased the lease for only $15 while also acquiring personal property on the premises. The financial dispute eventually reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia in Bankers Pocahontas Coal Company v. Monarch Smokeless Coal Company, decided in 1941.

The court case was concerned primarily with royalties and contractual liability, not with the people of Mohegan, but its dry legal language helps explain what Marion Post Wolcott encountered two years after the 1936 sale. The corporate structure that had sustained the earlier mining operation had unraveled. Lease assignments, unpaid obligations, receivership, and liquidation had left behind a community where the physical remains of industrial investment stood beside families still trying to live in the coalfields.

Marion Post Wolcott Comes to Mohegan

In September 1938, Marion Post Wolcott entered McDowell County with a camera.

Working for the Farm Security Administration, Wolcott was part of the federal documentary photography project that created one of the most important visual records of Depression-era America. At Mohegan she did not merely photograph a tipple or a mine entrance. She photographed the landscape created around mining and the people who remained inside it.

One of her photographs shows houses standing beside the remains of a coal tipple. The Library of Congress caption describes the scene as an abandoned mining town. Another photograph shows a coal miner’s wife with a child. Still another records a former miners’ boarding house where families were living under severe conditions. In one room, a woman and six children shared two beds without water or heat.

Those images make it tempting to imagine that Mohegan had simply died when the earlier company operation failed. Wolcott’s broader series shows a more complicated reality.

Near Mohegan she photographed an old miner riding a donkey along the county road, describing that form of transportation as still common. She photographed miners’ wives walking home with groceries on payday. She documented a small privately owned coal mine along the road and photographed shacks near a burning slag heap. The photographs show decline, but not complete abandonment. People were still working, traveling, shopping, raising children, and living among the remnants of an earlier industrial landscape.

The word “abandoned” in one photograph’s caption should therefore be read carefully. Wolcott was clearly looking at abandoned mining infrastructure and housing associated with a failed operation, but her own camera also recorded living families and continued coal activity in the same community and surrounding area. Mohegan had become something more complicated than either a thriving company town or a ghost town.

It was a coal camp living through transition.

Life After the Old Tipple

Federal census records reinforce that interpretation.

The 1940 census enumeration descriptions place part of Mohegan in Browns Creek Magisterial District, together with part of nearby Premier. Mohegan therefore remained a recognized inhabited place after Wolcott’s 1938 visit, even though portions of its earlier mining complex stood abandoned.

The individual census schedules can take the story even further. They record families in and around Mohegan, including residents employed in coal mining and other occupations. Combined with marriage certificates, death records, mine records, and company documents, those schedules offer the possibility of rebuilding Mohegan not only as a collection of companies but as a community of individual households.

That distinction matters. Coal camp histories are often told through corporate names because companies left behind the easiest records to find. Mine reports list tonnage. Court files preserve leases. Newspapers report company presidents. Federal regulations identify mines and shipping points.

Families left a different archive.

Their history survives through census pages, marriage licenses, death certificates, photographs, school records, and the possessions visible inside company houses. Wolcott’s images are important precisely because they interrupt the corporate record and allow the people who lived through Mohegan’s decline to appear in the story.

Pando No. 7 Brings Another Mining Era

Mohegan’s mining history did not end with the remains photographed in 1938.

By 1944, federal records identify Pando Coal Company’s Pando No. 7 mine in McDowell County. The mine was listed as a deep operation working the Day-Sewell seam, with Mine Index No. 1001 and Mohegan identified as its rail shipping point. Pasted markdown

The surviving records gathered so far do not prove that Pando No. 7 was simply the old Monarch mine reopened under another name. Coal properties, seams, leases, portals, and mine numbers could change independently of community names. What the evidence does establish is that Mohegan once again had an active corporate mining operation associated with it during the 1940s.

That distinction makes the 1938 photographs even more interesting. Wolcott captured the ruins of one phase of Mohegan’s coal economy only a few years before federal records and photographs documented another.

Russell Lee Photographs Mohegan

On August 6, 1946, photographer Russell Lee came to Mohegan.

The circumstances of his visit were very different from Wolcott’s. Earlier that year, a major national coal strike had resulted in federal intervention in the bituminous coal industry. As part of the settlement, the government undertook a broad survey of miners’ health, housing, medical care, and community conditions. Lee was assigned to photograph coal communities across the country as part of that investigation. The National Archives now preserves thousands of photographs from the project.

At Mohegan, Lee photographed the Pando Coal Company housing associated with Pando No. 7.

One image shows a miner’s wife filling a lunch bucket inside the family’s home. Lee’s caption specifically identifies the family as living in a company housing project at Pando No. 7 in Mohegan, McDowell County. Another photograph records the kitchen of a miner’s home. A third shows several houses in the Pando company housing project. The three surviving images sit together in the federal survey and provide a compact but valuable record of domestic life in Mohegan eight years after Wolcott photographed the community.

Lee’s photographs belonged to a survey much larger than Mohegan. Federal investigators examined mining communities across twenty-two states, while Lee photographed miners in thirteen states. The study investigated housing, health, sanitation, medical facilities, and working conditions. Its findings appeared in the 1947 federal report A Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry and in the photographic supplement The Coal Miner and His Family.

For Mohegan, Lee’s images give historians something rare: a second federal photographic record made only eight years after the first.

Two Cameras, Eight Years Apart

Placed beside one another, the Wolcott and Lee photographs tell a story that corporate records alone cannot.

Wolcott’s 1938 Mohegan contains abandoned houses, the remains of a tipple, crowded living conditions, a burning slag heap, miners’ families traveling along the road, and people continuing to make a life amid economic uncertainty. Lee’s 1946 Mohegan contains Pando Coal Company housing and the domestic routines of a miner’s household preparing for another day underground.

Between those photographic visits came a world war, enormous demand for coal, federal wartime regulation, and another change in company ownership and operations.

Yet the basic relationship between coal and home remained visible.

A miner’s shift began in a kitchen where someone packed his lunch. Company housing placed domestic life only a short distance from industrial work. Roads carried families toward stores and towns on payday. Tipples, railroad tracks, slag heaps, company houses, and mine openings occupied the same narrow valleys where children grew up.

Mining was never confined to the portal.

It shaped the entire community.

What Remains of Mohegan’s Story

Today Mohegan does not carry the national recognition of larger McDowell County coal communities such as Gary, Coalwood, or Welch. Its historical importance lies partly in the opposite fact. Mohegan represents hundreds of smaller coal places whose names appeared briefly in mine reports and railroad schedules before changes in ownership, mechanization, transportation, and population transformed them.

Its unusually strong documentary record allows the community to be followed through those changes.

The state archives preserve the transition from Deegans to Monarch to Mohegan. A West Virginia Supreme Court case reconstructs much of the ownership history. Contemporary newspapers describe Monarch’s plant while it was still operating. Federal photographers captured the community during the Depression. Census records confirm that families remained there. Wartime records document Pando No. 7. Russell Lee then returned the federal camera to Mohegan in 1946 and photographed another generation of company housing. Pasted markdown

What emerges is not the story of a place that simply rose and disappeared.

Mohegan was repeatedly remade.

Companies changed. Leases changed hands. The community changed names. One industrial complex declined while another operation appeared. Families lived beside structures that belonged to an earlier coal economy while new miners descended into another mine nearby.

That is what makes Mohegan valuable to the history of the Appalachian coalfields. Its story shows that a coal camp could experience several lives within a single generation, each one leaving behind another name, another company record, another row of houses, and another layer of memory.

The federal photographers happened to arrive twice.

Because they did, Mohegan’s people can still look back at us.

Sources & Further Reading

Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. “Houses in Abandoned Mining Town with Remains of Coal Tipple at Right, Mohegan, West Virginia.” September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017752418/

Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. “Coal Miner’s Wife and Child, Mohegan, West Virginia.” September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017752405/

Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. “Part of One Family Living in Miner’s Boarding House. One Woman and Six Children Live in One Room. Two Beds, No Water, No Heat. Mohegan, West Virginia.” September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017799371/

Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. “Shack by Burning Slag Heap on Main Country Road near Mohegan, West Virginia.” September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017799462/

Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. “Closeup of Shack near Burning Slag Heap on Main County Road near Mohegan, West Virginia.” September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017799466/

Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. “Old Miner on Donkey, Still Quite a Common Means of Transportation, in County Road near Mohegan, West Virginia.” September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017752399/

Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. “[Untitled Photo, Possibly Related to: Fence Gate in Coal Miner’s Front Yard, Mohegan, West Virginia].” September 1938. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017752392/

Lee, Russell. “Wife of Miner Filling Lunch Bucket. They Live in Company Housing Project. Pando Coal Company, Pando No. 7 Mine, Mohegan, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 6, 1946. Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War, Record Group 245, National Archives. National Archives Identifier 540678. https://visit.archives.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/power-light-photo-list.pdf

Lee, Russell. “Kitchen in Home of Miner, Pando Coal Company, Pando No. 7 Mine, Mohegan, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 6, 1946. Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War, Record Group 245, National Archives. National Archives Identifier 540679. https://visit.archives.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/power-light-photo-list.pdf

Lee, Russell. “Some of Houses in Company Housing Project. Pando Coal Company, Pando No. 7 Mine, Mohegan, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 6, 1946. Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War, Record Group 245, National Archives. National Archives Identifier 540680. https://visit.archives.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/power-light-photo-list.pdf

National Archives and Records Administration. “Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War [SFAW], Record Group 245.” Guide to Federal Records. The photographic holdings include approximately 4,100 images from the 1946–1947 medical survey of coal communities. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/245.html

United States Coal Mines Administration. A Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry: Report of the Coal Mines Administration. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947. National Archives Identifier 312186755. https://docsteach.org/document/medical-survey-bituminous-coal-industry/

United States Coal Mines Administration. The Coal Miner and His Family: A Supplement to A Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947. National Archives Identifier 312186929. https://docsteach.org/document/coal-miner-and-his-family-supplemental/

United States Government. “Pando Coal Company, Pando No. 7 Mine, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Federal Register, September 8, 1944. The entry identifies the operation as a deep mine in the Day-Sewell seam with Mohegan as its rail shipping point. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1944-09-08/pdf/FR-1944-09-08.pdf

Bankers Pocahontas Coal Co. v. Monarch Smokeless Coal Co., 123 W. Va. 53, 14 S.E.2d 922. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, 1941. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1941/123-w-va-53.html

“Wade Named Head of Monarch Smokeless Coal Co.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, June 30, 1931, 7. https://newspaperarchive.com/bluefield-daily-telegraph-jun-30-1931-p-7/

West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Entry for “Mohegan (Monegan?), McDowell,” identifying the community as formerly Deegans and Monarch. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamm.html

West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/

West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” West Virginia Department of Commerce. The collection contains more than 80,000 digitized mine-map images and indexes searchable by company, mine, seam, and county. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/

Battlo, Jean. McDowell County: In West Virginia and American History. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1998. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/files/d/35c65bfe-5457-4df3-a45f-2ced15355960/appalachian-studies-bibliography-cumulation-1994-2012.pdf

Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. https://utpress.org/9780870493416/miners-millhands-and-mountaineers/

Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. https://books.google.com/books?id=yYRXBPACntAC

Author Note: Mohegan’s history survives through an unusually rich combination of court records, mining documents, newspapers, and photographs made by Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee. Together, these sources reveal a McDowell County coal community that changed names and companies several times while generations of mining families continued to call the valley home.