Appalachian Community Histories – Roda, Wise County: Stonega Coal, Immigrant Labor, and Life in a Virginia Coal Camp
North of Appalachia in Wise County, Virginia, the road into Roda follows the kind of narrow mountain hollow that shaped much of the southwestern Virginia coalfield. Today there is little to suggest the scale of the industrial community that once occupied the area, but during the first half of the twentieth century Roda was one of several company towns developed by the Stonega Coke & Coal Company as it pushed deeper into the coal seams surrounding Appalachia, Stonega, Osaka, Keokee, and other communities.
Roda grew because of the coal beneath the mountains. Houses were built for miners and their families, a school opened for the growing number of children, churches served the community, a company store supplied everyday necessities, and railroad tracks connected the mines with the larger network centered at Appalachia. Mine openings and tipples stood near neighborhoods where families from the surrounding Appalachian mountains lived alongside African American residents and immigrants who had traveled much farther in search of work.
The community was part of a larger industrial transformation that remade Wise County during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Railroads made previously difficult mountain coal deposits commercially accessible, while companies acquired mineral rights and built entire settlements around new mines. Roda was one of those places, and the unusual amount of surviving documentation allows much of its history to be reconstructed through company records, government reports, photographs, newspapers, maps, and the memories of those who lived there.
Stonega Coke & Coal Comes to Roda
The history of Roda is closely tied to the Virginia Coal & Iron Company and the Stonega Coke & Coal Company. Virginia Coal & Iron had already begun developing coal around Stonega by the 1890s, and in 1902 the Stonega Coke & Coal Company was organized to operate the expanding coal properties. From there the company developed a network of mining communities throughout Wise and neighboring Lee County.
Exactly when Roda should be considered established is not entirely clear. The Library of Virginia dates the construction of the community to 1902, while Virginia Department of Historic Resources material generally gives 1903. Rather than forcing the evidence into a single year, Roda is best understood as part of Stonega’s rapid expansion during 1902 and 1903, when the company was opening new mines and building the communities necessary to support them.
Roda was planned around the needs of the mining operation rather than developing in the same way as an independent mountain town. The company needed workers to live close enough to reach the mines, which meant providing houses in a hollow where housing had not previously existed on the necessary scale. As miners brought wives and children into the community, other institutions followed, including schools, churches, medical services, stores, recreational activities, and a post office.
Rail transportation was essential to the entire arrangement. The Interstate Railroad connected Stonega properties with the larger railroad network around Appalachia, allowing coal produced in communities such as Roda to reach customers far beyond Wise County. Without that connection, the rich coal seams beneath the mountains would have remained far more difficult to exploit commercially. By the early twentieth century, however, communities that had once been separated by difficult mountain terrain had become parts of an industrial network built around mines, railroads, and coal shipments.
The Roda Mines
Several numbered mining operations eventually carried the Roda name, including Roda Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Their appearance in company, geological, and federal records shows how the community developed into more than a single mine with a collection of houses beside it. Roda became part of a much larger system of underground workings extending through the mountains around the town.
Roda No. 3 became particularly well documented because coal from the mine attracted the attention of federal researchers. In 1931 the United States Bureau of Mines published Bulletin 344, which examined the gas-making, coke-making, and byproduct properties of coal from the Taggart bed at Roda. Virginia geological records also preserved detailed information about coal samples collected inside Roda No. 3, sometimes recording the particular rooms and entries where samples had been cut.
These technical reports can seem distant from the daily lives of the men underground, but they explain why Roda existed in the first place. The Taggart coal and other seams beneath Wise County represented valuable industrial resources, and companies invested heavily in reaching and transporting them. Every new entry driven into the mountain meant additional opportunities for production, but it also placed miners in an environment where falling slate, fire, machinery, gas, and other dangers were part of everyday work.
One of those dangers took the life of miner Jim Hurd in 1916. Economic historian Price Fishback later used Stonega records to reconstruct Hurd’s case while examining mine safety and compensation in the American coal industry. Hurd was working in Roda No. 2 when falling slate struck him, causing injuries from which he died. He left a widow and children behind, making his case one of countless examples in which the risks of coal mining extended far beyond the man who entered the mine.
Roda’s mines remained dangerous even as equipment and safety practices changed. Federal records document a fire at Roda No. 3 in July 1953, while mine-rescue records from the broader border region show how extensive underground workings could create unexpected connections between mines. Coal operations in Wise County and neighboring Harlan County, Kentucky, sometimes approached one another beneath mountains that appeared to separate communities completely on the surface.
Life in a Company Town
For the families living above the mines, Stonega Coke & Coal Company was a constant presence. The company was an employer, landlord, property owner, merchant, and provider of many of the services needed in a community that had been built primarily to support mining.
A particularly valuable account of life in Roda comes from Emma Gardner, who was interviewed in 2006 for the A. Linwood Holton Governor’s School Appalachian History Archive. Gardner grew up in Roda as the daughter of a miner and later married a miner herself, giving her memories a perspective that stretches across generations of coalfield life. She recalled the company houses, school, store, hotel, post office, churches, mines, and doctor, along with the different neighborhoods that made up the community.
The company store was an important part of that world. Like other coal camps, Roda used company scrip as part of its economy, allowing workers and their families to purchase goods through the company system. Although nearby Appalachia developed into a larger commercial center where residents could find privately operated businesses, the company store remained one of the most convenient sources for necessities inside Roda.
Medical care also reflected the company-town structure. Gardner remembered a doctor with an office in the community who could visit residents in their homes when necessary. Stonega’s broader system became known for providing organized medical services in its camps, including the larger hospital at Stonega, although the availability of company-supported medicine existed alongside the obvious reality that coal mining itself produced severe injuries and long-term illnesses.
The physical environment of Roda reflected this mixture of industrial necessity and community life. Housing filled the usable portions of the hollow, while the mines and railroad remained close enough to influence the sound, movement, and daily schedule of the town. Men left for work according to mine shifts, children walked to school, families visited the store, and trains moved coal outward from the same landscape.
A surviving Stonega property inventory dated February 1, 1924, demonstrates just how thoroughly the company measured and recorded that environment. The inventory covered Roda along with Stonega, Osaka, Keokee, and Arno and included housing, stores, offices, industrial structures, machinery, and other company property. Such records reveal that the houses and community facilities were not secondary additions to the mining operation. They were part of the company’s investment in maintaining a stable workforce.
Roda School and Childhood in the Camp
One of the best surviving photographs of early Roda was taken in 1907, only a few years after the community began developing. The photograph shows students and adults gathered outside Roda School, providing a rare view of the families who had already begun making a permanent community around the mines.
The image is particularly important because coal-camp photographs often emphasize mines, tipples, railroad equipment, and company buildings. The Roda School photograph instead shows the generation growing up while their fathers worked beneath the surrounding mountains. It also confirms that educational facilities appeared very early in the life of the town.
Gardner remembered attending school in Roda through the seventh grade. She recalled two school buildings serving different groups of students before children continued their education elsewhere. Those who advanced to high school could travel to Appalachia, tying Roda increasingly to the larger nearby community as roads and transportation improved.
Education also reflected Virginia’s system of racial segregation. The 1907 school photograph preserved by the Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park depicts the school for white children, while Black children in the coal camps were educated separately. Later historical research into Wise County’s African American schools shows that Black children from communities including Roda, Derby, Osaka, Arno, and Stonega lived within a school system divided by race.
The same divisions could be seen in housing and recreation. Coal companies sometimes recruited racially and ethnically diverse workforces while simultaneously arranging neighborhoods according to racial, ethnic, and occupational categories. Roda became one of the places where that contradiction was visible in the physical arrangement of the community.
Black Residents, Hungarian Miners, and Roda’s Neighborhoods
Gardner remembered Roda as divided into several locally recognized sections, including Happy Holler and Sawmill Holler. She also remembered a Hungarian section commonly called “Hunk Hill” and a Black section known historically by an offensive racial name. The terminology itself reveals something about the social boundaries that existed inside the camp, even though residents all depended in one way or another on the same mining economy.
This type of neighborhood division appeared throughout the Stonega system. Mining companies recruited workers from the Appalachian countryside, from Black communities in Virginia and elsewhere in the South, and from European immigrant populations. Italians, Hungarians, and other immigrants were drawn into the southwestern Virginia coalfield during the years when companies struggled to secure enough labor for expanding operations.
Roda’s Hungarian population left an especially valuable paper trail through Magyar Bányászlap, a Hungarian-language miners’ newspaper that circulated throughout American coal regions. In 1917 Stonega Coke & Coal Company placed advertisements directed specifically at Hungarian miners. Those advertisements listed Roda along with Stonega, Osaka, Arno, Imboden, and Keokee while promising employment and describing company housing, stores, electric lighting, water, and other features intended to persuade miners to relocate.
The advertisements were designed to recruit workers, which means their claims about employment and living conditions have to be read as company promotion rather than objective description. At the same time, they provide direct evidence that Stonega regarded Hungarian miners as an important part of its labor force and was willing to advertise to them in their own language.
Other issues of Magyar Bányászlap reveal that Hungarian life in Roda went beyond employment. Reports described representatives visiting miners in Roda and neighboring camps, while community notices documented Hungarian organizations operating in the area. A 1917 report recorded a Roda branch of a Hungarian mutual-aid organization participating in the dedication of an American flag on July 4, showing how immigrant families created their own organizations while also participating in public expressions of American citizenship.
In 1918, Stonega recruitment material went even further by identifying John Gecsi of Roda as one of the Hungarian miners whom prospective workers could contact to learn about conditions. The notice suggested that organized Hungarian life had become well established in Roda, demonstrating that the immigrant section of the community was not simply temporary housing for disconnected workers. It contained relationships, organizations, and networks linking Roda with Hungarian miners across the American coalfields.
Church, Music, and Community Life
Coal may have provided the economic reason for Roda’s existence, but residents created institutions that were not limited to the mine. Churches became particularly important gathering places, serving religious purposes while also providing locations for funerals, weddings, social events, and relationships that connected families throughout the hollow.
The Wise County historic architectural survey documented the building later known as the Roda Baptist Mission. Although associated with a Baptist congregation in later years, the survey indicates that it was originally built around 1905 for Methodist use. Its early construction fits with the rapid development of Roda during the first years of the twentieth century, when the camp was already acquiring the institutions associated with a permanent community.
Music also became part of local life. The Library of Virginia’s history of Virginia coal towns notes that miners at Roda formed a band, adding another layer to a community too easily remembered only through work and hardship. Coal miners spent their working lives in dangerous and physically demanding conditions, but their lives outside the mine included music, worship, school activities, visiting neighbors, family gatherings, and the ordinary routines that made a place feel like home.
Gardner’s recollections reinforce that more personal understanding of Roda. Her memories are filled not simply with mines and company policies but with people, neighborhoods, schools, churches, and everyday experiences. The company may have constructed much of the physical community, but the people who lived there gave those buildings meaning.
Depression, Unionism, and Hard Times
The Great Depression placed enormous pressure on communities whose economies were almost completely dependent upon coal. When production declined, miners could lose working days even when they technically remained employed, leaving families to meet rent, food, medical, fuel, and other expenses on greatly reduced incomes.
Worker correspondence from Roda appearing in the Daily Worker during the 1930s provides a different perspective from Stonega’s corporate records. The newspaper openly supported labor activism and Communist politics, so its reports have to be read with an understanding of that political position, but the letters nevertheless preserve the concerns of miners who wanted their experiences recorded.
One Roda correspondent described household expenses that included rent, electricity, medical charges, fuel, mine lamps, church contributions, and United Mine Workers dues. Another discussed dissatisfaction with union leadership and political disputes inside the local organization. A February 1935 article attempted to calculate what a miner and his family had left after annual expenses, presenting coal-camp economics from the viewpoint of a worker rather than the company.
These accounts are especially useful when placed beside company records. Stonega could describe investments in housing, stores, medicine, recreation, and other services, while miners could describe what those same systems cost them and how difficult it became to meet household expenses when work was reduced. Neither perspective alone captures the full experience of life in Roda.
Labor organization also changed the relationship between miners and management. The United Mine Workers became an increasingly important presence in the coalfields during the 1930s, and correspondence from Roda shows that miners did not simply accept union leadership without debate. They argued about representation, wages, work schedules, and the direction organized labor should take, making union politics another part of community life.
Safety, Mechanization, and a Changing Coalfield
Even before the Depression, companies and miners had become increasingly concerned with mine safety. In August 1925, Crawford’s Weekly listed Roda No. 3 among the winners in a mine-safety competition. Such programs reflected growing efforts to reduce accidents at a time when underground coal mining remained one of the country’s most dangerous occupations.
Technology gradually changed the mines as well. Machines replaced forms of work that had once required larger numbers of men, while improved coal preparation and transportation allowed companies to produce more coal with fewer workers. Mechanization could make certain operations more efficient, but it also weakened the economic foundation of communities that had been built to house hundreds of miners.
By the early 1950s, the effects were becoming clear. Congressional records discussing unemployment in United Mine Workers District 28 showed a dramatic decline in employment at Roda between May 1952 and May 1953. For a conventional town, the loss of industrial jobs might damage one portion of the local economy. For a coal camp created specifically around mining, such a reduction threatened nearly every part of community life.
Fewer miners meant fewer families living in company houses, fewer children attending local schools, fewer customers supporting businesses, and fewer residents participating in churches and community organizations. Improvements in roads and automobiles also made it less necessary for workers to live immediately beside the mine, weakening another reason for the traditional company camp to survive.
Later histories generally place the end of Stonega’s original mining period at Roda around 1957. The community did not disappear overnight, and neither did coal mining from the surrounding mountains, but the system that had produced the early twentieth-century camp was coming to an end.
From Stonega to Westmoreland
Stonega Coke & Coal Company had longstanding ties with Westmoreland Coal Company, and in 1964 the two companies formally merged. The Stonega name that had been associated with mines and communities throughout Southwest Virginia gradually became part of Westmoreland’s larger corporate history.
Mining continued around Roda in different forms. Later surface operations required fewer workers than the older underground mines and did not depend upon maintaining the same kind of company town. Modern mining also reshaped portions of the landscape where earlier generations had lived and worked.
Federal and state environmental records preserve evidence of this later period. The United States Geological Survey monitored a mine drain entering Mud Lick Creek at Roda during the 1980s, while Virginia Department of Energy records document later operations such as the Roda Low Splint Mine and mining west of the community toward Black Mountain.
The continued appearance of Roda in mining and environmental records demonstrates how long coal remained tied to the landscape, even after the original Stonega community had changed almost beyond recognition. The first generation of mining had created the town by bringing workers into the hollow. Later generations of mining operated in a landscape where many of the institutions built for those workers were disappearing.
What Remains of Roda
By the time historic architectural surveys were conducted in Wise County during the 1990s, much of the original Roda coal camp had already vanished or changed considerably. Surveyors were still able to document surviving structures, including a historic company-era house and the Roda Baptist Mission, while photographs and other records preserved buildings that had not survived.
The surviving documentary evidence is now one of the community’s greatest historical resources. The 1907 school photograph preserves children and adults who lived in Roda when the camp was still new. Stonega corporate files preserve information about houses, stores, mines, property, workers, and company decisions. Federal geological reports describe the coal beneath the mountains in extraordinary technical detail, while newspapers document Hungarian immigrants, labor disputes, mine safety, community organizations, and the concerns of individual miners.
Oral histories connect all of those records to everyday life. Emma Gardner’s memories of the school, doctor, hotel, company store, neighborhoods, churches, and families help recreate a community that cannot be understood through production figures alone. Her recollections also show why places such as Roda continued to matter to former residents long after the economic system that created them had faded.
Roda’s history is therefore not simply the history of an old coal mine. It is the history of a community created during the industrial transformation of Southwest Virginia, populated by people from different racial, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds who shared the same narrow mountain landscape while experiencing it in very different ways.
The Stonega Coke & Coal Company built much of the physical Roda, but miners and their families turned those structures into a community. They attended school and church, organized unions and immigrant societies, formed a band, raised children, buried relatives, survived hard times, and built relationships that outlasted many of the company buildings around them.
Today, the mines, houses, railroad structures, and institutions of the old camp survive unevenly, but the historical record allows Roda to remain more than a name on a map. Its story offers a remarkably detailed window into what company-town life meant in the Virginia coalfields and into the people who made homes in communities built around the coal beneath their feet.
Sources & Further Reading
Eby, J. Brian. The Geology and Mineral Resources of Wise County and the Coal-Bearing Portion of Scott County, Virginia. Virginia Geological Survey Bulletin 24. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey, 1923. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_93590.htm
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Fieldner, A. C., J. D. Davis, R. Thiessen, E. B. Kester, and W. A. Selvig. Methods and Apparatus Used in Determining the Gas-, Coke-, and Byproduct-Making Properties of American Coals, with Results on a Taggart-Bed Coal from Roda, Wise County, Virginia. Bulletin 344. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1931. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12514/
Fishback, Price V. “The Economics of Company Housing: Historical Perspectives from the Coal Fields.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 8, no. 2 (1992): 346-365. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jleo.a037042
Fishback, Price V. Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9810/c9810.pdf
Gardner, Emma. Interview, November 18, 2006. A. Linwood Holton Governor’s School Appalachian History Archive. https://www.hgs.k12.va.us/History/Appalachian_History/AHA/AHA_People/interviews/Emma_Gardner.html
Hagley Museum and Library. Westmoreland Coal Company Records, Accession 1765. Wilmington, Delaware. https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/980
Hagley Museum and Library. Westmoreland Coal Company Photograph and Video Collection, Accession 1993.233. Wilmington, Delaware. https://digital.hagley.org/1993233
Hagley Museum and Library. “Stonega Coke & Coal Company.” Hagley Digital Archives. https://digital.hagley.org/taxonomy/term/12815
La Lone, Mary B. “Economic Survival Strategies in Appalachia’s Coal Camps.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 2, no. 1 (1996): 53-68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41446313
Library of Virginia. “Company Towns.” Virginia’s Coal Towns. Richmond: Library of Virginia. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/exhibits/coaltown/towns/
Library of Virginia. Virginia Chronicle: Digital Newspaper Archive. Richmond: Library of Virginia. https://virginiachronicle.com/
Magyar Bányászlap. Stonega Coke & Coal Company recruitment material, 1917. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/60570/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1917_029.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap. November 29, 1917. Stonega Coke & Coal Company labor directory listing Roda and neighboring Virginia mines. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/60588/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1917_048.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap. 1918. Reports and notices concerning Hungarian miners in Stonega, Roda, Osaka, Imboden, Inman, Appalachia, and Keokee. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/60602/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1918_010.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Prescott, E. J. The Story of the Virginia Coal and Iron Company, 1882-1945. 1946.
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Stonega Coke & Coal Company. Annual Reports. Westmoreland Coal Company Records, Accession 1765. Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/980
Stonega Coke & Coal Company. “Property Inventory, February 1, 1924.” Box 297, File 3. Westmoreland Coal Company Records, Accession 1765. Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/980
Tolson, Edward. Wise County, Virginia / City of Norton Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf
Tomlinson, Christopher Lloyd. “Contentment and Control: The Stonega Coke & Coal Company & Pioneering Welfare Capitalism in Southwest Virginia.” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2024. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/12368/
U.S. Geological Survey. Historical Topographic Map Collection, topoView. Reston, Virginia: U.S. Geological Survey. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Mine Drain to Mud Lick Creek at Roda, VA.” Water Data for the Nation. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-03529404/
Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. “From the Archives: A Coal Camp Photo Tour.” April 10, 2020. https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/blog/from-the-archives-a-coal-camp-photo-tour
Virginia Department of Energy. Roda Low Splint Mine Permit Records. Division of Mined Land Repurposing. https://energy.virginia.gov/coal/mined-land-repurposing/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “The Coal Industry in Wise County and Southwest Virginia.” Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/blog-posts/coal-industry-history-wise-county-southwest-virginia/
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Stonega Historic District National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2004. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/097-0042/
Wiley, Martha. “From the Archives: A Coal Camp Photo Tour.” Virginia State Parks, April 10, 2020. https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/blog/from-the-archives-a-coal-camp-photo-tour
Wolfe, Margaret Ripley. “Aliens in Southern Appalachia, 1900-1920: The Italian Experience in Wise County, Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 87, no. 4 (1979): 455-472.
Author Note: Growing up in Harlan County, I learned early how coal camps could remain present in memory long after mines, stores, and company houses disappeared. Roda’s surviving records allow us to recover not only Stonega’s industrial system, but also the families and communities that gave the camp its life.