Appalachian Community Histories – Monarch, Lee County and the Coalfield Community Near St. Charles
Monarch, in Lee County, Virginia, is not easily read as a traditional town. It does not appear in the record trail the same way Jonesville, Pennington Gap, or even St. Charles do. Instead, Monarch survives as a coalfield place name. It appears in local references, railroad history, road names, coalfield mapping, legal descriptions, and community memory. The strongest evidence points to Monarch as a St. Charles-area mining community tied to Straight Creek, nearby coal operations, and the larger industrial geography of northern Lee County.
That makes Monarch a different kind of Appalachian place. It was not only a dot on a map. It was a lived locality, a mine and tipple area, a name attached to roads and families, and part of the wider St. Charles coal world. In the records, Monarch is easiest to see when it is placed beside St. Charles, Benedict, Imperial, Blue Gem, Keokee, Calvin, and the St. Charles Branch railroad. Those names form the industrial neighborhood where Monarch belonged.
The Coal Country Around St. Charles
The story of Monarch begins with the coal-bearing country of northern Lee County. A. W. Giles’s 1925 Virginia Geological Survey report on the coal-bearing portion of Lee County remains one of the strongest starting points for the region. Virginia Energy describes the Giles report as a 216-page work with plates, figures, coal analyses, mine and prospect locations, drill holes, and a geologic map covering the coal-bearing portion of Lee County in the Southwest Virginia Coalfield.
That kind of source matters because Monarch was not a courthouse town or a farm village first. It was part of a coal landscape. The seams, rail connections, tipples, and hollow settlements shaped where people lived and how names appeared in public records. The Lee County Story summarizes the larger change this way: after the Civil War, railroad construction and mining development became one of the county’s biggest turning points. The same source notes that late nineteenth-century boosters emphasized the county’s coal, iron, timber, and the need for better access to markets.
Monarch fits into that pattern. It was a place made legible by coal. Mines and rail lines gave names to hollows, camps, roads, and tipples. A settlement did not need a charter to become known. In coal country, a name could become fixed because men worked there, families shopped there, trains loaded there, and newspapers used the name often enough for readers to understand it.
Monarch in the Newspaper Record
The Powell Valley News gives some of the clearest evidence that Monarch was more than a mine label. In 1925, the paper referred to Anna Alsup “of near Monarch” visiting at Benedict, and later that year it reported that Mr. and Mrs. Worley Alsup “of Monarch” were in Pennington. These short local items are valuable because they show Monarch being used as a community identity for ordinary residents.
A 1927 Powell Valley News land notice gives another important clue. It described property located two miles from St. Charles on Straight Creek, near Blue Gem Coal Company and near the “Monarch coal district.” That phrase is one of the strongest newspaper clues for understanding the name. Monarch was not only a household location. It was also understood as part of a coal district or local mining area close to St. Charles and Straight Creek.
Later newspaper OCR results also point to Monarch as a continued community name and mining reference. A 1951 Powell Valley News result mentions a sewing club in the “Monarch community,” while 1945 and 1959 results point to “Imperial and Monarch mines” and a “Monarch mine” shutdown. Those later newspaper hits should be checked against scanned page images because OCR can misread old newspaper type, but they are strong leads for the next level of research.
The St. Charles Connection
Monarch cannot be separated from St. Charles. St. Charles became the town name and legal center for the immediate coal community. The Virginia Legislative Information System lists St. Charles in Lee County as incorporated by Circuit Court on January 10, 1914. The same state charter page notes that the town was terminated in 2022.
The 2022 act terminating St. Charles helps explain the arc of many coal towns in Southwest Virginia. The General Assembly stated that St. Charles had been created by the Circuit Court of Lee County on January 10, 1914, that it was never granted a General Assembly charter as current law required, and that it had ceased to function as a town under Virginia law.
For Monarch, the importance of St. Charles is not that Monarch disappeared into it, but that St. Charles gives the legal frame around the area. Monarch appears to have functioned as a smaller locality within the St. Charles coal world. St. Charles had the town government, school, stores, churches, clinics, and central community memory. Monarch had the coalfield name, the road, the tipple and mine associations, and the neighborhood identity.
The Railroad and the Tipple
Coal towns in Lee County were shaped by railroads as much as by county lines. The St. Charles Branch connected mines and tipples to the wider market. Appalachian Railroad Modeling’s prototype history of the branch identifies major tipples at Dominion, Mayflower, Bonny Blue, Darby, Monarch, Imperial, Benedict, Keokee, and Calvin.
That list places Monarch among the working coal-shipping points of the branch. The same project’s track plan describes the modeled end of the Southern Railway’s St. Charles Branch as including Monarch and Benedict, and it notes that the Monarch tipple was demolished in the 1960s.
Although a model railroad source is not the same as a railroad valuation map or company record, it is useful because it draws on prototype railroad history and names the same coal points that appear in local history. The next primary-source step would be Southern Railway valuation maps, Interstate Commerce Commission valuation records, station lists, timetables, freight records, and mine maps for the St. Charles Branch.
Roads, Clinics, and Modern Memory
Even after the coal boom, Monarch did not vanish from local geography. Modern records still preserve the name. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Prevention Information Network lists Stone Mountain Health Services’ St. Charles Community Health Clinic at 241 Monarch Road in Saint Charles.
The name also appears in public infrastructure records. Virginia’s 2023 Appalachian Regional Commission award recommendations included a Lee County project titled “St. Charles Monarch Water Line Replacement” for $700,000.
Lee County legal boundary language also keeps Monarch in official use. A county election district boundary description refers to an unnamed and unimproved extension of Virginia State Route 636 “at Monarch,” then follows the St. Charles and Robbins Chapel precinct line.
Those modern references are not just leftovers. They show that Monarch remains a usable place name for roads, services, boundaries, and local infrastructure. In Appalachia, many coal camp names survive this way. The company store may close, the tipple may be gone, and the incorporated town may lose its charter, but the name remains attached to land, memory, and public work.
What Monarch Represents
Monarch’s story is the story of a place that belonged to the coalfields without becoming a formal town in the ordinary civic sense. It was close to St. Charles, connected to Straight Creek, tied to Blue Gem, Imperial, Benedict, and other mining places, and remembered through roads and records long after its industrial landscape changed.
The records suggest a community built around work, proximity, and naming. Newspaper items used Monarch to identify people. Land notices used Monarch to describe property. Railroad history used Monarch to identify a tipple point. Modern road, clinic, waterline, and precinct records still use Monarch to orient people on the ground.
That is often how coalfield communities survive in the historical record. They are not always preserved by a town hall, a charter, or a neat census table. Sometimes they remain in mine maps, deed books, school memories, church rolls, newspaper columns, and the name of a road that still tells you where you are.
Sources & Further Reading
Giles, A. W. Geology and Coal Resources of the Coal-Bearing Portion of Lee County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 26. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1925. https://www.energy.virginia.gov/commerce/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=2299
Giles, A. W. Geology and Coal Resources of the Coal-Bearing Portion of Lee County, Virginia. Internet Archive scan. 1925. https://archive.org/details/geologycoalresou26gile
United States Geological Survey. “Monarch, Populated Place, Lee County, Virginia.” Geographic Names Information System, Feature ID 1497021. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/1497021
United States Geological Survey. Pennington Gap Quadrangle, Virginia. Historic topographic map collection. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
United States Geological Survey. Pennington Gap, Virginia, 2022. US Topo map. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Powell Valley News. Pennington Gap, Virginia. Digitized newspaper issues, Library of Virginia microfilm source set. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/powell-valley-news
Powell Valley News. Pennington Gap, Virginia. 1925 digitized issue text. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/powell-valley-news-1925/Powell%20Valley%20News%20%281925%29_djvu.txt
Powell Valley News. Pennington Gap, Virginia. 1927 digitized issue text. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/powell-valley-news-1927/Powell%20Valley%20News%20%281927%29_djvu.txt
Powell Valley News. Pennington Gap, Virginia. 1951 digitized issue text. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/powell-valley-news-1951/Powell%20Valley%20News%20%281951%29_djvu.txt
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Chronicle: Digital Newspaper Archive.” https://virginiachronicle.com/
Library of Virginia. “Lee County Microfilm.” County and city records collection. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/local/results_all.asp?CountyID=VA165
Lee County Circuit Court. St. Charles incorporation petition and court order records, November 5, 1913, and January 10, 1914. Lee County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office, Jonesville, Virginia.
Virginia General Assembly. “Charter: St. Charles.” Virginia Law. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/st-charles/
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act to Provide for the Termination of the Town of St. Charles in Lee County.” 2022 Acts of Assembly, Chapter 89. https://lis.blob.core.windows.net/legacy/844916.PDF
Lee County, Virginia. “Election Districts.” Code of Lee County, Virginia. American Legal Publishing. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/leecountyva/latest/leecounty_va/0-0-0-854
Virginia Department of Energy. “Coal Mine Mapping.” https://energy.virginia.gov/geology/coalminemapping.shtml
Virginia Department of Energy. “Abandoned Mine Land Inventory.” https://energy.virginia.gov/coal/mined-land-repurposing/aml-inventory.shtml
Sites, R. S., and K. K. Hostettler. “Southwest Virginia Underground Coal Mine Map Database and Base Maps: Synopsis of an Ongoing Coalfield Project.” AAPG Bulletin 77, no. 8. 1993. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6706572
United States Bureau of Mines. Minerals Yearbook. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Various years. https://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/EZIDB5YH4RRLU8O
United States Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Lee County, Virginia. Population schedules. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources
United States Census Bureau. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Lee County, Virginia. Population schedules. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources
United States Census Bureau. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Lee County, Virginia. Population schedules. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources
United States Census Bureau. Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950: Lee County, Virginia. Population schedules. National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/
United States Geological Survey. Mineral Resources of the United States. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Various years. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2024/mcs2024.pdf
United States Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. Transportation of Coal. 63rd Cong., 2nd sess. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914. https://www.google.com/books
Interstate Commerce Commission. Valuation Reports Concerning Southern Railway and Related Lines. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. https://catalog.archives.gov/
Norfolk Southern Historical Society. “Archives and Research.” https://www.norfolksouthernhs.org/
Southern Railway Historical Association. “Archives.” https://www.srha.net/
Appalachian Railroad Modeling. “St. Charles Branch Prototype History.” https://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/stcharlesbranch/prototype/
Appalachian Railroad Modeling. “St. Charles Branch Track Plan.” https://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/stcharlesbranch/track-plan/
Schnabel, Megan. “‘I Can’t Make the Town Stay There.’” Cardinal News, January 26, 2022. https://cardinalnews.org/2022/01/26/i-cant-make-the-town-stay-there/
Hearts of Appalachia. “St. Charles, VA: A Coal Town Full of Heart and History.” 2025. https://heartsofappalachia.com/st-charles-va-a-coal-town-full-of-heart-and-history/
“The Lee County Story: St. Charles.” The Lee County Story. https://www.theleecountystory.com/st-charles/
“The Lee County Story: Coal and Rail in the County.” The Lee County Story. https://www.theleecountystory.com/coal-and-rail-in-the-county/
Culbertson, Charles G., and Ed Duncan. Lee County, Virginia: A Pictorial History. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company Publishers, 1988. https://www.worldcat.org/
Cox, W. Eugene, and Joyce Cox. Keokee, Virginia: Origins of an Appalachian Coal Mining Community. 2007. https://www.worldcat.org/
FamilySearch. “Lee County, Virginia Genealogy.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Lee_County,_Virginia_Genealogy
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Prevention Information Network. “Stone Mountain Health Services: St Charles Community Health Clinic.” https://npin.cdc.gov/organization/stone-mountain-health-services-1
Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. “2023 Appalachian Regional Commission Award Recommendations.” https://dhcd.virginia.gov/2023-appalachian-regional-commission-award-recommendations
Virginia Department of Transportation. “Virginia Roads and Transportation Records.” https://www.virginiadot.org/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “VCRIS: Virginia Cultural Resource Information System.” https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/v-cris/
Library of Congress. “Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/
Library of Congress. “Railroad Maps, 1828 to 1900.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/railroad-maps-1828-to-1900/
Chronicling America. “Historic American Newspapers.” Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Author Note: Monarch is one of those coalfield places that survives more in records, roads, and memory than in a neat town history. I wrote this one to treat the name seriously, because places like Monarch are often how Appalachian communities remain visible after the mines and tipples are gone.