Ragland, Mingo County: Chafin Grade School, National Coal No. 25, and the Coal-Mac Era

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 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 major coal development transformed the surrounding valleys, families had already been farming the slopes, traveling across the mountains on horseback, 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 Raymond Edward Reardon, who arrived as a child in 1921 and described his memories more than half a century later. His recollections allow Ragland to be seen not merely as a name in a mine report or a dot on a map, but as a place where residents watched much of the twentieth century arrive one change at a time.

The surviving online transcription of Reardon’s 1978 oral history identified him as “Haymond Edward Reardon” and identified his interviewer as “Linda Kyle Hinkle.” In September 2026, Linda Hinkle Springer, who conducted the original interview, contacted Appalachian Historian and corrected both names. She identified the interviewee as Raymond and confirmed that her own middle name is Kaye. Those firsthand corrections have been incorporated into this article.

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 records 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 descriptions of the area.

The federal records behind those postal references are particularly important. The National Archives preserves the Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832 to 1971, as Microfilm Publication M841. These records document 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 Ragland should be investigated under both Logan and Mingo because the county affiliation of the community changed after Mingo County was created.

Another National Archives collection, the Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837 to 1950, may reveal even more. These reports were often completed by local postmasters and could identify nearby creeks, roads, railroads, mail routes, neighboring post offices, and sometimes the number of families served. Some also contain hand-drawn or annotated maps. Logan County appears on Roll 644 and Mingo County on Roll 648, meaning an early Ragland report might survive under either county.

This is significant because Mingo County did not yet exist when Ragland first appeared in the postal record. Mingo County was created in 1895 from part of Logan County. Ragland therefore belongs to the historical record of both counties, even though it has been associated with Mingo County for well over a century.

Exactly how Ragland received its name remains less certain. Later references have associated the place with the Ragland surname, but I have not located a contemporary document that conclusively identifies the person or family for whom the community was named. Henry Clay Ragland was an important figure in neighboring Logan County and helped establish the Logan Banner, but the shared surname is not enough by itself to establish that the community was named for him.

Until a postal application, deed, family record, or other contemporary source answers that question, the origin of the name should remain open.

A Community Fixed on the Map

Whatever the origin of its name, Ragland was firmly established by the beginning of the twentieth century.

A 1911 Rand McNally map of Mingo County plainly marks Ragland among communities including Varney, Myrtle, Delbarton, and Williamson. The map is valuable because it demonstrates that Ragland was already recognized as a settlement before the coal industry reached the scale that would later dominate the surrounding landscape.

The geological record from the same period provides another perspective. In 1914 the West Virginia Geological Survey published R. V. Hennen, D. B. Reger, and W. A. Price’s extensive study of Logan and Mingo counties. The report and its accompanying maps documented the region’s geology and coal resources in enough detail to examine individual streams, coal beds, and mining possibilities.

Ragland appears within the geographic material associated with this work, placing the community within a landscape state geologists were already examining closely for its mineral wealth.

By 1937, the West Virginia State Road Commission was mapping Mingo County on a much finer local scale. Surviving county highway maps document more than major highways. They can show streams, smaller roads, settlements, railroads, schools, mines, houses, and other features that made up mountain communities.

The federal government was still recognizing Ragland as a distinct community in 1950. Census officials identified it as an unincorporated place within Lee Magisterial District and divided the community among several enumeration districts. Their descriptions referenced State Highway 65/5, Duty Branch, Spring Branch, and the area near Big Pigeonroost Branch.

Those descriptions demonstrate that Ragland was more than the name of a mine or post office. Federal census officials recognized a populated community occupying the road and surrounding branches.

The Ragland Raymond Reardon Remembered

Maps can show where Ragland was. Raymond Edward Reardon described what living there felt like.

On December 5, 1978, Linda Kaye Hinkle interviewed the 65-year-old Reardon for an oral-history project associated with the Williamson campus. Reardon recalled that his father moved the family from Logan County to Ragland in 1921, when Raymond was approximately 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 surviving online transcription of the interview, published decades later, incorrectly rendered Reardon’s first name as Haymond and Hinkle’s middle name as Kyle. Linda Hinkle Springer, the original interviewer, personally corrected those errors in September 2026. Her correction is especially valuable because it comes from a participant in the creation of the original oral history itself.

The economy Reardon remembered was still strongly connected to the land. Families farmed hillsides because level ground was scarce, and much of the work was performed with hand tools instead of machinery. Cash could be more difficult to obtain than food produced at home, so some residents dug ginseng and other medicinal plants or trapped animals for their pelts. Reardon also remembered moonshining as one way some people brought in money.

Stores existed, but they were general stores where groceries, dry goods, hardware, and many other necessities could be found under the same roof.

His memories also preserve a period when homemade clothing remained common. Cloth purchased from stores could be turned into dresses and other garments at home, while clothing already manufactured and purchased from a store could carry the special distinction of being “store boughten.”

Details such as these can seem small beside the history of large coal operations and railroad loadouts, but they often tell us considerably more about everyday life than industrial reports ever could.

It is also important that Reardon was remembering Ragland beginning in 1921, decades after the community first appeared in postal records. Ragland did not suddenly appear when a coal company opened a mine. An older rural community already existed before industrial development reached its later scale, and for a time the rural and industrial worlds existed side by side.

Over the Mountain to Omar

Transportation made the isolation of early Ragland particularly noticeable.

Reardon remembered wagons, buggies, and horses as ordinary forms of transportation and recalled 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 traveling toward the head of Rockhouse Creek, crossing a steep mountain, and descending Cow Creek toward Omar.

It was a route suitable for horses rather than automobiles.

Once the family obtained a car, they could not simply drive across the same mountain path. Automobile travel depended upon the roads that were available, and those roads did not necessarily follow the older routes used by people on horseback.

That recollection helps explain why the old postal geography is important. Cow Creek and Ragland were connected not merely through an archival cross-reference but through the everyday movement of families across the mountains.

County boundaries could appear simple on a map while residents continued to travel along ridge and creek routes that existed long before those boundaries were drawn.

Reardon remembered that his family had lived at Ragland for four or five years before his father purchased a truck and automobile. Those early vehicles lacked many things later drivers would consider basic, including modern heating, automatic windshield wipers, and other comforts.

On mountain roads that could freeze into deep ruts during winter, automobile ownership did not immediately make transportation easy.

Chafin Grade School

Among Raymond Reardon’s clearest recollections was Chafin Grade School at Ragland.

He remembered it as a “two-room affair.”

Teachers were strict, textbooks were not free, and recess included marbles, ball games, and whatever entertainment children could create for themselves. Chafin belonged to an era when small community schools were scattered throughout Appalachian hollows, allowing children to attend school relatively near their homes before consolidation increasingly moved education into larger facilities.

High school required a longer journey.

Reardon attended school at Delbarton, which he remembered as approximately three miles away. When he began high school, school buses were not available to him and students had to arrange their own transportation. By the time he finished four years later, school buses had arrived.

Within the span of one student’s education, Ragland had moved from a period when students largely had to find their own way to school toward a more organized transportation system connecting smaller communities with larger schools.

References to Chafin Grade School are especially valuable because small rural schools are often among the first local institutions to disappear physically and among the most difficult to reconstruct generations later.

The West Virginia State Archives maintains material relating to Mingo County schools, and additional local photographs or family collections may yet provide more evidence about Chafin and neighboring schools.

The little two-room school Raymond Reardon remembered deserves a place in the history of Ragland just as surely as the better-documented coal mines.

When Coal Came Up the Creek

Reardon’s description of Ragland changes noticeably when he reaches the expansion of coal mining around the community.

“When the coal mines opened on our creek,” he remembered, new families began arriving.

Coal camps became common. Automobiles increased in number. Roads improved. Stores offered a greater variety of goods. Bathrooms gradually replaced outdoor privies, and coal camp doctors made medical treatment more accessible in places where seeing a physician had once required considerably more travel.

The transformation did not happen everywhere at the same time, and mining did not erase the older rural economy overnight. Farming, hunting, gathering, timber work, and mining could exist beside one another.

What coal changed was scale.

Mines required workers. Workers brought families. Families created demand for houses, stores, schools, roads, doctors, transportation, and other services.

A creek community that had once been sparsely settled could become considerably busier within a generation.

Reardon also remembered coal mining before modern mechanization. In his younger years, it was still an era strongly associated with picks and shovels, and he recalled boys entering the mines at fourteen or fifteen years of age.

His testimony represents personal memory rather than a statistical survey, but it illustrates the enormous distance between the mining world he encountered in his youth and the highly mechanized operations that eventually surrounded Ragland.

The 1914 geological survey helps explain why coal companies were interested in this mountain landscape. Logan and Mingo counties contained numerous commercially important coal beds, and government geologists were mapping their thicknesses, positions, outcrops, and mining possibilities while communities such as Ragland were moving deeper into the industrial age.

National Coal No. 25

By the later twentieth century, one coal mine can be tied directly to Ragland through federal records.

A United States Bureau of Mines report published in 1972 analyzed coal samples collected during fiscal year 1971. In its West Virginia material, under Mingo County, the report identifies Ragland, National Coal No. 25, and the Lower Cedar Grove coal bed.

This was not a retrospective local history. It was a federal technical publication based upon 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 United States Department of the Interior regarding a mandatory federal mine-safety standard at its No. 25 Mine at Ragland, Mingo County, West Virginia.

This federal notice provides unusually direct documentation connecting the mine, company, and community.

The mine eventually closed, but its history did not end when production stopped.

In 2022, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sought emergency reclamation work connected with the Ragland, or Mounts, landslide in Mingo County. State records connected the problem with 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 involved cleanup, drainage improvements, repairs, a wet seal, and the possibility that a nearby resident would need to be temporarily relocated.

Engineering material associated with the emergency described a landslide along Rockhouse Fork Road that damaged a manufactured home and moved it from its foundation.

Decades after miners left National Coal No. 25, the abandoned underground workings were still capable of affecting people living above them.

From Pick and Shovel Mining to the Ragland Loadout

If Raymond Reardon witnessed Ragland change from horseback travel to automobiles, the industrial changes that followed were just as dramatic.

By the early twenty-first century, corporate filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission described Ragland as part of the much larger Coal-Mac mining operation spanning parts of Logan and Mingo counties.

A 2005 Arch Coal filing divided Coal-Mac into the Ragland and Holden 22 production complexes. The Ragland complex included 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 capable of handling approximately 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 corporate filings continued to identify Ragland as an important shipping point for the operation.

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 Raymond Reardon’s childhood is difficult to overstate.

He remembered crossing the mountain from Rockhouse Creek on horseback because the route was unsuitable for a car. Generations later, thousands of tons of coal could leave Ragland aboard a railroad train loaded in only a few hours.

Those two Raglands were not separate places.

They occupied the same narrow mountain landscape.

More Than a Coal Place

Coal dominates many of the records that survive because mining produced paperwork.

Companies filed reports. Government inspectors visited mines. Geologists mapped coal beds. Federal agencies tested coal. Railroads recorded shipments. State agencies maintained permits, production statistics, and reclamation records.

Ordinary family life did not leave behind paperwork on the same scale.

That imbalance can distort the history of a community like Ragland.

Read only the industrial records and Ragland becomes a mine location, coal seam, or railroad loadout.

Read Raymond Reardon’s testimony beside postal records, maps, census districts, school references, deeds, and mine reports, and a fuller community emerges.

There were families here before the largest mines. Children attended Chafin Grade School. Farmers worked steep hillsides because flatter land was scarce. People dug ginseng for cash. Horses followed mountain paths toward Cow Creek and Omar.

Automobiles gradually appeared.

Roads improved.

Mines opened.

Coal camps brought new families.

The community became increasingly connected to an industrial system capable of moving enormous quantities of coal beyond the mountains.

The 1950 census is particularly important in preserving the distinction between Ragland the community and Ragland the industrial location. Federal enumerators did not merely identify a mine called Ragland. They recognized an unincorporated community and described its boundaries through roads, streams, branches, and mountain geography.

The Landscape Keeps the Record

Much of Appalachian history survives in the landscape long after buildings and businesses have disappeared.

Ragland is a particularly strong example.

Rockhouse Fork still ties the community to the geography Raymond Reardon remembered. Cow Creek remains on the other side of the mountain. The coal seams mapped by geologists in the early twentieth century remain beneath the ridges.

The abandoned workings of National Coal No. 25 remained underground after the mine stopped production in 1977, and the 2022 emergency at Ragland demonstrated that industrial history could continue to affect the landscape decades later.

Historic maps preserve another layer of the community.

The 1911 map shows Ragland before some of the greatest twentieth-century industrial transformations. The 1937 highway maps can help reconstruct roads, buildings, schools, mines, streams, and settlement patterns during the coal era. Census descriptions from 1950 establish how federal officials defined the community. Geological records and mine maps can then be compared with the surface landscape to better understand what existed beneath the mountains.

Few written histories have been devoted exclusively to Ragland, but that does not mean the history has disappeared.

Instead, it survives scattered across government records, maps, oral histories, mining documents, newspapers, census schedules, deeds, family collections, and the memories of people connected to the community.

The September 2026 correction supplied by Linda Hinkle Springer is itself an example of why those living connections matter. A mistake preserved in a later transcription could be corrected because the woman who conducted the interview was still able to identify what the historical record had gotten wrong.

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, families were already living among these creeks and ridges.

There was a Ragland post office while the community was still part of Logan County. There were hillside farms, horseback trails, general stores, and children attending the two rooms of Chafin Grade School.

Coal did not create all of that.

Coal entered an existing mountain community and transformed it.

The transformation was profound.

Raymond Edward Reardon lived long enough to remember Ragland when automobiles were unusual and to witness the arrival of a much more mechanized mining age. Federal records carry 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 home directly to mine workings abandoned nearly forty-five years earlier. At Ragland, history is not confined to old photographs, oral histories, maps, 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.

Within one narrow Appalachian landscape, Ragland contains much of the larger history of southern West Virginia: rural settlement, changing 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

Hinkle Springer, Linda. Comment to Appalachian Historian concerning the Raymond Edward Reardon oral history, September 21, 2026. Hinkle Springer, who conducted the December 5, 1978 interview, corrected the interviewee’s first name from Haymond to Raymond and corrected her own middle name from Kyle to Kaye.

Reardon, Raymond Edward. Oral history interview by Linda Kaye Hinkle, December 5, 1978. Southern Appalachian Oral History Collection, Williamson Campus, Williamson, West Virginia.

“Our Appalachia: A Blog Created by Students of Brandon Kirk.” “Haymond Edward Reardon of Ragland, Mingo County, WV (1978).” March 24, 2019. Transcribed by David Daniels. The title and names are retained here as they appear in the published online transcription. Linda Hinkle Springer, the original interviewer, corrected the interviewee’s first name to Raymond and her own middle name to Kaye in September 2026.

National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M841.

National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M1126.

United States Post Office Department. Postal Bulletins, including the August 2, 1886 entry for Ragland.

West Virginia State Archives. West Virginia place-name records for Ragland and Cow Creek.

Rand McNally. Map of Mingo County, West Virginia, 1911.

Hennen, R. V., D. B. Reger, and W. A. Price. Logan and Mingo Counties. West Virginia Geological Survey, 1914.

West Virginia State Road Commission. Mingo County highway maps, 1937.

United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census enumeration district descriptions for Ragland, Lee Magisterial District, Mingo County, West Virginia.

United States Bureau of Mines. Analyses of Tipple and Delivered Samples of Coal. Report of Investigations 7588. Washington, D.C., 1972.

United States Department of the Interior. Federal Register notice concerning National Coal Mining Company No. 25 Mine at Ragland, Mingo County, West Virginia. April 11, 1974.

West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Records concerning the Ragland, or Mounts, landslide and mine blowout, Mingo County, 2022.

Arch Coal, Inc. Annual Report and Form 10-K filings concerning Coal-Mac and the Ragland production complex and loadout, 2005, 2006, and 2018.

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. Special thanks to Linda Hinkle Springer for recognizing the errors in the later transcription of the 1978 interview and helping preserve Raymond Edward Reardon’s story more accurately.