Appalachian Community Histories – North Elkin, McDowell County: Adkin, Elkhorn, North Fork, and the Coalfield District They Became
North Elkin sounds like the name of an old mountain district, the sort of place that might appear on nineteenth-century deeds or faded railroad maps. In reality, the name is much younger than most of the communities it contains. North Elkin District did not exist during the first great development of the Pocahontas coalfield, when railroads entered eastern McDowell County and mining towns appeared in hollows that had previously held only scattered farms and mountain settlements.
The United States Census Bureau records that Adkin, Elkhorn, and North Fork districts were combined between the 1980 and 1990 censuses to create North Elkin District. The historical material gathered for this article likewise shows why the district cannot be understood by searching only for the words “North Elkin.” Its history is really the combined history of three older districts and the coal communities, railroads, mines, stores, schools, churches, and families that developed within them.
A New District Made from Older Communities
The 1990 census provides the clearest documentary starting point. It states directly that Adkin, Elkhorn, and North Fork districts were combined to form North Elkin. Their combined 1980 population had been 11,676, with 4,099 housing units. By 1990, the newly defined North Elkin District contained 7,708 residents and 3,500 housing units spread across roughly 122 square miles. Anawalt and Gary were located within the district, along with portions of Northfork and Welch.
Those census figures capture the district at the end of an industrial age rather than at its beginning. By the time officials placed the North Elkin name across the map, many of the mines responsible for creating its communities had already closed. Company housing had been sold or abandoned, rail traffic had diminished, and places that had once supported thousands of miners and their families were losing population.
The administrative district was new. The landscape beneath it was not.
To understand North Elkin, it is necessary to go back almost a century before its creation, to a time when Elkhorn, North Fork, and the upper Tug Fork were becoming part of one of the most heavily industrialized coal regions in Appalachia.
Before Coal Changed Eastern McDowell County
McDowell County remained thinly populated through much of the nineteenth century. The mountains were steep, roads were poor, and many settlements followed narrow creeks and river bottoms where small farms could be maintained. Coal was present in enormous quantities beneath the mountains, but coal buried in an isolated hollow had little commercial value without a way to move it to outside markets.
The Norfolk and Western Railway changed that equation.
The railroad reached Pocahontas, Virginia, in 1883 and pushed westward toward McDowell County. By the middle and later 1880s it had reached Elkhorn, and in 1892 the Ohio Extension connected the eastern coalfield with western markets. Rail lines and coal development quickly became inseparable. Branches followed creeks into previously isolated hollows, while coal companies acquired mineral rights and constructed mines, tipples, coke ovens, stores, houses, schools, and churches beside the tracks.
The population figures reveal how rapidly the transformation occurred. McDowell County contained only 3,076 people in 1880. The population reached 7,300 in 1890, 18,747 in 1900, and 47,856 by 1910. Mining employment rose at the same time. A historical survey drawing from West Virginia mining records noted no miners in the county in 1888, 740 in 1889, and 1,347 in 1890. Within two decades the county had become an industrial destination for workers arriving from elsewhere in Appalachia, the American South, and overseas.
This was the world from which the future North Elkin District emerged.
Elkhorn and the First Railroad Coal Towns
Elkhorn was among the earliest places in the future North Elkin landscape to feel the full force of industrialization. Its importance was closely tied to the advance of the Norfolk and Western Railway. The McDowell Progress, the county’s early newspaper, moved to Elkhorn in 1889 when the community stood at the edge of railroad expansion. The newspaper later moved to Welch as the rail line and county’s commercial center shifted westward.
Coal development had already begun around Elkhorn. The professional McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey identifies the Crozer Coal and Coke Company as operating there from 1887, along with Houston Coal and Coke beginning in 1887 and Upland Coal and Coke in 1890. Engineer John J. Lincoln became one of the important figures in the community’s development through his work with the Crozer Land Association. His surviving house, built in 1899, became one of the architectural reminders of the industrial hierarchy that shaped the town.
Elkhorn was not simply a collection of mine openings. Housing, churches, transportation, and company administration occupied the same narrow valley. St. Mary’s Greek Catholic Church, constructed in 1912, reflected another part of the coalfield story: immigrant families who carried their religious traditions into southern West Virginia while becoming part of the mining economy.
The railroad corridor spreading outward from Elkhorn produced other communities as well. The historic survey traces the Norfolk and Western main line through Maybeury, Switchback, Elkhorn, Upland, and Powhatan, while the Ohio Extension continued through Northfork, Keystone, Eckman, Landgraff, Vivian, Kimball, and eventually toward Welch and communities farther west.
Not all of those communities would later fall inside North Elkin District, but together they formed the connected eastern McDowell coalfield in which the district’s older boundaries developed.
North Fork and a Chain of Mining Communities
North Fork District developed around another set of railroad branches and mining settlements. The Norfolk and Western’s North Fork Branch served places including Algoma, Gilliam, Worth, McDowell, Ashland, and Crumpler. These were communities whose fortunes were tied directly to coal extraction and transportation.
Northfork itself became more than a single-company settlement. The Coal Heritage Survey dates the community to 1901 and identifies several companies that worked nearby, including Algoma Coal and Coke, Fortune Hunter Coal, Island Creek Coal, Elk Ridge Coal, and United Pocahontas Coal. Because so many operations surrounded it, Northfork developed into a commercial center containing stores, hotels, schools, churches, restaurants, railroad facilities, and other businesses serving people from smaller camps in the surrounding hollows.
Across the creek stood Clark, incorporated in 1910. Over time the physical distinction between Clark and Northfork became difficult to maintain, and the two communities consolidated in 1948. The surviving photographs of Northfork show something more complicated than the stereotype of an isolated coal camp. Businesses lined the road while houses climbed the hillsides, and churches, schools, lodges, garages, and stores occupied the small amount of level ground available along the creek and railroad.
Northfork was therefore important not merely because coal was mined nearby, but because it became a gathering place for a much larger industrial district. The Coal Heritage Survey specifically identifies Northfork, along with places such as Anawalt, as a local commercial and social center that served smaller company communities around it.
Adkin and the Upper Tug Fork
The former Adkin District contributed another major part of North Elkin’s history. Here the development of Anawalt and the upper Tug Fork communities shows how quickly an isolated Appalachian landscape could be transformed once railroad access and mining capital arrived.
Anawalt was previously known as Jeannette. A comparison of early United States Geological Survey maps is especially revealing. The 1892 map showed no settlement or railroad at the site, but by the 1909 survey Anawalt appeared as a developed town reached by rail and surrounded by buildings.
The community was named for Major J. W. Anawalt, president of the Union Supply Company, a U.S. Steel subsidiary that operated stores in mining communities. Central Pocahontas Coal Company worked around Anawalt during the early twentieth century, while U.S. Coal and Coke opened its Gary No. 12 operation there beginning in 1909. Unlike some company camps that existed almost entirely because of one mine, Anawalt developed a substantial independent business district. It had a bank and numerous privately owned businesses and became a shopping and entertainment destination for surrounding mining communities.
The railroad serving this region was equally important. Construction of the main Tug Fork Branch between 1902 and 1909 helped connect Havaco, Wilcoe, Gary, Thorpe, Pageton, Anawalt, Leckie, and nearby operations to the wider Norfolk and Western network. Additional branches reached deeper into the mountains.
Every branch represented more than track on a map. It represented mines that could now ship coal, land that suddenly had industrial value, and settlements that could support hundreds or thousands of people.
Gary Hollow and the Power of U.S. Steel
No part of the North Elkin story better demonstrates the scale of industrial coal development than Gary Hollow.
United States Steel organized the United States Coal and Coke Company in 1902 and began developing a massive mining complex around Gary. Unlike an independent coal operator selling primarily to the open market, U.S. Coal and Coke served the needs of U.S. Steel. Coal taken from McDowell County became part of a vertically integrated industrial system stretching from Appalachian mines to steelmaking centers in Pennsylvania and the Great Lakes region.
Gary was named for Elbert H. Gary, one of U.S. Steel’s founders and its first chairman. The company cut timber, opened mines, laid out communities, and constructed housing and public buildings. The Norfolk and Western completed railroad access to the mines of Gary Hollow by 1910. Smaller company settlements extended farther into the hollow, including Elbert, associated with Mine No. 6 beginning in 1903, and Filbert, connected with Mine No. 9 beginning in 1907.
The Library of Congress Historic American Landscapes Survey describes Gary Hollow as a landscape of fourteen historic underground mines and supporting communities. For decades it represented one of the most significant concentrations of coal production in McDowell County. Hundreds of surviving residences and community structures still reveal the scale of the development even after most of the industrial equipment disappeared.
Gary Hollow was carefully organized around the needs of the corporation. Housing differed according to occupation and status, with larger homes provided for supervisors and other higher-ranking employees. Schools and residential sections also reflected the racial segregation of the period. Workers could labor beside one another underground while returning after the shift to neighborhoods divided by race or position within the company hierarchy.
The physical town therefore expressed the industrial structure that created it.
Life Inside the Coal Company Landscape
The coal companies did far more than open mines. Because many mining sites were isolated when development began, operators frequently had to construct nearly everything required for a permanent community.
Rows of company houses appeared along slopes and creek bottoms. Stores sold groceries, clothing, tools, and household goods. Schools educated miners’ children, churches provided places for worship, and boarding houses accommodated unmarried workers. Some camps had clubs, theaters, athletic facilities, or hospitals. In many places company scrip circulated through the local store while rent and other expenses were deducted directly from a miner’s wages.
The system could vary greatly from one community to another. Some places were almost completely controlled by one corporation. Others, particularly Northfork and Anawalt, developed independent businesses and served as commercial centers for nearby camps. That distinction mattered. A family living in a small hollow might depend heavily upon one company, yet only a few miles away stood a town where stores, banks, restaurants, churches, railroad facilities, and other institutions created a broader civic life.
The surviving newspapers offer another perspective. The McDowell Progress documented the first years of railroad and coal expansion around Elkhorn. Later, the McDowell Times of Keystone became one of the most important African American newspapers in West Virginia. Although Keystone lay outside the 1990 North Elkin boundary, the newspaper covered the same interconnected eastern McDowell coal society and documented Black churches, businesses, politics, organizations, and families throughout the region. The Library of Congress notes that the paper began in 1904 and became an important voice for Black residents of the southern West Virginia coalfields.
These sources help restore a history that cannot be recovered from mine production numbers alone.
The Coal Boom Reaches Its Height
By 1910, McDowell County contained 66 coal companies operating 99 mines, compared with 31 companies and 31 mines in 1900. Coal production increased from approximately 4.6 million tons to 13.7 million tons during the same decade. Development continued through the 1920s, and by 1923 the county contained 84 companies operating 138 mines.
The state government’s annual Department of Mines reports recorded this industrial world mine by mine. Company names, mine locations, employment, production, accidents, and fatalities placed communities such as Algoma, Anawalt, Ashland, Elkhorn, Maybeury, and Northfork inside a vast administrative record of coal production. The West Virginia Geological Survey’s 1921 mine directory performed a similar function, connecting post offices and communities to individual mining operations. These records remain particularly valuable because many mines disappeared so completely that only maps, state reports, railroad plans, and scattered ruins now identify their locations.
By the 1920s, the future North Elkin landscape had reached a maturity that would have been almost unimaginable only forty years earlier. What had been sparsely populated mountain country now contained rail yards, coke ovens, tipples, company stores, banks, schools, churches, boarding houses, theaters, and thousands of homes.
Yet the industrial system that created that prosperity was already vulnerable because nearly every part of the local economy depended upon coal.
Depression, Unionization, and War
The Great Depression reduced coal demand and forced mines to close or cut production. U.S. Coal and Coke was especially vulnerable because its operations depended heavily upon the needs of U.S. Steel. At the same time, economic hardship helped organized labor gain ground in McDowell County.
A 1933 union agreement established minimum wages, a forty-hour workweek, regular cash payment, and greater freedom for miners to choose where they lived and shopped. Labor disputes continued through the remainder of the decade and into the 1940s as workers pressed companies over wages, pensions, safety, healthcare, and working conditions.
World War II temporarily strengthened coal demand, and federal records from the immediate postwar period provide some of the richest documentation of everyday mining life.
In 1946, photographer Russell Lee traveled through American coal communities as part of a federal survey of miners’ living and working conditions. His photographs preserved homes, families, stores, churches, workers, rail equipment, and mines throughout McDowell County. At Gary, Lee photographed company houses, coal cars, and a church belonging to the U.S. Coal and Coke landscape. His wider McDowell County work provides an unusually intimate record of how mining families lived near the end of the coalfield’s greatest period of employment.
The photographs matter because they show the communities as lived places rather than industrial statistics. Children played beside company housing. Families gathered on porches. Miners changed shifts, attended union meetings, shopped, worshiped, and built lives in communities whose names were often inseparable from the companies employing them.
Mechanization and the Long Population Decline
The postwar years brought a transformation that ultimately reshaped the entire future North Elkin District.
Coal did not immediately disappear. In some periods production remained strong. Employment, however, moved in a different direction. Continuous mining machines and other technological improvements allowed companies to extract larger quantities of coal with fewer workers. For a county whose towns depended overwhelmingly on mining wages, increasing productivity could mean economic contraction rather than prosperity.
Historian Mark Myers found that mechanization contributed heavily to McDowell County’s population and employment decline between 1950 and 1970. Miners who could no longer find comparable work locally increasingly migrated to industrial cities such as Cleveland and Columbus.
The pattern played out across the communities that would later make up North Elkin. Anawalt’s Gary No. 12 operation had already closed in 1949. Gary and the surrounding U.S. Steel communities entered a prolonged period of contraction. The company’s remaining Gary Hollow mines eventually closed in 1986 after years of layoffs and shutdowns. Northfork also lost population as the surrounding mining economy weakened.
By the 1980s, the historic companies that had defined large portions of the McDowell coalfield were disappearing. The coal remained beneath the mountains in many places, and mining did not vanish entirely, but the old system of enormous company operations supporting densely populated networks of mining towns had ended.
It was during this period of contraction that the administrative name North Elkin finally appeared.
The Creation of North Elkin
The timing is historically significant.
North Elkin was not created during the coal boom. It was created after much of the industrial system that had given its predecessor districts their identities was already disappearing.
The 1990 census records the combination of Adkin, Elkhorn, and North Fork districts as part of a county redistricting. Their combined 1980 population was 11,676. North Elkin contained 7,708 residents in 1990. Gary alone had fallen from 2,233 residents in 1980 to 1,355 in 1990, while Anawalt declined from 652 to 329.
The new district therefore brought together communities sharing a common twentieth-century experience. They had been created or transformed by railroads and coal, reached maturity during the great industrial decades, and then endured mine closures, mechanization, migration, demolition, and population loss.
North Elkin was a new name placed over an old coalfield.
What Remains of North Elkin’s Older History
Much of the industrial landscape has disappeared. Tipples were demolished, mine entrances collapsed or were sealed, rail sidings were removed, and entire rows of company houses vanished. Flooding inflicted additional damage on several McDowell County communities during the early twenty-first century.
Enough survives, however, to read the landscape.
Elkhorn retains buildings associated with the earliest phase of coal development. Northfork still possesses commercial and residential structures reflecting its role as a regional service center. Anawalt preserves traces of the town that served the upper Tug Fork communities. Gary Hollow retains hundreds of residences and community buildings from the U.S. Coal and Coke era even though the massive industrial facilities that once dominated the hollow are largely gone.
A major historic survey completed for McDowell County documented more than 2,000 properties. Of the surviving buildings examined, the overwhelming concentration dated from the coal boom years between 1900 and 1929. Houses formed the largest category, followed by commercial buildings, churches, industrial sites, schools, and transportation structures. In other words, the surviving built landscape still reflects the communities created to house, serve, educate, transport, and organize the labor force that powered the coal industry.
The mountains also preserve less obvious evidence. Old railroad grades follow creeks into the hollows. Concrete foundations remain beside abandoned mine sites. Company roads climb slopes where rows of houses once stood. Churches and cemeteries preserve family names from communities whose populations have scattered across the country.
Why North Elkin’s History Matters
North Elkin is unusual because its administrative history runs backward from what a visitor might expect. The district itself is relatively new, while nearly every important historical force associated with it is much older.
Its story begins not with the creation of North Elkin but with Elkhorn and the Norfolk and Western Railway, the North Fork mining communities, the upper Tug Fork around Anawalt, and the enormous U.S. Steel complex at Gary. These places grew within separate districts, but coal and railroads connected them long before county officials placed them under one administrative name.
For that reason, North Elkin should not be remembered simply as another modern subdivision on a census map. It represents several of the most important chapters in McDowell County’s industrial history compressed into one district: the opening of the Pocahontas coalfield, the arrival of thousands of miners and immigrant families, the construction of company towns, the rise of Black coalfield communities, the expansion of the Norfolk and Western Railway, the corporate power of U.S. Steel, the labor movement, mechanization, migration, and the long decline of communities built around coal.
The Census Bureau may have created North Elkin by combining Adkin, Elkhorn, and North Fork, but the mountains had already tied those places together for generations. Beneath the modern district lines lies an older geography made from railroad branches, coal seams, company property, creeks, churches, schools, and family communities.
That older geography is the real history of North Elkin.
Sources & Further Reading
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Update: Final Report, McDowell County, West Virginia. Charleston: West Virginia Division of Highways, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Battlo, Jean. McDowell County in West Virginia and American History. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1998. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%22McDowell+County+in+West+Virginia+and+American+History%22
Carter, Alice E. “Segregation and Integration in the Appalachian Coalfields: McDowell County Responds to the Brown Decision.” West Virginia History 54. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh54-5.html
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p007656
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/ University of Tennessee Press
Garay, Ronald G. U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. https://utpress.org/title/u-s-steel-and-gary-west-virginia-2/
Gillenwater, Mack H. “Cultural and Historical Geography of Mining Settlements in the Pocahontas Coal Field of Southern West Virginia, 1880–1930.” PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1972.
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006731317
Historic American Landscapes Survey. Gary Hollow, 38 Church Street, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia. HALS WV-6. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0557/
Library of Congress. “The McDowell Progress.” Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016270576/
Library of Congress. “The McDowell Times, Keystone, West Virginia, 1904–1941.” Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092050/
Myers, Mark. “Coal Mechanization and Migration from McDowell County, West Virginia, 1932–1970.” Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2001. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/116/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://visit.archives.gov/whats-on/explore-exhibits/power-light-russell-lees-coal-survey
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Philadelphia: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1992. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/coal-mining-heritage.pdf NPS History
National Park Service. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. Prepared by Stacy Sone, 1991–1992. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500726_text
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Map and Profile of the Right Fork Spur of the Sand Lick Branch.” February 23, 1907. HS-CC10672. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122583
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Two Mule Publishing Company.
Schust, Alex P. Gary Hollow: A History of the Largest Coal Mining Operation in the World. Two Mule Publishing Company.
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
Sowers, Auburn Daniel. Facts About McDowell County, West Virginia. 1912. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
Tams, William Purviance, Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1964. https://archive.org/details/smokelesscoalfie0000unse
United States Census Bureau. 1980 Census of Population and Housing: West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1980. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/1980_Census_of_Population_and_Housing_._Preliminary_Reports._West_Virginia_%28IA_1980censusofpop8050unse%29.pdf
United States Census Bureau. 1990 Census of Population and Housing: Population and Housing Unit Counts, West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1993. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1990/cph-2/cph-2-50.pdf
United States Geological Survey. Pocahontas Folio, Virginia-West Virginia. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 26. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1896. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gf26
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1923. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde41west
West Virginia Department of Mines. List of Coal Mines in West Virginia, July 1, 1921. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1921. https://pec.lib.wvu.edu/catalog/55%2Ffa%2Ff1%2F57%2F55faf157-447a-4e63-9689-dc061ec945da
West Virginia Department of Mines. List of Coal Mines in West Virginia, July 1, 1927. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1927. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/ark:/99999/165693
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County History Sources.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
West Virginia State Road Commission. McDowell County Highway Map. 1937. A&M 4479. West Virginia and Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/subjects/4048
Author Note: North Elkin is unusual because its name is much newer than the communities and coal districts that make up its history. This article therefore follows Adkin, Elkhorn, and North Fork through census records, mine reports, railroad documents, photographs, newspapers, and preservation studies to explain how three older districts became one.