Appalachian Community Histories – Ragland, Mingo County: Chafin Grade School, National Coal No. 25, and the Coal-Mac Era
Ragland is the kind of Appalachian community whose history is easy to underestimate. On a modern map it is a small unincorporated place in the mountains of Mingo County, situated along the Rockhouse Fork country not far from Delbarton. Yet the records behind that name stretch from nineteenth-century postal routes and hillside farms to one-room and two-room school days, underground coal mines, massive surface operations, railroad loadouts, and abandoned mine workings that still affect the land.
Coal eventually became central to Ragland, but the community was not simply created by a coal company. Postal evidence places Ragland here before Mingo County itself existed. By the time the major coal expansion transformed the surrounding valleys, families had already been farming the slopes, traveling by horseback across the mountains, sending children to local schools, and building a community around the creeks and narrow hollows.
One of the most valuable witnesses to that older Ragland was Haymond Edward Reardon, who arrived as a child in 1921 and was interviewed more than half a century later. His memories allow Ragland to be seen not merely as a dot on a map or a name in a mine report, but as a place where people watched the twentieth century arrive almost one improvement at a time.
Ragland Before Mingo County
Ragland’s recorded history reaches back at least into the 1880s, when this part of the mountains still belonged to Logan County. Postal-history compilations place a Ragland post office in Logan County in 1886, and a compilation of Post Office Department bulletins contains an entry for Ragland dated August 2 of that year. Another entry appeared for Cow Creek in November 1888. The West Virginia State Archives later cross-referenced Cow Creek with Ragland in its place-name records, suggesting how closely the two names were associated in early descriptions of the area.
The federal records behind those postal references are especially important. The National Archives preserves the Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to 1971, as Microfilm Publication M841. Those records document such things as the establishment and discontinuance of post offices, changes in names and locations, and the appointment dates of postmasters. West Virginia’s Mason through Raleigh counties appear on Roll 140, meaning that Ragland should be checked under both Logan and Mingo because its county affiliation changed during the life of the community.
Another National Archives collection, the Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837 to 1950, may be even more revealing. These reports were often completed by local postmasters and could identify nearby creeks, roads, railroads, mail routes, distances to neighboring offices, and sometimes the number of families served. Many include hand-drawn or annotated maps. Logan County appears on Roll 644 and Mingo County on Roll 648, so an early Ragland report could survive under either county.
This matters because Mingo County did not exist when Ragland first appeared in the postal record. The county was created in 1895 from the southern portion of Logan County after rapid population and industrial growth in the region. Ragland therefore belongs to the histories of both counties, even though it has been a Mingo County community for well over a century.
Exactly how Ragland received its name is less certain. Later references have associated the place with the Ragland surname, but I have not found a contemporary record that conclusively identifies the person or family for whom it was named. Henry Clay Ragland was an important figure in neighboring Logan County and helped establish the Logan Banner, but the shared surname alone is not enough to say that the Mingo County community was named for him. Until a postal application, deed, family document, or other contemporary record settles the question, the namesake should remain an open one.
A Community Fixed on the Map
Whatever the origin of the name, Ragland was firmly established by the opening years of the twentieth century. A 1911 Rand McNally map of Mingo County plainly marks Ragland among communities such as Varney, Myrtle, Delbarton, and Williamson. It is useful evidence because it shows that Ragland was already regarded as a recognized settlement before the coal industry reached the scale that would later dominate the area.
The geological record from the same period gives another perspective. In 1914 the West Virginia Geological Survey published R. V. Hennen, D. B. Reger, and W. A. Price’s massive study of Logan and Mingo counties. The 776-page report and its accompanying maps documented the region’s geology and coal resources at a scale detailed enough to examine individual streams, coal beds, and mining possibilities. Ragland appears within the geographic material associated with this work, placing the community inside a landscape that state geologists were already studying intensively for its mineral wealth.
By 1937 the West Virginia State Road Commission was mapping Mingo County at a much finer local scale. Surviving historic county highway maps record not simply major roads but the dense network of streams, minor roads, settlements, railroads, schools, mines, homes, and other features that made up mountain communities. High-resolution scans of the 1937 series are preserved through the West Virginia GIS Technical Center.
The federal government was still treating Ragland as a distinct community in 1950. Census officials identified it specifically as an unincorporated place within Lee Magisterial District and divided it among several enumeration districts. Their boundary descriptions referred to State Highway 65/5, Duty Branch, Spring Branch, and the area near Big Pigeonroost Branch. Those descriptions are valuable because they show that Ragland was more than the name of a post office or mine. The Census Bureau recognized a definable populated community occupying both sides of the road and the surrounding branches.
The Ragland Haymond Reardon Remembered
Maps show where Ragland was, but Haymond Edward Reardon described what living there felt like.
On December 5, 1978, Linda Kyle Hinkle interviewed the 65-year-old Reardon as part of the Southern Appalachian Oral History Collection at the Williamson campus. Reardon said his father had moved the family from Logan County to Ragland in 1921, when Haymond was about eight and a half years old. Looking backward across nearly six decades, he remembered a community with fewer people and houses that were “few and far between.”
The economy he described was still strongly rooted in the land. Families farmed hillsides because level ground was scarce, and much of the work was performed with hand tools rather than machinery. Cash could be harder to obtain than food grown or produced at home, so some residents dug ginseng and other medicinal plants or trapped animals for their pelts. Reardon also remembered moonshining as one of the ways some people earned money. Stores existed, but they were general stores where groceries, hardware, dry goods, and numerous other necessities were gathered under one roof.
His memories also capture a time when homemade clothing had not yet disappeared. Cloth purchased from the store could be turned into dresses and other garments at home, while something already manufactured and purchased could carry the special distinction of being “store boughten.” Such details seem small beside the history of million-ton coal operations, but they tell us far more about daily life in early Ragland than an industrial report ever could.
It is also important that Reardon remembered this world from 1921, decades after Ragland first appeared in postal records. The community did not suddenly spring into existence when a coal operator opened a mine. There was an older rural Ragland beneath the industrial one, and for a time the two worlds overlapped.
Over the Mountain to Omar
Transportation made the isolation of early Ragland especially noticeable. Reardon remembered wagons, buggies, and horses as ordinary ways of traveling and said that automobiles remained uncommon when his family arrived.
Before the family owned a car, they frequently traveled between Ragland and Omar in Logan County on horseback. Reardon described riding toward the head of Rockhouse Creek, crossing a steep mountain, and descending Cow Creek toward Omar. It was a route suited to horses rather than automobiles. Once the family acquired a car, they could not simply drive over the same path and had to depend on whatever roads were available.
That memory helps explain why the old postal geography matters. Cow Creek and Ragland were connected not just on an archival index but through the lived movement of people across the mountains. County lines could look clean on paper while families on either side continued to travel over old ridges and creek routes that predated those boundaries.
Reardon said his family had lived in Ragland four or five years before his father purchased a truck and automobile. The first vehicles themselves were primitive by later standards, without the heating, starters, windshield wipers, and enclosed comfort that drivers would eventually take for granted. In a place where winter roads could freeze into deep ruts, owning an automobile did not immediately make mountain travel easy.
Chafin Grade School
Among Reardon’s clearest memories was Chafin Grade School at Ragland.
He described it simply as a “two-room affair.” Teachers were strict, textbooks were not free, and recess meant marbles, ball games, and whatever children could invent for themselves outside. The school belonged to the era of small community institutions scattered throughout Appalachian hollows, close enough for children to reach even when transportation to larger consolidated schools remained difficult.
High school required a longer journey. Reardon attended school at Delbarton, which he remembered as being about three miles away. When he began, there were no school buses serving him, and students had to arrange their own transportation. By the time he finished four years later, school buses had appeared. In one boy’s education, Ragland had moved from a time when a student found his own way down the mountain road to a more organized system connecting small communities with larger schools.
The surviving references to Chafin Grade School are particularly valuable because small rural schools are often among the first institutions to disappear physically and among the hardest to reconstruct later. State archival collections of Mingo County school photographs and local references to schools around Ragland and Duty may yet provide additional visual evidence of this period. The two-room school Reardon remembered deserves a place in Ragland’s history alongside its better-documented mines.
When Coal Came Up the Creek
Reardon’s description of Ragland changes noticeably when he reaches the arrival and expansion of coal mining around his home.
“When the coal mines opened on our creek,” he recalled, new families began arriving. Coal camps became common, automobile ownership increased, roads improved, and stores offered a wider selection of goods. Bathrooms gradually replaced outdoor privies. Coal camp doctors made medical treatment more accessible in communities where seeing a physician had once required traveling considerable distances.
The transformation did not happen everywhere at once, nor did it erase the rural economy overnight. Farming, hunting, gathering, timber work, and mining existed beside one another. What coal changed was the scale. A mine required labor, and labor brought households. Households created demand for stores, roads, schools, doctors, transportation, and services. A sparsely populated creek could become a far busier industrial settlement within a generation.
Reardon also remembered mining before modern mechanization. In his youth it was still an era of picks and shovels, and he recalled boys entering the mines at fourteen or fifteen. His testimony is personal rather than a statistical survey, but it reflects the enormous distance between the labor practices he witnessed as a young man and the mechanized operations that later surrounded Ragland.
The 1914 geological survey shows why mining companies were interested in this landscape in the first place. The mountains of Logan and Mingo counties contained multiple commercially important coal beds, and government geologists were carefully mapping their thickness, position, outcrops, and potential mining areas just as communities such as Ragland were entering the industrial age.
National Coal No. 25
By the later twentieth century, one mine can be tied directly and unmistakably to Ragland.
A United States Bureau of Mines report published in 1972 analyzed coal samples collected during fiscal year 1971. In its West Virginia table, under Mingo County, the report lists Ragland and National Coal No. 25 and identifies the coal bed as the Lower Cedar Grove. This was not a retrospective local history. It was a federal technical report based on coal sampling conducted as part of the Bureau of Mines’ work.
National Coal No. 25 appears again in the Federal Register on April 11, 1974. The National Coal Mining Company had petitioned the U.S. Department of the Interior for a modification of a mandatory federal mine-safety standard at its “No. 25 Mine at Ragland, Mingo County, West Virginia.” The notice provides unusually direct federal documentation connecting the mine, company, and community.
The mine eventually closed, but its history did not end underground.
In August 2022, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sought emergency reclamation work at the Ragland, or Mounts, landslide in Mingo County. State records attributed the problem to a mine blowout originating in the old National Coal Mining No. 25 workings in the Lower Cedar Grove seam and stated that mining there had ceased in December 1977. The proposed work included cleanup, drainage improvements, a wet seal, repairs, and the possibility of temporarily relocating a home.
Engineering records associated with the project described a landslide along Rockhouse Fork Road in Ragland that damaged a manufactured home and moved it from its foundation. Decades after the miners had left No. 25, the abandoned underground workings were still capable of affecting the people living above them.
From Pick and Shovel Mining to the Ragland Loadout
If Reardon had seen Ragland change from horseback transportation to the first automobiles, the industrial changes that followed were just as dramatic.
By the early twenty-first century, corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission described Ragland as part of the enormous Coal-Mac mining operation spanning Logan and Mingo counties. A 2005 Arch Coal filing divided Coal-Mac into the Ragland and Holden 22 production complexes. The Ragland complex operated four production spreads, an overland belt and loadout system, and truck dumps feeding a rail-loading facility. Coal leaving Ragland could be shipped directly on the Norfolk Southern Railway, and the loadout was then capable of handling about 5,000 tons per hour.
The scale continued to change. A 2006 filing described Coal-Mac as occupying roughly 46,800 acres and sending surface-mined coal to the Ragland or Holden 22 rail loadouts. Later filings continued to identify Ragland as one of the operation’s principal shipping points.
By 2018, Arch Coal described Coal-Mac as a surface mining complex covering approximately 45,800 acres in Logan and Mingo counties, primarily extracting thermal coal from the Coalburg and Stockton seams. The Ragland loadout could load a 10,000-ton train in less than four hours before sending it onto the Norfolk Southern system.
The contrast with Reardon’s childhood could hardly be greater. He remembered crossing the mountain from Rockhouse Creek on horseback because there was no road suitable for a car. Generations later, thousands of tons of coal could leave Ragland aboard a railroad train loaded in only a few hours.
Yet those two Raglands were not separate places. They occupied the same narrow mountain landscape.
More Than a Coal Place
Coal dominates many surviving records because mining generated paperwork. Companies filed reports. Inspectors visited mines. Geologists mapped coal beds. Federal agencies tested coal. Railroads measured shipments. State officials recorded permits and reclamation problems.
Ordinary family life did not leave the same volume of documentation.
That imbalance can distort the history of a place like Ragland. Read only the industrial records and it becomes a mine location, a coal seam, or a rail loadout. Read Reardon’s testimony beside the postal records, school references, census districts, deeds, maps, and mine reports, and a fuller community emerges.
There were families here before the largest mines. Children attended Chafin Grade School. Farmers worked steep ground because flatter land was scarce. People dug ginseng for cash. Horses followed mountain paths toward Cow Creek and Omar. Cars gradually appeared. Roads improved. Mines opened. Coal camps filled with new families. The community became tied to an industrial system capable of moving enormous quantities of coal beyond the mountains.
The 1950 census is especially useful in preserving that distinction. Federal enumerators did not simply identify a mine called Ragland. They recognized Ragland as an unincorporated community and drew detailed boundaries around it using roads, branches, streams, and mountain geography.
The Landscape Keeps the Record
Much of Appalachian history survives in landscapes long after buildings and businesses disappear. Ragland is a particularly strong example.
Rockhouse Fork still ties the community to the geography Reardon described. Cow Creek remains on the other side of the mountain. The coal seams mapped by geologists in the early twentieth century remain underneath the ridges. Abandoned workings from National Coal No. 25 remained underground after the mine ceased production in 1977, and the 2022 emergency at Ragland demonstrated that industrial history can continue to shape the land decades after production stops.
Historic maps add another layer. The 1911 map preserves Ragland before the greatest twentieth-century transformations. The 1937 highway mapping can be used to reconstruct roads, buildings, mines, schools, and settlement patterns during the coal era. Census maps from 1950 establish where federal officials believed the community began and ended. Mine maps and geological records can then be laid over that same terrain to see what existed beneath the houses and mountains.
Few written community histories have ever been devoted exclusively to Ragland, but that does not mean its history has disappeared. Instead, it is scattered through government files, maps, oral histories, mining records, newspapers, census schedules, deeds, and the memories of people who lived there.
Why Ragland’s Story Matters
Ragland’s history is a reminder that the coalfields did not begin with coal.
Before the giant surface operations, railroad loadouts, and federal mine records, there were families living among the creeks and ridges. There was a post office while Ragland was still part of Logan County. There were hillside farms, horseback trails, general stores, and children crowded into the two rooms of Chafin Grade School. Coal did not create all of that. It entered an existing mountain community and transformed it.
The transformation was profound. Haymond Reardon lived long enough to remember Ragland when automobiles were rare and to see the era of mechanized mining. The federal record carries the story farther, from National Coal No. 25 in the Lower Cedar Grove seam to a Coal-Mac operation capable of filling a 10,000-ton train at Ragland in less than four hours.
The consequences lasted just as long. The 2022 Ragland landslide and mine-blowout emergency connected a modern family’s home directly to workings abandoned nearly forty-five years earlier. In Ragland, history is not confined to old photographs or courthouse books. Some of it remains beneath the ground.
That is why small communities deserve the same careful attention as county seats and famous coal towns. Ragland contains, within one narrow Appalachian landscape, the larger history of southern West Virginia: rural settlement, shifting county boundaries, isolated mountain transportation, community schools, industrial coal development, railroad expansion, mechanization, and the long environmental inheritance of mining.
The records make clear that Ragland was never merely a name beside a mine.
It was, and remains, a community.
Sources & Further Reading
Author Note: This article is part of my continuing effort to document the smaller communities of Appalachia through primary records, maps, oral histories, and local sources. Ragland’s story shows why even places rarely given their own histories can preserve important pieces of the region’s larger past.