Appalachian Community Histories – Ream, McDowell County: Gary No. 6, U.S. Steel, and Life in a Coal Company Town
Ream once occupied a busy place in the industrial geography of Gary Hollow. The railroad ran along the narrow valley, rows of company houses climbed into the hollow, mine openings pierced the mountainsides, and a large brick company store stood near the tracks where miners and their families came to shop, collect mail, and handle company business.
Little about the settlement was accidental. Ream existed because one of the largest corporations in the United States needed coal.
The community was Gary No. 6, part of the enormous United States Coal & Coke Company operation created by U.S. Steel in McDowell County during the opening years of the twentieth century. Ream became one of a chain of settlements that included Gary, Thorpe, Elbert, Filbert, Wilcoe, and others. Together they formed an industrial landscape that the Library of Congress Historic American Landscapes Survey describes as fourteen historic underground mines and their supporting communities.
Ream had a distinct identity within that larger system. Its name came from Norman B. Ream, a U.S. Steel controller, while its economic life revolved around Mine No. 6. The official National Register documentation records the community as one of twelve settlements built by U.S. Coal & Coke in Gary Hollow and describes its company store as the commercial, business, and social center of the town.
For decades, coal from beneath the mountains at Ream entered an industrial chain stretching far beyond McDowell County. The miners who produced it were helping fuel the steel industry that built railroads, factories, bridges, ships, machinery, and modern American cities.
Yet Ream was never simply a mine number on a corporate ledger. It became home.
U.S. Steel Comes to Gary Hollow
At the beginning of the twentieth century, southern McDowell County contained some of the most valuable metallurgical coal in the country. The Pocahontas seams were particularly important because their coal could be used in the production of coke and steel.
U.S. Steel wanted dependable access to that fuel.
The United States Coal & Coke Company established itself in McDowell County in 1902 as part of U.S. Steel’s effort to control its own sources of raw material. Prospecting, railroad construction, mine development, house building, and industrial construction followed at remarkable speed.
A contemporary account published in the Engineering and Mining Journal in July 1909 described development beginning in 1902 and reported a mining system equipped with modern machinery. By April 1909, the operation was averaging about 9,000 tons of coal per day. Eight of its mines had large banks of beehive coke ovens, with 2,151 ovens in all.
Ream belonged to this first great period of construction.
Sources differ slightly over the precise opening date of Mine No. 6. Preservation research places its creation in the 1903 to 1904 period, while local histories generally date the beginning of production to 1904. What is certain is that No. 6 was among the early mines in the Gary system and that Ream developed around it during the first years of U.S. Coal & Coke’s expansion. The Norfolk & Western’s Sand Lick Branch, built through this part of Gary Hollow between 1904 and 1908, served Ream, Elbert, and Filbert and connected their mines with the national railroad network.
The railroad was as essential to Ream as the coal seam itself. A mine in an isolated mountain hollow had little value unless coal could be moved economically to market. Tracks, sidings, mine openings, tipples, coke ovens, houses, roads, and Sand Lick Creek therefore competed for space on a valley floor squeezed between steep mountains.
Ream was the result.
Gary No. 6 and the Industrial Town
Within seven years of U.S. Coal & Coke’s arrival, the company had constructed twelve mining operations around Gary Hollow. Main Gary served as the administrative center, while individual mines were surrounded by communities intended to keep workers close to their jobs.
The official Ream National Register nomination described the communities as connected by roads while possessing their own churches, schools, stores, and other necessities.
Mine No. 6 sat at the center of Ream’s economy.
The operation worked valuable Pocahontas coal, and contemporary descriptions of the larger Gary system show how thoroughly mining had been industrialized by the first decade of the twentieth century. Mechanical coal cutters, haulage systems, mine cars, ventilation equipment, tipples, railroad sidings, and coke ovens linked underground labor with the surface works.
The scale should not hide the human character of the work. Miners still entered a mountain where roof falls, explosions, machinery, mine cars, dust, and blasting presented constant danger. Mechanization could increase production, but it did not remove the need for men to judge roof conditions, timber working places, lay track, handle explosives, load coal, move equipment, and spend much of a shift beyond daylight.
An unusual piece of Ream’s record comes from the national Sentinels of Safety program. United States Coal & Coke’s No. 6 Mine at Gary appears as the winning underground bituminous coal mine in both 1925 and 1926. Whatever the dangers inherent in mining, those awards indicate that No. 6 could also achieve national recognition for its safety performance.
The Company Store at the Center of Ream
The building that came to symbolize Ream was not the mine itself but the company store.
Built around 1910, the large two-story brick structure stood near the railroad and County Route 13 at the mouth of the residential hollow. Its segmental arched windows, brick stringcourse, raised center parapet, and imposing size made it one of the community’s most substantial buildings.
The National Register nomination called it the most important building in Ream.
That description makes sense when its functions are considered.
The first purpose was retail. Miners’ families could purchase food, clothing, household necessities, and other merchandise without traveling out of the hollow. Yet the building also contained the company’s payroll office and, according to the official preservation documentation, a post office. Residents came there for merchandise, mail, wages, and company business, making the store a natural meeting place.
Company stores have often become symbols of coalfield exploitation, and sometimes for good reason. When the company controlled employment, housing, retail space, transportation, and other parts of everyday life, the line between providing services and exercising power could become very thin.
Gary Hollow complicates any simple interpretation.
U.S. Coal & Coke spent heavily on housing, schools, churches, roads, recreation, medical care, and public improvements because it wanted a stable workforce. Federal investigators in the 1920s considered Gary unusually well developed among American coal towns. The larger Gary operation eventually contained an extraordinary collection of churches, schools, athletic facilities, businesses, stores, and recreational institutions.
Those benefits were real, but so was the company’s authority over the landscape.
Ream’s store embodied both sides of that relationship. It was useful, central, and probably full of ordinary neighborhood encounters, but it also stood as a physical reminder that the same corporation providing the groceries also owned the mine where many customers worked.
The People Who Made Ream a Community
Corporate records can tell us how much coal a mine produced, but census schedules and state records reveal something more important: who lived around it.
The population of Gary Hollow became unusually diverse as U.S. Coal & Coke recruited the labor needed to keep its rapidly expanding mines running. A 1915 West Virginia mining report counted 1,479 hand-loading miners across the Gary operation. They included 227 native-born white miners, 271 African Americans, 360 Hungarians, 224 Romanians, 135 Italians, 145 Poles, and 117 miners classified as Slavic.
Those numbers apply to the larger Gary system rather than Ream alone, but they help explain the world in which Ream existed. Native Appalachian families lived and worked alongside African Americans arriving from the South and immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic before making another journey into the coalfields of West Virginia.
The mine brought them together at work, but company towns were not socially equal places.
Housing often reflected occupation and status. Miners with families might occupy small company houses, while engineers, doctors, foremen, superintendents, and other higher-ranking employees received larger residences. Single workers often boarded. Race and ethnicity could also determine where a family lived, even when men from different backgrounds worked beside one another underground.
Inside those houses, however, people built lives that extended beyond the company’s plans. Children were born and raised in Ream. Families tended gardens, cooked meals, visited neighbors, attended church, walked along the railroad and company roads, and watched generations of miners disappear into the mountain each morning.
A place conceived as an industrial camp gradually acquired family histories.
That distinction matters. U.S. Steel created Ream, but U.S. Steel did not create every memory associated with it.
Ream During the Great Coal Years
Ream matured during the decades when McDowell County became one of the great coal-producing regions of the United States.
The speed of industrial growth was extraordinary. McDowell County went from 31 mines operated by 31 companies in 1900 to 99 mines operated by 66 companies by the end of 1910. County coal production rose during the same period from approximately 4.6 million tons to 13.7 million tons.
U.S. Coal & Coke stood among the largest operators.
By 1916, a company advertisement in the McDowell Times announced that eleven mines and 2,000 coke ovens were working six days each week and called for another thousand miners and coke drawers. It was corporate recruiting material, but precisely because of that it provides a revealing glimpse of the labor demands of Gary Hollow at its height.
Ream’s location between Main Gary and Elbert placed it in the middle of this industrial corridor. Coal cars moved through the valley. Mine whistles and machinery organized the working day. Smoke from coke ovens once hung above parts of the hollow. The railroad carried away the coal that justified the existence of everything around it.
The Depression disrupted that world.
U.S. Coal & Coke depended heavily upon demand from U.S. Steel, so reduced industrial production brought cutbacks. At the same time, the labor movement gained strength across southern West Virginia. A 1933 union agreement established minimum wages, a forty-hour workweek, cash payment every two weeks, and the right of miners to live and shop where they chose.
For company towns, those changes weakened some of the arrangements that had made corporate control so complete during the early years.
The automobile did the same thing in a quieter way. Better roads allowed families to shop outside their own camp, reducing dependence upon company stores. The Ream National Register nomination specifically identified automobiles and improved roads as reasons the store gradually lost its earlier importance.
War, Coal, and a Changing No. 6
The Second World War gave the Gary mines another period of enormous importance.
Steel production depended on metallurgical coal, and the mines of southern West Virginia became part of the industrial machinery supporting American wartime production. Ream’s miners were therefore participating in something much larger than the daily movement of coal cars out of No. 6.
The postwar period brought a major change to the mine itself.
The original No. 6 workings eventually became known as No. 6 West. As those reserves approached exhaustion, development shifted across the valley toward what became No. 6 East. Local mining history places development of the new complex in the late 1940s, with mine maps indicating coal production by 1949.
No. 6 East was more than a hole in the mountain. The complex included mine offices, a bath and lamp house, machinery repair facilities, a powder house, a dispatcher’s building, and a tipple headhouse. Coal dumped at the headhouse was crushed and carried by an enclosed conveyor across the highway and Sand Lick Creek to the railroad loadout.
It represented the continued modernization of a mining community that was already approaching half a century old.
The old Gary Hollow system was changing institutionally as well. U.S. Coal & Coke’s corporate charter was dissolved in 1952, after which U.S. Steel operated the mines more directly.
By then, generations of families had already known the community as Ream.
Gary-Ream at Midcentury
The 1950 census provides one of the clearest statistical snapshots of Ream near the height of the postwar mining era, although it presents an important problem.
The Census Bureau did not publish a separate population for Ream. Instead, it classified the area as the unincorporated place of Gary-Ream.
Gary-Ream contained 2,858 residents in 1950. That number should never be treated as Ream’s population alone, but it demonstrates that the combined settlement remained a substantial community during the middle of the century.
Federal housing statistics recorded 601 dwelling units in Gary-Ream. Those census tables also gathered information on occupancy, tenure, number of rooms, plumbing facilities, housing condition, household size, and race, offering an unusually detailed view of material life in the community.
Numbers such as those help restore scale to a landscape that can appear deceptively empty today.
Ream was not a handful of miners living beside an isolated portal. It belonged to a densely inhabited industrial corridor where thousands of people lived within walking distance of mines, stores, schools, churches, railroads, and one another.
The Long Decline of No. 6
Mechanization gradually changed the mathematics of coal mining.
A mine could produce large quantities of coal with fewer workers than had been required during the hand-loading era. At the same time, easily accessible reserves were being exhausted, steel-industry demand changed, and entire company towns faced a difficult question: what happened when the corporation no longer needed as many people living beside the mine?
No. 6 East was idled around 1960 during an economic downturn, although portions of the complex remained useful. The machinery shop later reopened as an equipment overhaul facility, and coal production resumed at No. 6 East in 1967.
The final run lasted only a few more years.
Production ended in 1972 after the remaining lease was exhausted, according to former U.S. Steel employee and local historian Buddy French. His account is particularly valuable for the later history of Ream because he worked in the No. 6 East machinery shop and later returned to examine the abandoned industrial site.
The closing of a mine did more than eliminate a workplace. In a community designed around that workplace, it weakened the economic reason for maintaining houses, stores, rail facilities, and other buildings that had once been indispensable.
Ream began to empty.
The Company Store Survives, Then Disappears
For a time, the old Ream company store outlived the industrial world that had created it.
When preservationists documented the building in 1991, they found a substantial brick structure that retained much of its original form despite alterations to the front for use as a maintenance garage. The nomination described the store as the only remaining U.S. Coal & Coke company store and emphasized its architectural importance as well as its connection with the coal industry.
It entered the National Register of Historic Places on April 17, 1992, as part of the Coal Company Stores in McDowell County multiple-property nomination.
Preservation did not save it.
By the time McDowell County’s coal heritage resources were surveyed again in the 2010s, the Ream store was gone. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey Update listed the U.S. Coal & Coke Company Store at Ream as demolished, one of several historic company stores lost since the original survey.
Its disappearance was part of a much larger pattern. The same countywide study found that hundreds of previously recorded coal-related structures had vanished in roughly twenty-five years. Mine structures, company stores, schools, offices, clubhouses, and houses disappeared as population declined and the expense of maintaining unused buildings became increasingly difficult to justify.
Ream’s most recognizable landmark therefore survived the closing of its mine but not the broader disappearance of the coal-camp landscape.
What Remains at Ream
The disappearance of the store did not erase Ream.
Company houses still survive in altered form. Concrete, stonework, old industrial foundations, mine openings, railroad infrastructure, and remnants of coke ovens preserve fragments of the industrial arrangement. The surrounding mountains contain an even larger archaeological record in the form of abandoned underground workings.
Some of the surviving landscape can be difficult to interpret without historical maps. A concrete wall may once have belonged to a tipple. A level bench on a hillside may mark an old tram road. Stonework hidden beneath vegetation may have supported a coke yard or industrial building. Houses that now appear isolated once stood among many others.
The Historic American Landscapes Survey calls Gary Hollow a vanishing industrial landscape, noting that most of its great industrial structures are gone even though hundreds of residential and community buildings from the original development survive.
Ream is one of the clearest examples of that transformation.
The mine built the town, but once the mine disappeared, the mountains quickly began reclaiming the physical evidence.
Why Ream Matters
It would be easy to treat Ream as a footnote to Gary because the community was only one numbered operation within a much larger corporate system.
That would miss what makes the place historically valuable.
Ream allows the history of industrial Appalachia to be seen at a human scale. U.S. Steel’s immense corporate strategy can be followed all the way down to one hollow, one mine, one store, one railroad siding, and one row of houses. Decisions made in corporate offices eventually determined whether men entered No. 6, whether trains carried coal out of the valley, whether families could remain in company houses, and whether the settlement prospered or declined.
The surviving records make that history unusually recoverable. Payroll books and company records from U.S. Coal & Coke survive in the Eastern Regional Coal Archives. Federal census schedules record individual families. State mine reports document production and labor. Railroad drawings reconstruct the industrial geography. Federal investigations describe company-town conditions. Newspapers recover accidents, funerals, officials, churches, and residents. Historic photographs preserve buildings that no longer stand. The National Register nomination records the company store shortly before its disappearance.
Together they reveal a place that existed for coal but became something larger.
For much of the twentieth century, Ream was where children grew up, where neighbors met at the company store, where miners walked toward No. 6, where railroad cars waited beside the creek, and where families measured their lives by shifts, school years, church services, paydays, births, weddings, funerals, and the changing fortunes of the mine.
The company called it No. 6.
The people who lived there called it Ream.
Sources & Further Reading
Sone, Stacy. “U.S. Coal & Coke Company Store.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, 1991. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/U.S.-coal-and-coke-company-store.pdf
Historic American Landscapes Survey. Gary Hollow, 38 Church Street, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia. HALS No. WV-6. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0557/
Orr, Elisabeth, Stefania Staniscia, and Charles Yuill. Gary Hollow. Historic American Landscapes Survey No. WV-6. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/habshaer/wv/wv0500/wv0557/data/wv0557data.pdf
Aurora Research Associates. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “United States Coal & Coke Company Records, USX Collection, Accession 89-100.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Mike Hornick Collection, Accession 88-54.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Map and Profile of the Right Fork Spur of the Sand Lick Branch of the Tug Fork Branch of the Ohio Extension of the N&W Railway Co.” Drawing B355, HS-CC10672, February 23, 1907. Norfolk & Western Historical Society. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122583
National Archives and Records Administration. “Norfolk & Western Railroad Valuation Maps.” Record Group 134. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/cartographic/railroad-list
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Reports of the Department of Mines. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, various years. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=annrepdepminwv
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1915. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1915. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde1914west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1919. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1919. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde37west
West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. List of Coal Mines in West Virginia, July 1, 1921. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, 1921. https://books.google.com/books?id=dKANAAAAYAAJ
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10446.htm
United States Coal Commission. “Completed Mining Community A Schedules with Camp Ratings, December 1922–June 1923.” Record Group 68, National Archives Identifier 6293264. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-068-coal-commission
United States Public Health Service. “Sanitary Surveys of Coal Communities, April–June 1923.” Record Group 68, National Archives Identifier 6278177. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-068-coal-commission
United States Coal Commission. First Report of the United States Coal Commission. House Document 67-533. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-068-coal-commission
United States Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population Schedules, McDowell County, West Virginia. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1920. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1488411
United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census of Population: West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-2/15191523v2p48ch2.pdf
United States Census Bureau. 1950 Census of Housing, Volume I: General Characteristics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/housing-volume-1/36965082v1p6ch7.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “West Virginia Vital Research Records.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_select.aspx/
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Circuit Court Case Files.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Machine Used in Gary W. Va. Mine That Digs the Coal and Loads It on the Car.” September 1908. Photograph. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673709/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Tipple & Elevator into Shaft. Leads Down to Mine 200 Ft. Below. Gary Mine.” August 1908. Photograph. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673705/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “Main Entrance, Gary W. Va. Mine. Trapper Boy in Center.” September 1908. Photograph. National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673712/
Hine, Lewis Wickes. “National Child Labor Committee. No. 92. Main Entrance Gary W. Va. Mine.” September 1908. Photograph. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673729/
McGehee, C. Stuart. “Gary.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/2025
Garay, Ronald G. U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. https://utpress.org/title/u-s-steel-and-gary-west-virginia-2/
Schust, Alex P. Gary Hollow: A History of the Largest Coal Mining Operation in the World. Bluefield, WV: Two Mule Publishing, 2005. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%22Gary+Hollow%22+%22Alex+Schust%22
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Bluefield, WV: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=%22Billion+Dollar+Coalfield%22+Schust
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. https://utpress.org/9780870493416/miners-millhands-and-mountaineers/
Society of Architectural Historians. “Coal Country.” SAH Archipedia. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://sah-archipedia.org/essays/WV-01-0003
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1992. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/coal/index.htm
United States Geological Survey. Gary, WV-VA. 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle, 1:24,000. Surveyed 1967. https://store.usgs.gov/product/295583
CoalCampUSA. “Ream, WV (Gary No. 6).” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://coalcampusa.com/sowv/flattop/ream-wv-coal-mine/ream-wv-coal-mine.htm
French, Buddy. “Ream, WV: Gary No. 6 Mining Complex ‘West.’” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.bramwellwv.com/reamminingcomplexw.html
French, Buddy. “Ream, WV: Gary No. 6 Mining Community ‘West.’” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.bramwellwv.com/reamcommunityw.html
French, Buddy. “Ream, WV: Gary No. 6 ‘East’ Mining Complex.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.bramwellwv.com/reameindex.html
Author Note: Ream is one of the many Appalachian coal communities whose physical landscape has faded even as the memories of the people who lived and worked there remain important to the region’s history. This article is intended to preserve the story of Gary No. 6, the families who called Ream home, and the role the community played in McDowell County’s coal industry.