Appalachian Community Histories – Pardee, Wise County: Blackwood Coal, Railroads, Timber, and a Vanished Virginia Coal Camp
High in the country north of Appalachia, Virginia, where the hollows climb toward Black Mountain and the Kentucky line, the community of Pardee once stood as part of one of the most heavily industrialized corners of Wise County. Today the name survives more readily in old maps, mining records, geological reports, family histories, and photographs than it does on the landscape itself. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, Pardee was a working coal camp tied into a network that stretched through Dunbar and Roaring Fork toward Appalachia and across Black Mountain into eastern Kentucky.
Pardee was a company community, but coal was only part of its story. Timber came out of the surrounding mountains. Railroad tracks carried coal, lumber, workers, passengers, and supplies through a valley where ordinary road travel remained remarkably difficult. A physician practiced there by the 1910s. Families raised children there, miners went underground there, and trains connected the camp with the larger towns of Southwest Virginia. In 1927, one miner operating a coal-cutting machine at Pardee learned of an audition in nearby Norton and set off with a borrowed banjo. His name was Dock Boggs, and the opportunity helped carry the sound of the Virginia coalfields into American music history.
The surviving records make Pardee especially valuable for understanding how a coal camp could appear, grow, become connected to a much larger industrial system, and eventually all but disappear. Early federal geological surveys identified the Pardee mine and coal bed, while Virginia lawmakers were still dealing with the remarkable fact that thousands of people living around Pardee, Dunbar, and Roaring Fork lacked a public vehicle road.
The Coal Beneath Pardee
The reason an industrial community developed in such difficult terrain was buried inside the mountains.
When geologist Charles Butts surveyed the Pound quadrangle in the early twentieth century, he documented a substantial coal seam near the headwaters around Black Mountain. His 1914 United States Geological Survey report called it the Pardee, Limestone, or Parsons coal bed. Significantly, Butts explained that the Pardee bed took its name from the Pardee mine itself, showing that the mine was already established strongly enough to give its name to the geology surrounding it. He described the bed as roughly seven to ten feet thick where it was not broken by shale and clay partings and reported that it was being mined at Pardee.
Federal sampling soon provided an even more precise picture. In May 1915, a government coal sample was taken from the Pardee No. 1 mine of the Blackwood Coal & Coke Company. The United States Geological Survey placed the mine one mile northwest of Pardee station on the Roaring Fork Railroad. The sample was cut about 2,500 feet inside the mine, in a right entry branching from the main workings, and the measured coal at that location was nearly eight feet thick.
Another early federal report identified the same Pardee No. 1 mine as an operation of the Blackwood Coal & Coke Company and classified the coal there under the Parsons name. Together, these reports establish something important about Pardee’s early history. This was not merely a settlement that happened to be near mining. Its location, transportation connections, and very identity were built around the extraction of a particularly valuable coal bed.
The seam would long outlive the first generation of the community. A later federal study described the Pardee bed in Wise County as also being known as the Haddox or Parsons bed and placed its thickness generally between eight and eleven feet. Even between 1951 and 1995, long after Pardee’s early company-camp era, Virginia mines working the Pardee bed produced nearly twenty-four million tons of coal. Production from the bed reached its twentieth-century peak in 1984.
Blackwood Coal & Coke Company Builds a Community
Pardee belonged to the network of camps operated by the Blackwood Coal & Coke Company. The National Register documentation for the nearby Appalachia Commercial Historic District identifies Blackwood, Roaring Fork, Pardee, and Calvin as Blackwood Coal & Coke Company communities. They were part of the remarkable proliferation of company settlements that reshaped Wise County during the opening decades of the twentieth century.
Coal companies placed these communities close to their mines because the terrain made long-distance daily travel impractical. Houses could be constructed quickly along narrow strips of relatively usable land beside streams and railroad tracks, putting miners within walking distance of the workings. The resulting settlements were more than collections of houses. Coal camps commonly included stores, schools, churches, post offices, entertainment facilities, and other services needed by families living miles from larger towns.
The arrangement also gave the company tremendous influence over daily life. Housing and employment were connected. Company stores supplied food, clothing, and household necessities. Scrip could substitute for ordinary money in the local economy. The same industrial enterprise that provided work could therefore shape where a miner lived, where his family bought groceries, and how closely the household remained tied to the mine.
Pardee nevertheless developed enough community infrastructure that contemporary records show more than miners and company officials living there. A 1917 Virginia business directory listed J. G. Bentley as a physician at Pardee. The same directory listed the Blackwood Lumber Company at Pardee among Wise County’s lumber businesses. Those two entries offer a small but revealing glimpse of a place that had already grown beyond a mine opening and a row of houses. There was enough population to support a resident doctor, while timber extraction remained important alongside coal.
Timber in the Same Mountains
Before coal completely dominated the public image of Wise County, timber had already brought industrial exploitation into its mountains. Vast stands of hardwood covered slopes that had previously been difficult to reach commercially, and railroad construction suddenly made those trees accessible to outside markets.
Pardee became one of the places where that timber economy operated on an industrial scale. Luther F. Addington’s The Story of Wise County, Virginia describes large band sawmills at Pardee, Exeter, Ramsey, and Glamorgan. These mills could cut around 30,000 board feet of lumber in a day, particularly valuable yellow poplar harvested from the surrounding mountains.
The 1917 business directory’s listing for the Blackwood Lumber Company at Pardee confirms that lumbering was not merely part of an earlier frontier period that disappeared once coal arrived. Timber and coal extraction overlapped. The same railroad system that made deep mining commercially practical also provided a way to move enormous quantities of lumber out of terrain where wagon transportation had once limited large-scale development.
That combination helps explain the industrial appearance Pardee assumed during its strongest years. Mine workings penetrated the hills while timber operations cut the slopes above them. Tracks followed the stream valleys. Houses occupied whatever level ground could be found between the railroad, creek, and mountainside. Pardee was a coal camp, but it belonged to a broader era in which nearly every commercially valuable natural resource in the mountains was being connected to national markets.
A Railroad Town Before It Was a Road Town
One of the most revealing documents in Pardee’s history came not from a mining company but from the Virginia General Assembly.
In September 1919, the legislature approved an act allowing Wise County to borrow as much as $80,000 to build a public road and bridges through the Roaring Fork and Pot Camp Fork valleys. The proposed road would run through Roaring Fork and Dunbar to Pardee.
The lawmakers explained why such an extraordinary measure was necessary. Several thousand people were living “in and near” the three communities, yet they had no access to a public vehicle road. The legislation also anticipated further population growth because new industrial enterprises were underway or expected in the valley.
The wording should not be misunderstood as claiming that several thousand people lived in Pardee alone. The law referred collectively to the population around Roaring Fork, Dunbar, and Pardee. Even with that qualification, it demonstrates how quickly industrial development had filled previously remote valleys with workers and families.
It also reveals how different transportation worked in an Appalachian coal camp. Pardee could be industrially connected to distant markets while remaining difficult to reach by automobile or wagon. Railroads had arrived because coal companies needed them. Public roads followed later.
Charles Butts’s geological work and later federal sampling place Pardee directly on the Roaring Fork Railroad system. The Interstate Railroad and associated feeder lines linked mines in the hollows with Appalachia, where connections could be made with the larger Southern and Louisville & Nashville systems. The National Register study of Appalachia notes that company railroad spurs carried coal and timber out of the mountain valleys and also provided passenger service between communities.
By 1925, a Southern Railway timetable showed how fully Pardee belonged to this regional network. Passengers reaching Appalachia could make connections with the Interstate Railroad for Pardee, Roda, Norton, and Glamorgan. A resident of Pardee therefore lived in an isolated hollow by road standards but could board a train that ultimately connected with a much wider transportation system.
Life Along Pot Camp Fork
Government reports naturally preserve the mines better than they preserve supper tables, schoolrooms, gardens, porches, and children playing beside company houses. Yet the documentary record still allows some of Pardee’s everyday community to emerge.
Coal-camp families inhabited a landscape organized around shifts at the mine. Whistles, locomotives, tipples, mine motors, and coal cars helped set the rhythm of the day. The company settlement provided necessities, while Appalachia functioned as the larger commercial center for Pardee and the surrounding camps. The National Register study describes miners and their families traveling into Appalachia for goods and entertainment unavailable in the smaller settlements. During the region’s prosperous years, “Payday Saturdays” packed Appalachia’s streets with people coming out of the coal camps.
Pardee’s isolation therefore did not mean complete separation. Railroad service, and eventually improved roads and buses, connected families with Appalachia, Norton, and neighboring camps. Marriage, employment, church membership, shopping, schooling, and kinship linked these communities together so closely that the history of one camp often crosses immediately into another.
Federal census geography provides another way of recovering that world. In 1940 the relevant Wise County enumeration district included Dunbar, Pardee, and part of Roaring Fork, making the original population schedules an especially promising source for tracing miners, wives, children, occupations, birthplaces, housing arrangements, and migration patterns during the mature years of the camp. The surviving evidence therefore makes it possible to study Pardee not simply as an industrial operation but as a community made up of individual households.
The camp’s connections also crossed the Virginia and Kentucky boundary. A 1928 Kentucky State Department of Mines report listed Blackwood Coal & Coke Company’s Pardee operation among Letcher County mines while giving Pardee, Virginia, as its post office. Black Mountain was a state line on maps, but the coal industry on either side frequently functioned as a single economic region.
Dock Boggs Leaves the Mine for an Audition
Pardee also occupies an unexpected place in the history of Appalachian music.
Moran Lee “Dock” Boggs grew up in Wise County and entered the mines while still young. His music blended old mountain ballads, religious songs, African American blues influences, and the hard experiences of coalfield life into a banjo style that would eventually make him one of the most distinctive musicians recorded during the early country music era.
In an interview later published in Broadside, Boggs remembered exactly where he was when the opportunity arrived that changed his life. In 1927 he was operating a coal-cutting machine at Pardee with fellow worker Emmitt Fletcher for the Blackwood Coal & Coke Company. A friend living at Dorchester told him that talent scouts were coming to Norton looking for musicians who might record commercially.
Boggs initially doubted he had much chance. The mountains were filled with musicians, and he knew people who devoted far more time to music than a coal miner working regular shifts underground could. His friend persisted. Boggs borrowed a banjo and went to the ballroom of the Norton Hotel to audition.
He received a recording contract.
That moment connects Pardee to something much larger than mining history. Boggs soon traveled to New York and made the records that established his early career. His recordings later became important documents in the history of old-time music, folk revival, banjo playing, and Appalachian song. Yet immediately before that career opened, he was a worker at Pardee cutting coal beneath a Wise County mountain.
His recollections also preserve something technical reports cannot. Boggs remembered the changing underground workplace, from an earlier era of mule haulage and primitive ventilation to motors and coal-cutting machinery. His story places an individual human voice inside the industrial changes visible in government statistics.
Decline in the Coalfields
Pardee’s decline belonged to a much wider transformation across Southwest Virginia.
For decades, coal camps required large numbers of men because much of the work remained labor intensive. As machinery became more powerful, mines could produce more coal with fewer workers. Railroads likewise required fewer employees as diesel locomotives replaced steam. The National Register study of nearby Appalachia identifies mechanization and railroad technological changes during the 1950s as major causes of job and population loss throughout the surrounding coalfield communities.
The numbers for Wise County show the scale of the transformation. Mine employment fell from nearly 5,000 workers in 1950 to about 2,659 in 1960 and 1,846 by 1970. Families followed employment out of the mountains, businesses lost customers, and communities that had been constructed for a labor-intensive mining system suddenly possessed more housing than the new coal economy required.
Places such as Pardee were particularly vulnerable because their original purpose had been so closely tied to the mines. A courthouse town could survive as a government center. A commercial town might retain stores and professional services. A company camp deep in a narrow hollow had fewer alternatives once employment declined.
The physical settlement gradually faded with the same industrial system that had created it. Modern geographic records classify Pardee as a historical populated place, and the landscape that once held homes and community buildings has continued to be shaped by mining.
Pardee and Coal Miner’s Daughter
Before the old camp vanished almost entirely, Pardee gained one final connection to Appalachian cultural history.
The 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter, based on the life of Kentucky country singer Loretta Lynn, was filmed partly in Wise County. The Virginia Film Office officially records Wise County among the production locations, while accounts of the filming identify Pardee as one of the former coal-camp settings used to recreate the coalfield world of Lynn’s childhood.
There was an obvious reason filmmakers found the area useful. Pardee had not been constructed as a movie set. Its mountains, railroad corridor, company houses, and industrial surroundings were products of the same central Appalachian coal economy the film was trying to portray. Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia were separated politically by Black Mountain, but the mining landscapes on each side of that boundary had much in common.
For a short period, therefore, the remains of Pardee performed a second role. Buildings created for coal miners became visual stand-ins for an earlier generation of coalfield families whose experiences were being introduced to a national audience.
What Remains of Pardee
The disappearance of the residential camp did not erase the name.
Virginia Department of Energy records still identify a Pardee Tipple on Pot Camp Fork, approximately half a mile south of the historic community. Another modern industrial facility is identified as the Pardee Preparation Plant about two miles north of Dunbar. The old name therefore remains embedded in the same mining geography that created the town more than a century ago.
The coal itself also carries the name. Geological maps still recognize the Pardee bed, and Virginia’s mining records preserve abandoned underground workings associated with it. A place can disappear from the surface while remaining permanently written into the geology and industrial vocabulary of a region.
That may be the most fitting way to remember Pardee. The community was created because coal and timber beneath and above Black Mountain became valuable enough to overcome extraordinary isolation. Railroads entered first. Houses, mines, a lumber operation, a physician, stores, schools, and families followed. Then came a public road into a valley where thousands of people had already been living around the industrial camps. Eventually mechanization reduced the workforce, families moved away, houses disappeared, and the coal town slipped from a living community into a historical place name.
Yet Pardee never entirely vanished.
It remains in government reports describing a mine thousands of feet underground. It remains in railroad timetables linking the camp with Appalachia. It remains in photographs of houses beneath steep Wise County mountains. It remains in the recollections of Dock Boggs, who walked out of a Pardee mine and toward one of the most important recording careers in Appalachian old-time music. It remains in the memory of families who once called the camp home, and in a coal seam that still bears its name.
In that sense, Pardee tells a familiar Appalachian story. Industry could build a town with astonishing speed when the mountains contained something the nation wanted, then leave remarkably little behind when the economic system changed. Recovering the history of places like Pardee gives those vanished communities something more permanent than the companies that created them. It puts the people who lived there back onto the map.
Sources & Further Reading
Butts, Charles. The Coal Resources and General Geology of the Pound Quadrangle of Virginia and Kentucky. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 541-F. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914. USGS report
Butts, Charles. The Coal Resources and General Geology of the Pound Quadrangle in Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 9. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1914. Virginia Energy record
Campbell, Marius R., and Frank R. Clark. Analyses of Coal Samples from Various Parts of the United States. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 621-P. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. Includes the May 22, 1915 sample from Blackwood Coal & Coke Company’s Pardee No. 1 mine. USGS Bulletin 621-P
United States Geological Survey. Miscellaneous Analyses of Coal Samples from Various Fields of the United States. Bulletin 531. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913. The Wise County tables identify the Pardee No. 1 mine of Blackwood Coal & Coke Company. USGS Bulletin 531
Virginia Geological Survey. Bulletin 26. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey. Includes detailed coal sections and samples from the Pardee No. 1 and Pardee No. 4 mines of Blackwood Coal & Coke Company. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 26
Virginia General Assembly. Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, Extra Session of 1919. Richmond, 1919. See legislation authorizing road construction through the Roaring Fork and Pot Camp Fork valleys to Roaring Fork, Dunbar, and Pardee. 1919 Virginia legislation
United States Census Bureau. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules, Virginia, Wise County, Gladeville Magisterial District, Enumeration District 98-8. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1940. Enumeration District 98-8 specifically included Dunbar, Pardee, and part of Roaring Fork. Enumeration district reference
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1924. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1924. The Letcher County listings identify Blackwood Coal & Coke Company’s Blackwood mine with Pardee, Virginia, as its post office, illustrating the company’s cross-border operations. 1924 Kentucky mine report
Kentucky State Department of Mines. Annual Report, 1928. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1928. Lists Blackwood Coal & Coke Company’s Pardee mine in Letcher County with Pardee, Virginia, as its post office. 1928 Kentucky mine report
Blackwood Coal & Coke Co. v. James, 107 Va. 656, 60 S.E. 90 (1908). Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Useful primary evidence for Blackwood Coal & Coke Company mining practices and working conditions in Wise County during the company’s early years. Case record
Blackwood Coal & Coke Company v. Old Dominion Power Company, 151 Va. 52, 144 S.E. 439 (1928). Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Record preserved by Washington and Lee University School of Law. Complete court record
C. Pardee Works v. Duffy, 4 F. Supp. 649 (D.N.J. 1932). This federal case links C. Pardee Works, Blackwood Coal & Coke Company, Blackwood Land Company, Roaring Fork Railroad Company, and related Pardee interests. Federal court decision
Boggs, Dock. Interview in Broadside, no. 41. Boggs recalled operating a coal-cutting machine at Pardee for Blackwood Coal & Coke Company in 1927 when he learned of the Norton recording auditions that began his professional recording career. Dock Boggs interview
Brennan, Gerald. “Dock Boggs.” Encyclopedia.com. Discusses Boggs’s coal-mining career and confirms that he was operating a coal-cutting machine at Pardee when he learned of the 1927 Brunswick auditions in Norton. Dock Boggs biography
Southern Railway. Timetable, June 28, 1925. The timetable documented connections at Appalachia with the Interstate Railroad for Pardee, Roda, Norton, and Glamorgan. Timetable discussion and images
United States Geological Survey. Appalachia, Virginia-Kentucky Quadrangle. Topographic map. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1935. Particularly valuable for reconstructing the railroad, roads, waterways, settlement pattern, and physical landscape around Pardee. USGS historical map record
Virginia Department of Highways. Map of Wise County Showing Primary and Secondary Highways. Revised July 1, 1935. Richmond: Virginia Department of Highways, 1935. Useful for reconstructing the developing road system from the Kent Junction and Dunbar area toward Pardee.
Addington, Luther F. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 1956. Especially useful for Pardee’s lumber industry and the large band sawmill operated in the community. Digitized volume
McKnight, Brian Dallas, Jodi Deal, and Mary B. LaLone. Life in the Coal Camps of Wise County: In Honor of Wise County’s Sesquicentennial. Big Stone Gap, VA: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 2006. One of the strongest secondary sources for Pardee and the wider Wise County coal-camp system.
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Appalachia Commercial Historic District. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2019. Identifies Blackwood Coal & Coke Company as operator of Blackwood, Roaring Fork, Pardee, and Calvin and places the communities within the wider coalfield economy. National Register nomination
Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research. Virginia Coal: An Abridged History. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech. Useful for the Interstate Railroad, feeder lines, mining expansion, mechanization, and the broader history of the Southwest Virginia coalfield. Virginia Tech report
Hagley Museum and Library. Westmoreland Coal Company Records and Photograph Collections. Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum and Library. The collections contain substantial visual and documentary material relating to Wise County coal camps and were used in Life in the Coal Camps of Wise County. Hagley finding aids
United States Geological Survey. Estimated Recoverable Coal Reserves of the United States. Circular 171. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1952. Describes the Pardee coal bed in Wise and Lee Counties, including its alternative names, thickness, reserves, and analysis from Pardee No. 1. USGS Circular 171
United States Geological Survey. “Use of Historical Production Data to Predict Future Coal Production Rates.” USGS Circular 1147. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Reports approximately 23.99 million tons of Virginia production from the Pardee coal bed between 1951 and 1995 and a peak production year of 1984. USGS historical production data
Nolde, J. E., Henderson Jr., and R. L. Miller. Geology of the Virginia Portion of the Appalachia and Benham Quadrangles. Virginia Division of Mineral Resources Publication 72. Charlottesville: Virginia Division of Mineral Resources, 1988. Geological mapping covering Pardee and the adjoining Black Mountain coalfield. USGS documentation
Virginia Division of Mineral Resources. Outline of the Mineral Resources of Virginia. Bulletin 47. Charlottesville: Virginia Division of Mineral Resources. Includes the Pardee coal bed and useful descriptions of regional mining, underground haulage, and tipple practices. Virginia Bulletin 47
Virginia Department of Energy. Coking Coal LLC, Pardee Tipple Permit. Richmond: Virginia Department of Energy. Modern government documentation locating the Pardee Tipple on Pot Camp Fork and preserving the historic Pardee name in the industrial landscape. Pardee Tipple permit
Virginia Department of Energy. Cumberland River Coal Company, Pardee No. 1 Strip Permit. Richmond: Virginia Department of Energy. Identifies the Pardee No. 1 Strip operation approximately two miles north of Dunbar on Pot Camp Fork. Pardee No. 1 Strip permit
Author Note: Growing up in the Appalachian coalfields, I have always been interested in the communities that nearly disappeared when mining changed. Pardee’s surviving records show how even a vanished camp can still tell a remarkably detailed story about work, family, transportation, and mountain life.