Appalachian Community Histories – Raysal, McDowell County: Pond Creek Pocahontas, Raymond Salvati, and a Coalfield Community
On August 27, 1946, photographer Russell Lee stood in the narrow coal country of McDowell County and pointed his camera toward the Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Company tipple at Raysal. The resulting federal photograph is one of the clearest surviving images of the community during its mining years. Coal cars sit beneath and around the industrial structure while the surrounding mountains press tightly against the railroad and mine works. The photograph belonged to the federal government’s Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, but today it preserves something more basic: a view of the operation around which much of Raysal’s twentieth-century history revolved.
Raysal was never a great city of the Pocahontas coalfield. It belonged instead to the network of smaller McDowell County communities where a mine, railroad siding, post office, school, company business, and rows of homes could transform a mountain bottom into a recognizable place. Its history survives in scattered records rather than one complete local chronicle. Federal photographs, census schedules, company papers, newspaper reports, railroad records, and even a Hungarian-language miners’ newspaper preserve pieces of a community that grew beside one of the most important coal operations in southern West Virginia.
A Name Taken from Raymond Salvati
The name Raysal itself points directly toward the coal industry. West Virginia place-name historian Hamill Kenny recorded that the name was formed from Raymond Salvati, a mining official associated with the Pond Creek Pocahontas operation. Salvati became an important figure in the interconnected management of Pond Creek Pocahontas and Island Creek Coal Company, and surviving company correspondence places him within the organization by the late 1920s.
The West Virginia State Archives place-name index lists Raysal in McDowell County by 1930, showing that the community name was already formally recorded by the opening years of the Depression.
That timing fits the rapid expansion of Pond Creek Pocahontas. The company had begun operating in the Pocahontas field in 1923. A contemporary 1933 article in Coal Age reported that company production increased steadily afterward. Its No. 3 mine opened in March 1930, while No. 4 opened in March 1932 and shipped approximately 400,000 tons during its first ten months. By 1932, Pond Creek Pocahontas was producing about 1.5 million tons of coal annually from its operations.
The Raysal operation belonged to this period of expansion. A particularly valuable contemporary account published in the Hungarian Miners’ Journal in 1952 stated that the mine at Raysal had been opened in 1932. The same report connected the operation directly with Raymond Salvati and the Island Creek organization.
Raysal was therefore not simply a mountain settlement that happened to have a mine nearby. Its very name carried the imprint of the coal company and one of the men who managed the larger industrial system surrounding it.
Pond Creek Pocahontas and the Growth of the Coalfield
Pond Creek Pocahontas operated at a scale that reached well beyond Raysal. Its mines around Bartley, Bradshaw, and the surrounding country were linked organizationally with Island Creek Coal Company and commercially with the Norfolk and Western Railway. Coal taken from beneath the McDowell County mountains had little value unless it could be prepared and carried to distant markets, so mines, tipples, railroad tracks, machine shops, substations, and supply buildings developed as parts of the same system.
A Norfolk and Western engineering drawing from 1923 for another Pond Creek Pocahontas development at Big Four shows just how elaborate that infrastructure could become. The plan marked a tipple, powerhouse, substation, supply house, machine shop, old tunnel, and a proposed electrified railroad spur. Although the drawing concerns Big Four rather than Raysal, it demonstrates the type of interconnected industrial landscape Pond Creek Pocahontas was constructing throughout its McDowell County holdings.
By the middle 1930s, the company had become a substantial employer. A 1937 congressional record concerning coal employment reported Pond Creek Pocahontas employment rising from 438 workers in 1929 to 1,369 in 1935. Those workers were spread among several operations, but the increase illustrates the growth occurring in the company system during the same years Raysal emerged as a named mining community.
The company’s presence reached into daily economic life as well. Surviving records from the Ingle-Schierloh Company preserve orders and correspondence concerning Pond Creek Pocahontas metal scrip. Company officials ordered thousands of pieces for use within the coal operation, including correspondence sent through the company’s Bartley offices. The records include transactions from the late 1920s and 1930s and demonstrate how thoroughly the coal company could enter the everyday economy of mining families.
For communities such as Raysal, the company was therefore more than the name on a tipple. Mine employment determined family income. Company facilities shaped where people worked and shopped. Railroad schedules influenced the movement of coal and supplies. The opening or closing of a mine could change the future of the entire settlement.
Families and Workers at Raysal
Federal census records bring the people of Raysal into clearer view. The 1940 census placed the community within McDowell County’s Sandy River District, Enumeration District 24-60. Among the people recorded there was William Evans Spencer, identified as a coal-mine brakeman. The larger enumeration district contains the kind of information that allows the mining community to be reconstructed household by household, including occupations, family relationships, education, housing, and where residents had been living five years earlier.
Those records are important because places such as Raysal were never populated solely by men disappearing underground at the beginning of a shift. Around the miners lived wives, children, store workers, railroad employees, teachers, postal employees, and others whose lives depended directly or indirectly upon the coal economy.
Newspaper fragments preserve some of that community life. In 1938, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported that M. Holbrook of Raysal had been elected vice-chairman of the Sandy River District Boy Scouts organization. Representatives from Raysal and surrounding communities participated in the organization, showing that civic life extended beyond the mine portal. Earlier and later newspaper notices likewise recorded Raysal residents through social events, accidents, local organizations, and ordinary community news.
These small notices matter. Industrial histories can make a coal camp look like nothing but machinery and production figures, but people living at Raysal raised families, attended school, received mail, joined organizations, traveled to neighboring towns, and created lives whose boundaries did not end at the company property line.
The Post Office and a Permanent Community
The presence of a post office gives another measure of Raysal’s development. Federal postal records concerning the community survive in National Archives collections, while later congressional and Senate documents identify Raysal postmasters. Federal records from the 1940s show the office becoming a presidential post office on July 1, 1945, an indication of the volume and importance of postal activity in the community during the height of the coal era.
The post office also survived the decline of the original mine. In July 1965, the United States Senate Executive Calendar listed Ruth B. Netotea as nominee for postmaster at Raysal, replacing J. G. Bryant, who had resigned.
A 1969 file concerning the Raysal post office survives in the Jennings Randolph Collection at the West Virginia State Archives. Its existence more than fifteen years after the mine closing is a reminder that Raysal did not simply disappear when coal employment fell. The community established an identity that outlasted the particular operation responsible for much of its early growth.
Russell Lee Photographs the Raysal Tipple
The most striking surviving primary source for Raysal came during the summer of 1946.
Russell Lee was traveling through the American coalfields as part of the federal Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry. His work took him into mining communities where he photographed mines, company housing, stores, miners, families, transportation, and the physical conditions of coalfield life.
On August 27, he photographed the Pond Creek Pocahontas tipple at Raysal. The National Archives identifies the image specifically with Raysal, McDowell County, and Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Company.
The importance of the photograph lies partly in its ordinary appearance. There is no explosion, strike, rescue attempt, or public ceremony. Instead, Lee captured the industrial machinery of an operating coal community. The tipple dominates the scene, with railroad cars positioned where coal could be prepared and moved outward. Mountains rise immediately behind the works, leaving little flat land and forcing the industrial complex into the same narrow valley occupied by tracks, roads, houses, and streams.
That landscape defined communities throughout southern McDowell County. Coal had to move from underground workings through preparation facilities and onto the railroad. The tipple was the visible point where the underground mine met the national economy.
At Raysal, Lee preserved that connection in a single frame.
Coal Cars Through the Mountains
The Norfolk and Western Railway was the other great industrial presence behind Raysal’s coal economy. Without the railroad, the enormous volumes of coal extracted by Pond Creek Pocahontas could not have reached the industries, railroads, furnaces, and homes that consumed Pocahontas-region coal.
A dramatic reminder came on March 26, 1951. The Hungarian Miners’ Journal reported that two Norfolk and Western coal movements collided near Raysal. One consisted of a train carrying 82 loaded coal cars toward Iaeger. Coming from the Pond Creek direction was a locomotive and coal car. The newspaper reported that the collision occurred around a curve on a single-track portion of the railroad. Both locomotives were damaged, but the crews escaped injury after getting clear in time.
The accident provides an unusually detailed glimpse of the amount of coal moving through the area. Eighty-two loaded cars in a single train represented the work of miners, loaders, tipple crews, railroad workers, and countless pieces of machinery operating together.
It also demonstrates how closely the railroad was woven into Raysal’s geography. The trains were not passing through an unrelated mountain town. They were moving through an industrial corridor created because of coal.
The Mine Begins to Run Out
Within little more than a year of the railroad collision, Raysal received far more serious news.
The Hungarian Miners’ Journal reported in October 1952 that the Pond Creek Pocahontas mine at Raysal had been permanently closed. Unlike many later summaries that simply record a closing date, the contemporary newspaper explained why.
According to the report, most of the coal had already been exhausted. What remained was not considered economical to mine under existing conditions. Eighty-five men lost their jobs when the operation shut down. The newspaper added that the mine had once employed approximately 250 miners, but that the workforce had been steadily reduced during the preceding years.
Those numbers show that the closing was not a single unexpected blow delivered to a mine operating at full strength. The decline had already begun. A workforce that once numbered around 250 had fallen to 85 by the time the company finally determined that further mining was no longer worthwhile.
For the remaining men, however, the distinction probably mattered little. Eighty-five jobs disappeared from a relatively small Appalachian community whose economy had been organized around coal.
The same 1952 report stated that the Raysal mine had opened in 1932. If taken from opening to closing, the operation had therefore lasted about twenty years. Within that relatively brief period, a generation of families had built their lives around wages from the mine. Children had grown up knowing the tipple and railroad as permanent features of the valley. Businesses and public institutions had developed around the population the operation supported.
Then the coal that justified the mine was no longer worth taking out.
Pond Creek Pocahontas Becomes Island Creek
The closing at Raysal did not immediately end Pond Creek Pocahontas as a corporation. The company continued operating elsewhere, and its relationship with Island Creek became even more formal during the middle 1950s.
The official corporate record preserved by the West Virginia Secretary of State documents what happened next. On September 7, 1955, an agreement merged and consolidated Pond Creek Pocahontas Company into Island Creek Coal Company.
The merger completed a process that had been visible for years. The companies had shared management connections, and Island Creek had distributed Pond Creek coal. Raymond Salvati himself was part of that intertwined corporate world.
For Raysal, the corporate change came after the mine that had anchored the community was already gone. What remained was a settlement whose name continued to preserve Salvati’s connection to the earlier company era.
Raysal After the Mine
The closing of a mine could devastate a coal town, but it did not necessarily erase it. Raysal continued to appear in government records long after 1952.
A federal school listing from 1970 identified Raysal Elementary School in McDowell County, demonstrating that the community still supported an important local institution nearly two decades after the mine closing. Archival records from a McDowell County evaluation project also preserve aerial photographs identified with Bradshaw or Raysal, offering another way to trace how the landscape changed after large-scale mining declined.
The post office continued serving the community. Local government and volunteer institutions followed. Roads and railroad tracks remained where earlier generations had traveled between the coal camps of the Sandy River and Dry Fork country.
What gradually disappeared was the industrial landscape that had once explained why Raysal existed where it did.
Tipples could be dismantled. Tracks and sidings could be altered. Company buildings could fall or be torn down. Houses could disappear into brush or be replaced. A person passing through decades later might have little reason to know that hundreds of miners had once earned their living there.
That is what makes the surviving records so important.
Remembering Raysal
Raysal’s history is the history of hundreds of Appalachian places that became important without ever becoming large.
Its name remembers Raymond Salvati. Its industrial story belongs to Pond Creek Pocahontas and Island Creek. Its economic lifeline ran along the Norfolk and Western Railway. Census records preserve the miners and their families. Postal records show a functioning community. School records reveal life continuing after the mine. A Hungarian miners’ newspaper preserves the unusually detailed story of the operation’s closing.
Above all, Russell Lee’s 1946 photograph preserves Raysal at the moment when the system was still working.
The tipple stands over the tracks. Coal cars wait beneath it. The mountains close around the scene.
Six years later, the newspaper reported that most of the coal was gone and the remainder was no longer worth mining. Eighty-five men walked away from jobs at an operation where roughly 250 had once worked.
Yet Raysal remained.
That may be the most important part of its story. Coal created the conditions that allowed the community to grow, gave it an unusual name, filled its railroad cars, supported its families, and eventually left behind the familiar problems of a declining coal economy. The people who made Raysal a community, however, were more permanent than any particular mine.
Today the surviving photograph, company records, newspapers, government documents, maps, and family records allow that small piece of McDowell County to be reconstructed. They remind us that Appalachian coal history was never only the story of corporations or tonnage. It was also the story of places like Raysal, where a twenty-year mine could shape generations and leave its name written permanently across the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Lee, Russell. “Tipple. Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Company, Raysal, McDowell County, West Virginia.” August 27, 1946. Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Record Group 245, National Archives Identifier 541016. National Archives and Records Administration. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/541016
National Archives and Records Administration. “Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Compiled 1946–1947.” Record Group 245, National Archives Identifier 540230. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/540230
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population Schedules, McDowell County, West Virginia, Sandy River District, Enumeration District 24-60. Record Group 29, Microfilm Publication T627. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population: McDowell County, West Virginia. Record Group 29. National Archives and Records Administration. https://1950census.archives.gov/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Records of the Post Office Department, Microfilm Publication M1126, Roll 645, McDowell County, West Virginia. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971.” Microfilm Publication M841. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 80th Cong., 2nd sess., March 1948. Postmaster nomination for Josephine G. Byran [Bryant], Raysal, West Virginia. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1948-pt3/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1948-pt3-4.pdf
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 81st Cong., 1st sess., 1949. Postmaster appointment of Josephine G. Bryant, Raysal, West Virginia. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1949-pt1/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1949-pt1-23.pdf
United States Senate. Executive Calendar. July 26, 1965. Nomination of Ruth B. Netotea as postmaster at Raysal, West Virginia. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/executive_calendar/1965/07_26_1965.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “Post Office, Raysal (McDowell County), 1969.” Jennings Randolph Collection. Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/randolph/randolphgasf.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Raysal, McDowell County.” Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamr.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Vital Research Records.” McDowell County birth, marriage, and death records. https://wvculture.org/vital-records-interactive/
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Records and Historical Sources.” Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Newspapers.” Holdings of the Welch Daily News, McDowell Recorder, McDowell Times, and other county newspapers. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/newspapers/mcdowell.html
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Ferdinand C. Menk Coal Mining Records.” A&M 3645. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. Includes Pond Creek Pocahontas Company annual reports and company records. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2040
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Ferdinand C. Menk Coal Mining Records, Series 5, Box 20.” Island Creek and Pond Creek Pocahontas analyses, specifications, policies, cost estimates, and staff meeting records. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/top_containers/16988
West Virginia University Libraries. “Pond Creek Colliery.” West Virginia History OnView, ca. 1920. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/004342
West Virginia University Libraries. “View of Mining Facilities, Pond Creek Pocahontas Company.” West Virginia History OnView. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/036089
West Virginia University Libraries. “View of Tipple, Pond Creek Pocahontas Company.” West Virginia History OnView. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/036085
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Proposed Track Layout at No. 2 Mine for Pond Creek-Pocahontas Co. (Formerly Cirrus Coal & Coke Co.) at Big Four, W.Va.” Chief Engineer’s drawing, September 19, 1923. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=101766
Edwards, J. H. “And Uniformity Are Watchwords at New Mine of Pond Creek Pocahontas Co.” Coal Age, April 1933. https://cdn.cocodoc.com/cocodoc-form-pdf/pdf/296166435–Oal-A-ge-Politechnika-lska-delibra-bg-polsl-.pdf
Coal Age. “Pond Creek No. 3.” Vol. 35, 1930, 515. https://cdn.cocodoc.com/cocodoc-form-pdf/pdf/296166435–Oal-A-ge-Politechnika-lska-delibra-bg-polsl-.pdf
Ingle-Schierloh Company. Pond Creek Pocahontas Company Scrip Correspondence, 1926–1937. Newman Numismatic Portal, Washington University in St. Louis. https://nnp.wustl.edu/Library/AdvancedSearch?contenttype=Archive
Salvati, Raymond E. Correspondence concerning Pond Creek Pocahontas Company scrip, June 19, 1929. Ingle-Schierloh Company Records. Newman Numismatic Portal, Washington University in St. Louis. https://nnp.wustl.edu/Library/AdvancedSearch?contenttype=Archive
United States Government. Federal Register. December 3, 1937. Listings for Pond Creek Pocahontas Nos. 1, 3, and 4 mines. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1937-12-03/pdf/FR-1937-12-03.pdf
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 75th Cong., 1st sess., 1937. Coal employment statistics for Pond Creek Pocahontas Company. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1937-pt2-v81/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1937-pt2-v81-3.pdf
United States Government. Federal Register. September 11, 1943. Wartime federal control of coal mines, including Pond Creek Pocahontas Company. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1943-09-11/pdf/FR-1943-09-11.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. Report of Norfolk & Western Railway collision near Raysal, West Virginia, March 1951. Vol. 38, no. 14. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/66585/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1951_014.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap [Hungarian Miners’ Journal]. “Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Co. Raysal, W. Va.” 1952, no. 28. Report on the permanent closing of the Raysal mine and loss of eighty-five jobs. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/66603/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1952_028.pdf
West Virginia Secretary of State. “Island Creek Coal Company.” Corporate record documenting the September 7, 1955, merger of Pond Creek Pocahontas Company into Island Creek Coal Company. https://apps.sos.wv.gov/business/corporations/organization.aspx?org=71856
United States Government. Federal Register. May 23, 1970. Federal school listing including Raysal Elementary School, McDowell County, West Virginia. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1970-05-23/pdf/FR-1970-05-23.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection: topoView.” Maps covering Raysal and southern McDowell County, West Virginia. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Eastern Regional Coal Archives.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, WV. Collections include coal-company records, maps, photographs, newspapers, company-store records, railroad materials, and oral histories. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
Wieck, Edward A. Preventing Fatal Explosions in Coal Mines. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1942. https://www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/Preventing-Fatal-Explosions-Coal-Mines.pdf
Pond Creek Pocahontas Co. v. Alexander, 137 W. Va. 864, 74 S.E.2d 590 (1953).
Hudson v. State Compensation Commissioner, 121 W. Va. 461, 5 S.E.2d 108 (1939). https://app.midpage.ai/document/hudson-v-state-compensation-commissioner-4006641
United Construction Workers v. Laburnum Construction Corp. Supreme Court of Virginia, 1953. https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/supreme-court/1953/3989-1.html
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945.
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Two Mule Publishing, 2010.
Lambie, Joseph T. From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway. New York: New York University Press, 1954. https://search.worldcat.org/title/2406061
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.
Sullivan, Charles Kenneth. Coal Men and Coal Towns: Development of the Smokeless Coalfields of Southern West Virginia, 1873–1923. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989.
Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Libraries, 1964.
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1993. https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/486766
Friedl, Joseph. A History of Education in McDowell County, West Virginia, 1858–1976. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1975.
Sowers, Auburn Daniel. Facts About McDowell County, West Virginia. 1912.
McDowell County Centennial, 1858–1958. McDowell County, WV, 1958.
Solins, Mrs. Samuel, and Mrs. Paul Jones. McDowell County History: A Pictorial History of McDowell County, West Virginia. 1959.
McDowell County Historical Society. The Heritage of McDowell County, West Virginia. 1995.
Author Note: This article was written to preserve the story of Raysal, West Virginia, and the people whose lives were shaped by Pond Creek Pocahontas, the railroad, and the coal industry. By bringing together federal records, company documents, newspapers, photographs, and other historical sources, it seeks to remember a McDowell County community whose history extends far beyond the mine that helped create it.