Appalachian Community Histories – Pageton, McDowell County: Page Coal & Coke and the Company Town Built by Coal
Along West Virginia Route 161 in McDowell County, the community of Pageton stretches through a narrow mountain valley where the railroad, the Tug Fork, and rows of houses once belonged to a much larger industrial landscape. The hills rise sharply around the settlement, leaving little level ground, and the surviving streets still follow the geography that shaped nearly every coal town in southern West Virginia.
Pageton was not a town that happened to have a coal mine. It was built around coal.
Page Coal & Coke Company developed the mines, housing, store, industrial buildings, and much of the community life that followed. Norfolk & Western Railway tracks connected the operation to national markets, while workers arrived from other parts of Appalachia, from Eastern Europe, and from mining communities across the United States. By the 1920s, Page Coal & Coke was producing hundreds of thousands of tons of coal while Pageton had become home to miners and their families, company officials, store employees, railroad workers, and immigrant organizations that left records in languages other than English.
Unlike many small coal camps, Pageton survives in an unusually rich documentary record. Page Coal & Coke payroll books, store records, blueprints, railroad engineering drawings, state mining reports, court cases, newspapers, photographs, and immigrant labor publications preserve pieces of the community that might otherwise have disappeared. The Eastern Regional Coal Archives alone holds roughly twenty linear feet of Page Coal & Coke Company payroll books, store records, and blueprints from about 1920 to 1940.
Taken together, those records tell the story of a place built quickly during the expansion of the Pocahontas Coalfield, sustained for more than half a century by one of the world’s most valuable coal seams, and then forced to find a future after the company around which it had been constructed disappeared.
The Railroad Reaches the Upper Tug Fork
Pageton’s story begins with the railroad.
Large deposits of coal in southern West Virginia had been known for decades, but mountains and poor transportation made commercial development difficult. That changed as Norfolk & Western Railway pushed deeper into McDowell County during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The professional Coal Heritage Survey identifies the main Tug Fork Branch as a line developed between 1902 and 1909, eventually serving Havaco, Wilcoe, Gary, Venus, Thorpe, Pageton, Anawalt, and Leckie.
The railroad did more than carry coal away. Its arrival made communities like Pageton economically possible in the first place. Coal operators could bring in machinery and supplies, construct tipples beside the tracks, load railcars directly from their mines, and ship Pocahontas coal to industrial customers far beyond McDowell County.
The surviving Norfolk & Western engineering record provides one of the best clues to Pageton’s earliest development. On December 28, 1904, the railway’s Office of the Chief Engineer prepared a drawing titled “Layout of Tracks, Page Coal and Coke Co.” The document identifies Pageton, mine tracks, and coke ovens. A related plan shows a proposed change in the track layout and the Pageton station.
That 1904 drawing is important because later histories do not agree completely about when Pageton began.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey says Pageton was established around 1907, while other histories place the organization of Page Coal & Coke Company in 1903 and the beginning of coal shipments in 1904. The railroad drawing settles at least part of the question. Whatever date is used for the completion or establishment of the community itself, Page Coal & Coke was already developing a substantial industrial operation at Pageton by the end of 1904.
There is no real reason the dates must contradict one another. A corporation could be organized, mines and railroad sidings developed, coke ovens constructed, and coal shipped before the surrounding company town reached the form later historians recognized as Pageton.
Building Page Coal & Coke Company
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey attributes Page Coal & Coke Company to the Crozer family, prominent industrialists from eastern Pennsylvania. Other local histories connect the name Pageton with Louis R. Page, one of the figures associated with the company.
The company entered a coalfield already becoming one of the most important mining regions in the United States. McDowell County’s population had increased from 7,300 in 1890 to 18,747 in 1900 and then to 47,856 in 1910 as railroads, mines, and coal camps transformed what had once been an overwhelmingly rural mountain county. The Coal Heritage Survey notes that miners included African Americans and immigrants from numerous countries, while the mines also created jobs for railroad employees, carpenters, clerks, managers, doctors, engineers, and other workers.
At Pageton, Page Coal & Coke mined the famed Pocahontas No. 3 seam. The National Register nomination for the company store described that seam as producing some of the world’s highest quality coal and credited the success of the mining operation with allowing the company to replace its earliest buildings with more substantial permanent structures.
The scale of the operation can be seen in production records. According to the Coal Heritage Survey, three Page mines at Pageton extracted 268,512 tons of coal in 1920, a figure the survey described as above average compared with other mines. Three years later, the West Virginia Department of Mines directory listed Page Coal & Coke Company’s “Page Nos. 1, 2 and 3” at Pageton.
These were not isolated drift openings hidden in the mountains. They were part of an integrated industrial complex of mines, tracks, loading facilities, company housing, administrative buildings, stores, and, during Pageton’s early years, coke ovens.
Coke Ovens and the Industrial Landscape
Coke was an important part of the early Pocahontas coal economy. Coal was heated in ovens with limited oxygen, driving away volatile material and leaving behind a carbon-rich fuel useful to the iron and steel industries.
Norfolk & Western’s December 1904 drawing specifically identifies coke ovens at the Page operation, proving that coke production formed part of Pageton’s industrial landscape almost from the beginning.
Later community histories describe hundreds of ovens at Pageton and say that the ovens eventually went out of service as changes in the steel industry made it more practical to coke coal elsewhere. Local tradition records that housing later occupied part of the former oven area, producing a neighborhood remembered as Coke Row. Those details are preserved particularly strongly in community histories assembled by former residents and local researchers, and they fit the industrial pattern documented in the surviving railway records.
The ovens would not have been a minor feature when operating. Rows of beehive ovens in the southern coalfields produced heat, smoke, flame, and heavy industrial traffic. Alongside locomotives, tipples, mine machinery, sawmills, and the constant movement of coal cars, they made Pageton look and sound very different from the quieter community that occupies the valley today.
The landscape itself was being reorganized around industry. Flat ground was too valuable to waste. Tracks followed the river and valley floor. Industrial buildings stood near rail access. Company houses climbed or stretched along whatever land could support them. Managers and higher-ranking employees generally received larger houses, while ordinary miners occupied standardized company dwellings.
That physical hierarchy was a common feature of McDowell County coal camps. The Coal Heritage Survey found that company towns frequently used a limited number of housing plans and assigned different types of houses according to family size and the worker’s status. Doctors, engineers, foremen, superintendents, and other higher-status employees might receive larger residences, while miners and their families occupied simpler houses.
Pageton still retained enough of that pattern more than a century later for preservation specialists to recognize the town itself as historically significant.
The Store at the Center of Pageton
If the mine was Pageton’s economic heart, the Page Coal & Coke Company Store became its public center.
Page Coal & Coke hired Bluefield architect Alex B. Mahood to design a permanent store in 1914. Mahood later became one of southern West Virginia’s best-known architects, but Pageton represented one of his early coalfield commissions and his first documented company store.
The two-story brick building stood on a tall stone foundation with simple Classical Revival detailing. Railroad tracks passed immediately behind it near the delivery entrance. In front and beyond the store stretched a long row of company-built houses, while the mine manager’s house stood at the opposite end of the residential row. The National Register documentation suggested that Mahood may also have designed the manager’s residence.
Its importance went far beyond groceries.
In isolated company towns, the store often combined retail business with other services. Stores could contain company offices, post offices, and sometimes medical facilities. Even when those particular functions varied from town to town, the store was one of the few places where nearly everybody in the community eventually passed through.
The National Register nomination described Pageton’s store as the commercial, business, and social center of the company-owned town. Miners and their families visited regularly to shop and conduct business, while its size and prominent location made the building an unmistakable symbol of Page Coal & Coke’s presence.
Company stores have become one of the most recognizable features of Appalachian coal history because they reveal both the practical necessities and the power relationships of the company-town system. In communities created where almost no previous infrastructure existed, operators had to provide food, housing, water, schools, roads, and other basic services. At the same time, owning the houses, employing the workers, and operating the principal store gave a corporation extraordinary influence over everyday life.
The wider McDowell County company-town system commonly included company scrip, with rent, utilities, and other expenses deducted from workers’ wages. Roads and automobiles eventually weakened the store’s monopoly over local commerce by making independent towns easier to reach, but for much of Pageton’s history the company store stood at the center of daily life.
Hungarians, Russians, Greeks, and a Coalfield Community
Company records tell Pageton from the viewpoint of the operator. A different Pageton emerges from immigrant newspapers.
The Hungarian Miners’ Journal, or Magyar Bányászlap, repeatedly mentioned the community. As early as 1916, the newspaper listed Page Coal & Coke Company at Pageton among coal employers, showing that the town had already entered the communication network connecting Hungarian miners throughout the American coalfields.
By 1920, Pageton had an organized Hungarian miners’ mutual-aid presence. A March issue of the newspaper listed a Pageton branch with its own president, secretary, treasurer, recorder, sick visitor, and other officers. Later issues continued to identify the Pageton organization, showing that this was not simply a handful of unrelated immigrants living temporarily near a mine. It was a functioning ethnic community with institutions of its own.
An August 5, 1920 Pageton correspondence preserved in the Hungarian Miners’ Journal went even further. It discussed employment, the coal seam, wages, house rent, and the presence of Hungarian, Russian, and Greek miners in the community. Unlike corporate reports, which reduced labor to employment totals and production figures, immigrant newspapers allowed miners to describe a coal camp in terms that mattered to families deciding where to work and live.
Mutual-aid societies were particularly important in an industry where injury or death could suddenly remove a family’s principal source of income. Sick visitors checked on members. Societies collected dues, assisted injured miners and widows, organized meetings, and provided a social network in communities where immigrants might initially speak little English and live hundreds or thousands of miles from relatives.
Pageton therefore belonged to two worlds at once. It was a Page Coal & Coke company town, designed around the needs of an industrial corporation, but inside that town were smaller communities created by the miners themselves.
People worshipped, visited neighbors, organized aid societies, attended meetings, raised children, celebrated marriages, mourned deaths, and created identities that did not end at the mine portal.
Life Beyond the Tipple
The surviving regional newspapers reinforce that point.
A 1931 Bluefield Daily Telegraph community column reported on Pageton’s Ladies Aid, church services, prayer meetings, visitors, travel, and the ordinary movement of residents in and out of town. Similar Pageton columns appeared during the 1930s and 1940s.
These small notices are easy to overlook beside production records and mine disasters, but they reveal how coal camps became hometowns.
A company could own the houses and store without controlling every friendship formed inside them. Children grew up together. Churches created congregations. Women built religious and civic organizations. Families exchanged visits with relatives in nearby camps. People moved between Pageton, Gary, Thorpe, Anawalt, Northfork, Welch, and other McDowell County communities that were linked by railroad tracks, roads, kinship, work, and marriage.
Three photographs made in August and September 1931 and now preserved by Virginia Tech Special Collections provide another window into this mature industrial period. Part of the Norfolk and Western Historical Photograph Collection, they document Page Coal & Coke Company at Pageton during the years when mining remained central to the local economy.
Those images are especially valuable because so much of the industrial landscape later disappeared.
Danger Above and Below Ground
Coal mining was dangerous, but Page Coal & Coke’s industrial world exposed workers and families to hazards outside the mine as well.
One of the clearest examples appears in a West Virginia Supreme Court case arising from a March 21, 1929 accident. Fifteen-year-old Joe Danchatz was helping at the company’s steam sawmill when his arm came into contact with a rapidly revolving circular saw. The injury resulted in the loss of his right hand and part of his forearm. Litigation over the accident eventually reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia in 1931.
The case is a grim reminder that a coal company was rarely involved only in digging coal. Companies operated sawmills, stores, rail facilities, maintenance shops, power systems, and other supporting industries. Workers and their families lived inside an environment filled with heavy machinery.
Mine safety created its own conflicts.
West Virginia Department of Mines archival records contain a February 1941 circuit court case between Page Coal & Coke Company and the Department of Mines. A Hungarian Miners’ Journal report from March of that year discussed state authorities classifying the Pageton mine as gaseous amid a broader argument over explosions, machinery, coal dust, and safety practices.
The surviving record is significant because it shows regulation becoming part of the struggle over how coal was mined. By the twentieth century, questions of ventilation, gas, dust, machinery, inspections, and responsibility for accidents increasingly involved not only the company and its miners but state mine officials and the courts.
Pageton’s history therefore cannot be reduced to either a prosperous company town or an exploited labor camp. It was both an industrial success and a place where workers faced genuine dangers, economic dependence, and conflicts over the conditions under which coal was produced.
The Long Life of Page Coal & Coke
Page Coal & Coke survived through enormous changes in the American coal industry.
The company operated through World War I, the turbulent labor years following the war, the Great Depression, World War II, and the rapid mechanization of the postwar mines. The Pageton visible in a 1931 railroad photograph was already different from the settlement shown on a 1904 engineering drawing, and the community would change again as trucks, automobiles, machinery, and regional highways altered coalfield life.
By the mid-twentieth century, mechanization allowed companies to produce coal with fewer men. At the same time, the company-town system weakened as miners increasingly owned automobiles, shopped outside the camps, and purchased homes that were no longer tied directly to employment.
In 1963, Consolidation Coal Company acquired both the Crozer Coal and Land Company and Page Coal & Coke Company as Consol expanded its holdings in southern West Virginia. West Virginia Secretary of State records cited by the Coal Heritage Survey indicate that Page Coal & Coke Company itself terminated in 1964.
That could easily be treated as the end of Pageton’s industrial story, but it was not.
The old company name disappeared while coal processing continued.
Pageton After Page Coal & Coke
The most interesting evidence for Pageton’s later industrial life comes from the federal government.
A 1982 Federal Register notice listed workers at Consolidated Coal Company’s Pageton Preparation Plant in a trade-adjustment investigation. The document identifies the location as Pageton, West Virginia, gives the petition number as TA-W-13,524, and describes the plant’s product simply as coal preparation.
An Environmental Protection Agency study from the same general period listed Consolidation Coal’s Pageton Preparation Plant with a capacity of about 3,700 tons per day.
That evidence changes the way Pageton’s decline should be understood.
Page Coal & Coke’s original company-town era ended in the 1960s, but the industrial infrastructure created there remained useful afterward. Coal from other operations could still be processed at Pageton. The community therefore moved through a transitional period in which the company that had built the town disappeared while parts of the coal economy survived.
Eventually, those operations also faded.
Without the mines and preparation plant supporting large numbers of workers, the economic reason for maintaining so much of the built environment weakened. Houses disappeared. Industrial structures came down. Schools closed or were demolished. The landscape began slowly returning to something that looked less industrial, even though foundations, roads, railroad grades, houses, and memories continued to mark what had been there.
A Historic District Hidden in a Coal Camp
When professional historians returned to survey McDowell County’s coal heritage in the 2010s, Pageton stood out.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey recommended a Pageton Historic District with a period of significance from 1907 to 1964. Surveyors identified 65 contributing resources and considered Pageton significant for both the coal industry and company-town architecture.
That recommendation matters because coal towns are best understood as landscapes rather than collections of isolated old buildings.
A row of similar houses shows how a company organized labor and family life. A larger manager’s house reveals occupational hierarchy. A railroad bridge explains how coal moved. A store marks the center of company commerce. A school shows where miners’ children were educated. The relationship among those buildings tells the story.
Preservationists warned that those relationships were disappearing rapidly throughout McDowell County. Of roughly 1,200 resources examined in the original 1991 survey, the 2018 report estimated that at least 25 percent and possibly as many as 40 percent had been demolished during the following quarter century. Pageton Elementary, dating from about 1930, was demolished between fieldwork in 2016 and completion of the report in 2018.
The Page Coal & Coke Company Store followed the same path.
The store had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 17, 1992. When the later survey was conducted, it still stood in Pageton in fair but vacant condition. Today, the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office identifies the Page Coal & Coke Company Store as demolished.
A building once considered the commercial and social center of the community is now part of the historical record rather than the physical landscape.
What Pageton Tells Us About McDowell County
Pageton’s history is important precisely because it was not one of McDowell County’s largest cities.
It was a coal town.
Its existence depended on a railroad branch, a valuable seam of Pocahontas coal, an industrial corporation willing to develop the site, and thousands of days of labor performed by miners and their families over several generations.
A Norfolk & Western engineer looking at Pageton in 1904 saw tracks, mines, and coke ovens. A Page Coal & Coke executive saw production and investment. A Hungarian miner arriving in the 1910s or 1920s saw wages, rent, neighbors, working conditions, and the possibility of joining a mutual-aid society. A child growing up there might remember school, Coke Row, church, trains, the company store, and the sound of the preparation plant.
All of those perspectives belong to the same history.
Pageton also demonstrates how quickly industrial Appalachia could be created and how slowly it could disappear. In only a few years, an isolated mountain valley could become a complex industrial community tied to national steel production. For decades afterward, the company town could seem permanent. Houses, mines, stores, railroad tracks, churches, schools, and generations of families gave the landscape an identity centered on coal.
Then the mines closed. The original company disappeared. The preparation plant survived for a time, then it too vanished. Buildings that seemed permanent became vacant, and some of the most important structures were demolished.
Yet Pageton did not disappear with them.
The surviving houses, railroad landscape, archives, photographs, court records, mine reports, immigrant newspapers, and memories of former residents preserve a community that was more complicated than the words “coal camp” suggest.
Pageton was an industrial site, an immigrant community, a company town, and a hometown. Its history belongs not only to Page Coal & Coke Company or to the Pocahontas Coalfield, but to the larger story of how southern West Virginia helped power American industry, and what happened to the mountain communities left behind when the industrial system that created them moved on.
Sources & Further Reading
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update: Final Report, McDowell County, West Virginia. 2018. Accessed October 16, 2026. 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. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Source%3ABattlo%2C_Jean._McDowell_County_in_West_Virginia_and_American_History
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Accessed October 16, 2026. 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. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://utpress.org/9780870493416/miners-millhands-and-mountaineers/
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. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006731317
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001263739
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Layout of Tracks, Page Coal and Coke Co.” Drawing 6596, HS-F02518. December 28, 1904. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=214661
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Proposed Change in Track Lay Out, Page Coal and Coke Co., Pageton, W. Va.” Drawing HS-CC02612. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=214661
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Tug Fork Branch, Extension above Pageton, List of Bridges Stations Sidings Etc.” Document D-537, HS-B10318. March 9, 1909. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=99318
National Park Service. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. 1992. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/64500726.pdf
National Park Service. Page Coal and Coke Company Store. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Pageton, McDowell County, West Virginia, 1991–1992. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Page-coal-and-coke-company-store.pdf
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Page Coal & Coke Co., Pageton, West Virginia.” Norfolk and Western Historical Photograph Collection, September 1931. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/items/show/36242
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Page Coal and Coke Company, Pageton, West Virginia.” Norfolk and Western Historical Photograph Collection, August 1931. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/items/show/36243
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Page Coal and Coke Company, Pageton, West Virginia.” Norfolk and Western Historical Photograph Collection, August 1931. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/items/show/36244
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1923. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_%28IA_annualreportofde41west%29.pdf
West Virginia Archives and History. “Department of Mines Coal Mine Fire and Disaster Reports, AR1529.” Includes Page Coal & Coke Company v. West Virginia Department of Mines, February 1941. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar1519-1536.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “McDowell County Circuit Court Case Files.” Includes Page Coal & Coke Company v. James McQueen, case 61:1375, 1905. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
Danchatz v. Page Coal & Coke Company. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, 1931. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591479c7add7b049343fe0b6
Swope et al. v. Pageton Pocahontas Coal Company. 129 W. Va. 813, 41 S.E.2d 691. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, March 11, 1947. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1947/129-w-va-813.html
Welch Lumber Co. v. Pageton Lumber Co. 69 W. Va. 282, 71 S.E. 282. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, 1911. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/welch-lumber-co-v-pageton-lumber-co-wva-1911
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. “Pageton, W. Va.” August 5, 1920. Contemporary account of work, wages, housing, and immigrant miners at Pageton. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.epa.hu/05100/05152/00032/pdf/EPA05152_magyar_banyaszlap_1920_32_aug_05.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. April 1, 1920. Listing for the Pageton, West Virginia, division of the Hungarian miners’ organization. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.epa.hu/05100/05152/00014/pdf/EPA05152_magyar_banyaszlap_1920_14_apr_01.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. January 16, 1930. Pageton, West Virginia, organizational notices. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.epa.oszk.hu/05100/05152/00420/pdf/EPA05152_magyar_banyaszlap_1930_03_jan_16.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. March 6, 1941. Coverage concerning Page Coal & Coke Company and West Virginia mine-safety authorities. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/75708/1/hu_b1_mhd_1183_1941_03_06.pdf
United States Department of Labor. “Worker Adjustment Assistance Investigation, Consolidated Coal Company, Pageton Preparation Plant, Pageton, West Virginia.” Federal Register 47, no. 120, June 22, 1982. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/fedreg/fr047/fr047120/fr047120.pdf
Myers, Mark S. “McDowell County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Updated April 23, 2026. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1577
Author Note: Pageton’s story reflects the rise, transformation, and decline of the company-town system that shaped much of southern West Virginia’s coalfields. This article draws on railroad records, mining reports, court cases, immigrant newspapers, historic surveys, and archival sources to preserve the history of the people and industries that built this McDowell County community.