Appalachian Community Histories – Roderfield, McDowell County: From the Norfolk & Western Railway to the West Virginia Mine Wars
Roderfield is easy to pass through without realizing how much history is crowded into the narrow valley around it. The community lies along the Tug Fork in McDowell County, between Welch and Iaeger, where railroad tracks, the river, roads, houses, and mountains are pressed into a strip of usable ground. Today it is a small census-designated place. In the 2020 census, only sixty-two people were counted there. Yet during the height of the southern West Virginia coal boom, Roderfield occupied a place in a much larger industrial world.
Coal companies operated from Roderfield, Norfolk & Western trains passed through it, miners and their families filled houses along the slopes, and labor organizers fought for a foothold in one of the most fiercely anti-union coalfields in the nation. In July 1920, gunfire at a union meeting brought Roderfield directly into the West Virginia Mine Wars. Eight years later, another kind of tragedy struck when an underground gas explosion at the Princess Pocahontas operation killed six miners.
The story of Roderfield is therefore larger than the story of one small coal community. It is a piece of the history of the Norfolk & Western Railway, the Pocahontas coalfield, the struggle to organize southern West Virginia miners, and the generations of families whose lives were tied to what lay beneath these mountains.
A Town Between the River and the Railroad
Roderfield developed in a landscape that left little room for anything unnecessary. The Tug Fork bends through the community while steep mountains rise on either side. Spice Creek enters nearby, and the main line of the Norfolk & Western Railway passes through the same narrow corridor. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey places Roderfield about seven miles west-northwest of Welch and describes the town as having developed around the railroad, river, roads, coal workings, and limited strips of buildable land.
There is a slight discrepancy in the surviving records over exactly how early the name Roderfield was in use. The West Virginia State Archives place-name index lists Roderfield in McDowell County in 1892, while the Coal Heritage Survey states that the community first appeared in the state gazetteer in 1898. By that later date, Roderfield had railroad service and a Western Union office, evidence that it had already become connected to the industrial and communications network spreading across the coalfields.
Standard West Virginia place-name references attribute the community’s name to Roderfield Iaeger, described as the original owner of the town site. The Iaeger name became one of the best-known place names in this corner of McDowell County, though the neighboring town of Iaeger is associated with Colonel William G. W. Iaeger, a major landowner whose family name became firmly attached to the region.
Whatever the precise date at which people began consistently calling the settlement Roderfield, its emergence belonged to the same transformation that remade nearly all of McDowell County during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
In 1880, McDowell County had only 3,076 residents and remained overwhelmingly rural. The West Virginia Department of Mines reported no miners in the county in 1888, followed by 740 in 1889 and 1,347 in 1890. By 1900 the county population had reached 18,747, and by 1910 it had exploded to 47,856. African American migrants from the South, immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, and white workers from the surrounding Appalachian countryside poured into the new mining settlements.
Roderfield grew in the middle of that upheaval.
The Norfolk & Western Makes Roderfield Possible
The railroad was not simply one feature of early Roderfield. It was one of the principal reasons a coal community could exist there at all.
The Norfolk & Western pushed its Ohio Extension through this part of McDowell County between 1890 and 1892. The line connected communities such as Welch, Davy, Big Sandy, Roderfield, Iaeger, and Panther with markets far beyond the Tug Fork valley. Coal that had once been economically trapped behind mountains could now be loaded into cars and carried east or west in enormous quantities.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the railroad was investing directly in Roderfield. Norfolk & Western’s annual information published in the September 10, 1904, issue of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle recorded the construction of railroad agents’ dwelling houses at several locations, including Roderfield. The same report described extensive investment in yards, stations, bridges, water facilities, track, and other infrastructure throughout the system.
A few years later another engineering feature permanently changed the local landscape. The Coal Heritage Survey dates the Norfolk & Western tunnel at the western edge of Roderfield to about 1908. The tunnel cuts through the base of the mountain and is approached by steel bridges, creating one of the community’s most visible reminders that Roderfield grew around a railroad engineered through extremely difficult terrain.
The tracks remain part of the corridor today, but during the coal boom their presence meant something more immediate. Trains brought workers, mail, machinery, merchandise, and communication with the outside world. Loaded coal cars carried the wealth of the mountains away by the thousands of tons. The movement of trains also tied Roderfield to Welch, Bluefield, Williamson, Roanoke, Norfolk, and eventually national industrial markets.
Roderfield was not an isolated mountain settlement that happened to acquire a railroad. It was a railroad-era community whose growth was inseparable from the tracks.
Coal Companies Move Into Roderfield
By 1906, Roderfield was described as a village of about two hundred people. The Vaughan Coal and Coke Company was identified as its principal coal operator. Houses and commercial buildings began filling what usable ground existed along the main road, while additional rows of homes climbed the hillside above it.
The familiar coal-camp landscape was taking shape. Company operations needed miners, but miners required houses, stores, schools, churches, transportation, and services. Across McDowell County, coal operators frequently found themselves building entire settlements because so little infrastructure existed before industrial mining arrived. The mountains determined where a house could stand, where a railroad could curve, and where a mine entrance could be opened.
By 1923, Roderfield had become associated with several different mining companies rather than a single isolated operation. The West Virginia Department of Mines directory for that year listed Baldwin Pocahontas Coal Company, Fall River Pocahontas Collieries Company, Flanagan Coal Company, and Hampton Roads Collieries Company among operations using Roderfield as their post-office address.
That detail helps explain why Roderfield’s history differs somewhat from the story of a perfectly controlled single-company camp. It functioned within a cluster of mining operations connected by the railroad, nearby hollows, and the wider Davy, Roderfield, Big Sandy, and Iaeger corridor.
The surviving architecture recorded by historic-property surveys reflects that development. Investigators found early twentieth-century houses and commercial properties along Davy-Roderfield Road, Archer Road, Jefferson Road, River Road, and the surrounding slopes. Some structures were dated to around 1890 or 1900, while many others belonged to the 1910s and 1920s, when the coalfield was approaching its industrial peak.
The buildings are important because the mining machinery alone does not tell the story of a coal town. A house on a hillside, a store beside the road, a church, a cemetery, or an old railroad structure can reveal where people slept, worshipped, bought food, raised children, waited for trains, and buried the dead.
The Jenks Brothers and Life Underground
Some of the best surviving evidence for what life around Roderfield meant to actual miners comes from Orville and Mack Jenks, brothers whose recollections were preserved as part of West Virginia’s coalfield musical and oral-history tradition.
Orville began working around a mine when he was only eleven years old, initially emptying coal cars because he was too young to work underground. By thirteen, he was able to enter the mines. Around 1918, he worked as a motorman at the Davy Branch Mine in Roderfield with his brother Mack.
Mack’s experience was similarly harsh. He remembered beginning mine work at twelve and earning seven and a half cents an hour during ten-hour days. At thirteen, he began working inside the mine, where his pay increased to twelve and a half cents an hour. Mining would remain part of his life for decades.
Their stories put human faces on the industrial statistics. Coal mining was not merely an occupation adults entered after reaching maturity. In the early twentieth-century coalfields, boys could begin learning mine work while still children, contributing wages to families whose survival depended on every available income.
The Jenks brothers also carried another part of coalfield culture with them: music.
In later years, they became associated with mining and union songs, performing pieces shaped by underground work, accidents, organizing, and working-class life. Mack wrote songs such as “A Little Lump of Coal” and “Union Blues,” while Orville became known as a performer. Mining songs could entertain, but they also preserved experiences that company records rarely bothered to record.
Through men such as Orville and Mack Jenks, Roderfield belonged not only to the economic history of coal but also to the musical history of the southern West Virginia coalfields.
July 4, 1920: Gunfire at a Union Meeting
Roderfield entered one of the most violent chapters in West Virginia history during the summer of 1920.
The United Mine Workers of America had made repeated attempts to organize the southern coalfields, where many operators fiercely resisted unionization. By 1920, Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney of UMWA District 17 were pushing another organizing campaign through areas where company guards, private detectives, deputies, and state authorities had often been used to prevent miners from joining the union.
Roderfield became one of the flashpoints. Historian David Corbin’s overview of the Mine Wars identifies Roderfield among the communities where gunfights and other violence accompanied the organizing drive.
A contemporary account from the United Mine Workers Journal gives the union’s version of what happened on July 4. According to the Journal, Baldwin-Felts detectives attacked a miners’ meeting at Roderfield, and the miners fought back. The report stated that two detectives and two miners were shot and that one of the miners was fatally wounded.
Later accounts provide additional detail. The McDowell County Comprehensive Plan states that about one hundred miners had gathered to organize a union and placed armed sentries around the meeting. When law officers and Baldwin-Felts men arrived, shooting broke out. The county account says four men died, and it describes R. B. Page, a Black McDowell County miner, leading roughly seventy-five armed men toward Roderfield the following day to defend the union miners, after which most of the group was arrested.
The difference between the casualty figures is important. The contemporary UMWA account says four men were shot, with one miner specifically described as fatally wounded, while the much later county history says four men died. Rather than forcing the two accounts into agreement, the discrepancy should remain part of the historical record. Coalfield violence generated competing stories almost as soon as the shooting stopped, and newspapers, unions, operators, law enforcement, and later historians often described the same confrontation differently.
What is beyond dispute is that armed conflict occurred at Roderfield during the 1920 organizing campaign.
It was not an isolated disturbance. The UMWA reported arrests, evictions, armed mine guards, and violence across southern West Virginia. Only weeks earlier, the confrontation at Matewan had left seven Baldwin-Felts agents and several local men dead. The struggle continued through 1920 and 1921, eventually culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Roderfield therefore deserves a place on the map of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Its July 1920 gunfight was smaller than Matewan or Blair Mountain, but it belonged to the same fight over who would control life and labor in the coalfields.
Union Songs and a Second Organizing Era
The violence of 1920 did not settle the labor question.
During the early years of the Great Depression, union organization again moved through the southern West Virginia coalfields. Mack Jenks became an enthusiastic organizer during the 1930s. West Virginia University records describe union workers traveling into coal camps in trucks, playing music, collecting signatures, and trying to establish locals while avoiding hostile guards and authorities.
Music and organizing often traveled together. A song could carry a political message into a mining camp in a way a formal speech could not. The men singing were miners themselves, people whose hands and lungs bore the evidence of the work they described.
Orville eventually performed at a United Mine Workers convention in 1935, playing before delegates that included UMWA president John L. Lewis. The brothers also performed at local union meetings while continuing to earn their living in the mines.
Their careers reveal how labor history continued after the famous gun battles faded from newspaper headlines. Roderfield’s miners did not suddenly move from an anti-union world in 1920 to a settled union order. Organization came in waves, and the memories of violence, mine guards, dismissals, and blacklisting remained part of coalfield life.
The Princess Pocahontas Mine Explosion
On the evening of November 30, 1928, Roderfield suffered one of the deadliest events in its local history.
Seven men were underground in the Princess Pocahontas No. 1 Mine when a gas explosion occurred at about eight o’clock. Six were caught in the explosion area and killed. The seventh man, who was elsewhere in the mine, escaped and raised the alarm.
Rescue crews and equipment were summoned, but reaching the victims was difficult. The Bureau of Mines later reported that ventilation had to be restored over long distances and that the haulageway carried return air, slowing the rescue effort. Teams entered around midnight. Gas masks were used ahead of the restored airflow, and the last bodies were not brought out until about nine o’clock on the evening of December 1.
The federal investigation revealed disturbing conditions.
The mine had been rated as gassy about a year before the explosion, yet no fireboss was employed. Although the mine foreman conducted some examinations, federal investigators found weak ventilation at the entry face, which allowed gas to accumulate before it was ignited.
News of the disaster spread far beyond McDowell County. An Associated Press report printed in Canada described six men missing following an explosion at the Princess Pocahontas Coal Company’s operation near Roderfield as rescue crews hurried to the scene. Similar reports appeared in American newspapers while families waited for news from underground.
The West Virginia State Archives preserves evidence that the state itself investigated the disaster. Its Department of Mines collection contains a specific file for the Princess Pocahontas Coal Corporation’s Spice Creek Mine at Roderfield dated November 30, 1928. The state’s newspaper guide also identifies Welch Daily News coverage under headlines including “Little Hope For Men After Mine Blast” on December 1 and “Inquest into Mine Blast Scheduled For Next Week” on December 3.
For a community built around underground labor, mine disasters carried a particular terror. Every shift required men to disappear into the mountain while families remained outside with little control over what happened below. When something went wrong, a railroad station, company office, mine entrance, church, or roadway could suddenly become a gathering place for wives, children, relatives, rescuers, and neighbors waiting for names.
At Roderfield in 1928, six families received the news every mining family feared.
Roderfield Through Depression, War, and the Postwar Years
The coal industry did not disappear from Roderfield after the explosion. Mining continued through the Depression, the Second World War, and into the postwar era. The Coal Heritage Survey concludes that coal production in the Roderfield area remained at a moderate level through about 1954.
The physical community continued changing around the industry. Historic surveys found a substantial cemetery in the bend of the Tug Fork and a brick church dating to around 1940. Houses dating from the 1910s and 1920s survived beside later buildings, leaving several generations of development visible along the same roads.
Property records also reveal a transition from coal-company ownership toward a more complicated pattern of surface and mineral ownership. A later West Virginia Supreme Court case preserved references to older McDowell County deeds showing Famous Pocahontas Coal Company conveying property to Roderfield Realty Company on January 1, 1945. Other deeds show Roderfield Realty Company transferring surface property while reserving mining rights, a familiar arrangement in Appalachian coal country where ownership of the ground above and the minerals below could be divided among different parties.
Those deeds are a reminder that the decline of a company operation did not necessarily end the influence of the coal industry. Mineral rights, railroad rights-of-way, gas agreements, and old company land arrangements could shape a community for generations afterward.
By the 1950s, the larger McDowell County economy was also beginning to change. Mechanization allowed coal companies to produce more coal with fewer men. Mines consolidated or closed, young people left in search of work, and communities built for a labor-intensive mining industry began losing population.
Roderfield shared in that transformation.
What the Surviving Landscape Tells Us
Much of Roderfield’s history can still be read in its geography.
The railroad continues through the valley. The tunnel through the mountain remains a physical monument to the engineering that opened the Pocahontas coalfield to outside markets. Roads follow the limited ground between river and hillside. Houses stand where miners and their families once lived. The cemetery preserves generations of names connected to Roderfield, Davy, Iaeger, Big Sandy, and the surrounding coal communities.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey demonstrates how much of that landscape has already disappeared across McDowell County. More than two thousand properties were documented during the project, and hundreds of resources previously recorded in the 1991 survey had been demolished by the time researchers returned.
That makes the remaining pieces of Roderfield particularly valuable.
An ordinary-looking house may be one of the last buildings left from the community’s early coal boom. An old bridge or tunnel may survive from the era when Norfolk & Western trains were transforming McDowell County. A deed can show how a coal corporation controlled land beneath generations of homes. A union journal can recover a gunfight that nearly vanished from popular memory. A Bureau of Mines report can explain why six men never came home from a November shift in 1928.
Together, these records turn Roderfield from a dot on the map into a community with a remarkably layered history.
Why Roderfield Matters
Roderfield never became a major city, county seat, or celebrated industrial center. That is precisely why its history matters.
Much of Appalachian history happened in places like this, communities small enough to be overlooked but important enough to carry the full weight of the region’s industrial transformation. Roderfield experienced the arrival of the railroad, the opening of coal mines, migration into the coalfields, dangerous underground labor, child workers, company influence, armed union conflict, mine disaster, union organization, and eventually the decline of the labor-intensive coal economy.
The Norfolk & Western tunnel and tracks tell one part of that story. The names of coal companies in state mining reports tell another. Orville and Mack Jenks left behind the voices and songs of men who knew the mines from childhood. The United Mine Workers Journal preserved the memory of gunfire on July 4, 1920. Federal investigators documented exactly how dangerous conditions underground contributed to the deaths of six men in 1928.
Today Roderfield is home to only a fraction of the people who once crowded into the valley. Yet population alone is a poor measure of historical importance.
In the narrow space where Spice Creek, the Tug Fork, the railroad, and the mountains meet, Roderfield contains a condensed history of the southern West Virginia coalfields. It is a story of tremendous industrial ambition and ordinary family life, of men who went underground and trains that carried the coal away, of workers who risked violence to organize, and of a community that endured long after the boom years passed.
For anyone trying to understand McDowell County, Roderfield is not simply another former coal settlement along the road between Welch and Iaeger. It is one of the places where the larger history of Appalachian coal can still be seen at human scale.
Sources & Further Reading
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways, November 15, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Historic Property Inventory Form Index: McDowell County, Northfork to Vivian. July 2018. https://www.aurora-llc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Coal_Heritage_Northfork_to_Vivian_HPI_Index_by_SurveyNo.pdf
West Virginia Division of Culture and History. Historic Property Inventory Forms MD-0379 and MD-1521, Roderfield, McDowell County. Coal Heritage Survey, 1991. West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. https://wvculture.org/agencies/state-historic-preservation-office-shpo/historic-and-archaeological-survey/
West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. “SHPO Interactive Map Viewer.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.mapwv.gov/shpo/viewer/
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Roderfield Station, West Virginia.” Norfolk Southern Collection of Materials Relating to the Norfolk and Western Railway Company. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/items/show/27943
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Archives and Historical Collections.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.nwhs.org/
Commercial and Financial Chronicle. “Norfolk & Western Railway.” September 10, 1904. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRASER. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/commercial-financial-chronicle-1339/september-10-1904-536442/fulltext
West Virginia University Libraries. “Orville and Mack Jenks.” Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://omekas.lib.wvu.edu/home/s/folkmusic/page/orville-and-mack-jenks
Moore, Roderick. “Mack Jenks, Union Bard.” Goldenseal 3, no. 4 (1978). Cited in West Virginia University Libraries, “Orville and Mack Jenks.” https://omekas.lib.wvu.edu/home/s/folkmusic/page/orville-and-mack-jenks
Korson, George Gershon, ed. Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943. Referenced in West Virginia University Libraries’ Jenks collection. https://omekas.lib.wvu.edu/home/s/folkmusic/page/orville-and-mack-jenks
United Mine Workers of America. United Mine Workers Journal. Vol. 31. Indianapolis: United Mine Workers of America, 1920. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012261589
Doyle, James, and Andrew Wilson. Letter to John L. Lewis, June 12, 1920. Reprinted in United Mine Workers Journal, 1920. https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-from-united-mine-workers-journal-organization-campaign-continues-in-southern-west-virginia/
Corbin, David A. “The Mine Wars.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1741 WV Encyclopedia
Libertella, Anthony F. The Conflicts in the West Virginia Coal Fields, 1920–1921. Master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1969. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/etd/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu1729857506813429 OhioLINK ETD Center
McDowell County Commission. McDowell County Comprehensive Plan. Welch, WV: McDowell County Commission. https://mcdowellcountycommission.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/mcdowellcocompplan-1.pdf
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1923. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_%28IA_annualreportofde41west%29.pdf
West Virginia Department of Mines. “Princess Pocahontas Coal Corporation, Spice Creek Mine, Roderfield, Explosion File, November 30, 1928.” Department of Mines Coal Mine Fire and Disaster Reports. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar1519-1536.html
Humphrey, H. B. Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States, 1810–1958. Bulletin 586. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1960. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12740/m1/124/ UNT Digital Library
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “WV Mine Disasters 1884 to Present.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
West Virginia Archives and History. “Newspapers on Microfilm: McDowell County.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/newspapers/mcdowell.html
McDowell Times. Keystone, WV, 1913–1941. Library of Congress, Chronicling America catalog. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092050/
Bluefield Daily Telegraph. Bluefield, WV. Library of Congress catalog. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86092065/
McDowell Public Library. “Local History and Genealogy Collection.” Welch, WV. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://mcdowell.lib.wv.us/collection.htm
United States Geological Survey. Welch Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1:62,500. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1912.
United States Geological Survey. Welch Quadrangle, West Virginia. 1:62,500. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1924. https://store.usgs.gov/product/925804
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1916. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1916.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
United States Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population Schedules, McDowell County, West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920. FamilySearch digital collection. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1488411
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://search.worldcat.org/title/666823075
Torok, George D. A Guide to Historic Coal Towns of the Big Sandy River Valley. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. https://utpress.org/9781572332829/guide-to-the-historic-coal-towns-of-the-big-sandy-river-valley/ University of Tennessee Press
Sullivan, Charles Kenneth. Coal Men and Coal Towns: Development of the Smokeless Coalfields of Southern West Virginia, 1873–1923. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=Coal+Men+and+Coal+Towns+Charles+Kenneth+Sullivan
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/
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=Crandall+Shifflett+Coal+Towns
McDowell County Historical Society. The Heritage of McDowell County, West Virginia, 1858–1995. War, WV: McDowell County Historical Society, 1995.
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1992. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/coal-mining-heritage.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: R.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamr.html
Author Note: Roderfield’s story shows how even a small coalfield community could become connected to some of the largest forces shaping Appalachian history, including railroad expansion, industrial mining, labor conflict, and mine disasters. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of the miners, families, railroad workers, and residents whose lives shaped this McDowell County community.