Appalachian Community Histories – Superior, McDowell County: Dixon, Lake Superior Coal Company, and the Town Built by Coal
A few miles east of Welch, where Elkhorn Creek winds between steep McDowell County mountains, the community of Superior grew around one of the many coal operations that transformed southern West Virginia during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Today it is easy to pass through the area without realizing how many layers of industrial history once crowded into the narrow valley. Mines, railroad tracks, company houses, a store, schools, churches, offices, and neighboring Maitland filled ground that the mountains left available.
Superior was never one of McDowell County’s largest towns, but its surviving historical record is unusually rich for a community of its size. Company papers, mine records, payrolls, engineering articles, corporate filings, school records, photographs, mine scrip, and even records from a Canadian steel corporation allow pieces of its story to be reconstructed in considerable detail.
That story begins before the name Superior appeared. It begins with a confusing collection of place names, railroad names, mining companies, and postal designations along Elkhorn Creek, then follows a coal camp whose fortunes eventually connected a small West Virginia hollow with steelmaking hundreds of miles away in Canada.
Before Superior: Dixon, Huger, and Olmsted
The earliest history of Superior requires some caution because the names found in old records do not line up neatly with the names used today. Dixon, Dixon-Pocahontas, Huger, and Olmsted all appear in records connected with the immediate area, although they should not simply be treated as successive names for one identical settlement.
An early West Virginia gazetteer described Huger as a Norfolk & Western Railway station in McDowell County about two miles east of Welch and instructed readers to look under Olmsted for the businesses there. The Olmsted entry in turn called the place a village on the Norfolk & Western, stated that its railroad name was Huger, and listed a mine superintendent and the Middle States Coal Company among the local interests. The record shows just how differently a coalfield place could be named depending on whether someone worked for the railroad, delivered the mail, operated a mine, or simply lived nearby.
The company most directly connected with the beginning of what became Superior was the Dixon-Pocahontas Fuel Company. McDowell County Circuit Court files show that the company was already involved in legal cases in 1907 and 1908, firmly establishing its presence in the county before the creation of the Lake Superior Coal Company.
Even more revealing material survives in the Neil Robinson Collection at the West Virginia State Archives. A Dixon-Pocahontas file contains correspondence from December 1908 concerning labor problems, along with core sample reports for the company’s North Side and South Side mines dated July and August 1909. Those are not later recollections of the coal boom. They are records created while the operation was still being developed, when engineers and managers were measuring what lay beneath the mountains and dealing with the difficulties of assembling a labor force to remove it.
Local coalfield histories place the Dixon operation on the south side of Elkhorn Creek and state that coal shipments began in 1909. They remember the mining community itself as Dixon. What is certain from the archival record is that Dixon-Pocahontas was active there by this period and that its mines were being examined, worked, and developed several years before the Lake Superior name became dominant.
The Lake Superior Coal Company Arrives
A major change came in 1913.
West Virginia Secretary of State records show that the Lake Superior Coal Company became a West Virginia corporation on February 21, 1913. It was organized with $500,000 in capital stock, divided into 5,000 authorized shares valued at $100 each, and listed its principal office in Welch. The same official record would remain open until the end of 1959.
Coalfield histories identify 1913 as the year Lake Superior took over the Dixon-Pocahontas operation and the community increasingly became known as Superior. The coincidence between that takeover and the formal incorporation of the Lake Superior Coal Company makes the transition particularly clear, even though the older Dixon name did not necessarily disappear from every record immediately.
The new name also points toward a much larger industrial story. Lake Superior Coal Company was connected with the corporate interests behind the Algoma steel operations in Canada. By 1950, Algoma Steel Corporation was explicitly describing Lake Superior Coal Company and Cannelton Coal & Coke Company as its wholly owned West Virginia subsidiaries. The coal dug from McDowell County was therefore part of an industrial system that stretched far beyond the county and even beyond the United States.
For families living at Superior, however, the corporation was not an abstract collection of stock certificates and subsidiaries. It was the company that controlled the mine around which much of everyday community life revolved.
Building a Coal Camp in the Mountains
Like other company communities in southern West Virginia, Superior had to be fitted into the small amount of usable land between the creek, railroad, mine facilities, and mountainsides.
Local memory preserved names for different sections of the settlement, including Good Husband Row, String Town, Middle Bottom, and Blue Heaven. Houses spread across the valley floor and climbed the slopes where construction was possible. Superior also blended almost seamlessly into neighboring Maitland, another mining settlement whose tipple stood nearby.
The company town was more than rows of houses. Records of the Minter Homes Corporation preserved at West Virginia University show Lake Superior Coal Company planning substantial community buildings at the end of the 1920s. The collection contains 1929 correspondence concerning a fire house and a church, as well as other Lake Superior construction files. A separate 1930 file is specifically devoted to one store and one office for the company and includes estimates, specifications, and correspondence.
Those records provide a glimpse of the deliberate construction that went into a coal camp. A mine company needed more than an opening in the mountain. It needed housing, offices, commercial space, transportation, fire protection, and facilities that made it possible to maintain a permanent workforce.
The company store occupied a particularly important place in that system. Coal companies commonly operated stores where families could obtain food, clothing, household goods, and other necessities. Superior also participated in the coalfield system of company scrip. Morehead State University’s Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection preserves original Lake Superior Coal Company pieces from Superior dating to about 1920, physical reminders of an economy in which the company’s presence extended from a miner’s workplace into the family pocketbook.
An especially valuable surviving record of the people behind the operation is the 1941 Lake Superior Coal Company payroll held by the Eastern Regional Coal Archives. Payrolls can reveal what broad production figures cannot, preserving names, jobs, and the structure of the workforce that kept a mine operating.
Engineering Beneath Superior
Mining at Superior was not technologically static. The company repeatedly invested in the machinery and engineering necessary to work coal on a large scale.
A contemporary mining journal in 1921 described work on the hoisting shaft of Lake Superior’s No. 1 mine. Engineers installed a permanent self-supporting concrete lining while keeping the operation running. Concrete was mixed at the surface and carried down the shaft in wheelbarrows aboard the mine cage. The project was noteworthy enough that the trade press discussed it as an example of how major shaft work could be completed without stopping production.
More than two decades later, the operation again appeared in the technical press. The November 1947 issue of Coal Age carried an article titled “Trolleyphones at Lake Superior Coal Company,” describing communication technology used in the mine. Its appearance in a national technical journal shows that Superior was not simply an isolated mountain operation using antiquated methods. It participated in the broader modernization of the American coal industry.
The railroad infrastructure around the community was equally important. Coal could be mined in enormous quantities, but without the Norfolk & Western system there was little practical way to move it to distant industrial customers. One physical reminder of that transportation network survived long enough to receive attention in the 2018 McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey. The survey identified the Norfolk & Western Huger Tunnel at Superior, dated it to 1915, and recognized it for significance in transportation and technology.
The 1925 No. 2 Mine Explosion
Modern equipment never eliminated the danger of underground mining.
On October 3, 1925, an explosion occurred in Lake Superior Coal Company’s No. 2 Mine. The West Virginia Department of Mines created an official disaster file, and that file survives today among the department’s coal mine fire and disaster records in the West Virginia State Archives.
The existence of the state investigation is important because it moves the event beyond later local recollection. Mining disasters produced official investigations into what happened underground, making these files some of the strongest primary sources available for understanding working conditions, ventilation, gas, equipment, and the decisions made before and after an accident.
For the families of Superior, however, mine safety could never be reduced to engineering language. Every shift carried men away from the houses lining the valley and into workings hidden inside the mountains. An explosion, roof fall, machinery accident, or other emergency could instantly reach beyond the mine portal and into nearly every part of community life.
That closeness between work and home was one of the defining realities of a company town.
A McDowell County Mine Connected to Canadian Steel
Perhaps the most unusual part of Superior’s story is how far its coal traveled economically.
Algoma Steel Corporation’s 1950 annual report makes the connection explicit. The company described Cannelton Coal & Coke Company and Lake Superior Coal Company as wholly owned West Virginia subsidiaries. It reported that the two coal operations worked only 217 days during the fiscal year because of labor shutdowns affecting the American coal industry, yet they still supplied Algoma’s coal requirements through their own production and purchased coal.
That meant a miner entering the mountain at Superior was participating in a chain of production that eventually reached Canadian steelmaking. Coal mined in McDowell County helped feed an industrial corporation centered around Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
It is one of the more striking examples of how misleading the word isolated can be when applied to Appalachian coal communities. Geographically, Superior sat in a narrow mountain valley. Economically, it was connected by railroads, corporations, markets, and heavy industry to places hundreds of miles away.
Superior and Maitland
Superior’s identity also cannot be separated completely from neighboring Maitland.
The two mining communities developed under different corporate histories, yet their physical proximity meant that everyday life crossed company boundaries. Local histories describe the two tipples as standing only a short distance apart. Over time, the combined name Superior-Maitland became common, particularly in connection with the local school.
Superior-Maitland Elementary became one of the community institutions that linked the two places. Its history also places this small coal settlement inside the much larger story of race and public education in McDowell County.
Historian Alice E. Carter’s study of segregation and integration in the county records that Superior-Maitland Elementary was among several schools damaged by arson in 1958. Carter was careful to note that there was no strong evidence connecting those fires to the school integration controversy then unfolding in McDowell County.
School attendance regulations from 1964 offer an even more revealing window into the period. The Superior-Maitland attendance area included Superior, Maitland, Belcher Mountain, and Big Four. Earlier language specifically gave Black pupils options to continue attending Welch-Dunbar or, for those in East Superior, Superior East. Later that year the regulations were rewritten in race-neutral language while continuing the previous attendance options. The records capture the complicated and gradual dismantling of McDowell County’s dual school system.
Superior was therefore more than a collection of mine workings. Children went to school there, families worshiped there, workers shopped there, and generations built lives in the shadow of the tipple.
Mechanization and the Beginning of Decline
By the 1950s, the coal industry that had created Superior was entering a different era.
Mechanization allowed mines to produce more coal with fewer workers, while changing markets made employment increasingly uncertain. An especially revealing contemporary account appeared in the Hungarian-language American miners’ newspaper Magyar Bányászlap in 1954. The paper reported that 100 miners had been laid off from Lake Superior’s No. 4 Mine at Superior, partly because of mechanization and partly because production was being reduced for lack of orders. According to the report, the company could provide only two or three days of work per week even after the layoffs.
For a company town, reduced mine employment affected far more than the men receiving paychecks. Fewer working days meant less money moving through stores and households. Layoffs encouraged families to leave in search of work elsewhere. Houses emptied. School enrollment changed. Businesses lost customers.
The process happened throughout McDowell County. In 1950, the coal industry still employed roughly 18,000 people, about 65 percent of the county’s working population. The decline of mining employment that followed would therefore alter almost every aspect of the county’s social and economic life.
Superior was caught directly in that transformation.
From Lake Superior to Cannelton
The corporate era that had given the community its name formally ended at the close of 1959.
West Virginia Secretary of State records show Lake Superior Coal Company terminating on December 31, 1959, through a merger into Cannelton Coal Company. Cannelton became the surviving corporation.
Algoma’s corporate reporting described the same restructuring as effective January 1, 1960, explaining that its two American subsidiaries, formerly Cannelton Coal and Coke Company and Lake Superior Coal Company, had been combined. The old operations became the Kanawha and Pocahontas divisions of the surviving Cannelton Coal Company.
The merger did not mean that mining around Superior immediately stopped. Coal production continued under later ownership, but the disappearance of the Lake Superior Coal Company as a separate corporation marked the end of the organization that had shaped the community for nearly half a century.
It was also part of a broader shift across the coalfields. Independent company towns and individual corporate operations increasingly gave way to consolidation, mechanization, larger corporate systems, and eventually dramatic reductions in employment.
What Remains of Superior
The physical Superior of the coal boom has largely disappeared.
Company houses that once covered the valley and mountainsides vanished as mining declined and properties changed hands. Mine facilities were removed, altered, or reclaimed. The clear boundaries between Superior and Maitland became even harder to read on the modern landscape.
Yet pieces survive.
Local histories have identified the old brick company store as one of the most visible remnants of the Lake Superior era, while the Huger Tunnel remains a documented piece of the Norfolk & Western transportation system. Archival collections preserve what the landscape has lost: photographs, mine maps, payrolls, construction specifications, accident records, corporate correspondence, fire boss books, school material, and company records.
The West Virginia State Archives alone holds Lake Superior material ranging from mine records to the official file on the 1925 explosion. The Neil Robinson Collection reaches back into the Dixon-Pocahontas years. The Eastern Regional Coal Archives preserves the 1941 payroll. West Virginia University holds construction records for the company store and office. Morehead State University preserves the company’s scrip. These records make it possible to recover a community whose physical evidence has become increasingly difficult to see.
Why Superior Matters
Superior is easy to describe as another vanished coal camp, but that description misses what its history can tell us.
It began in the rush to develop the Pocahontas coalfield, when companies, engineers, railroads, and workers pushed into narrow Appalachian valleys in search of some of the finest industrial coal in the country. Dixon-Pocahontas opened the way, and the Lake Superior Coal Company turned the operation into a community whose residents lived within sight and sound of the industry that supported them.
The surviving records show both sides of that world. There was engineering innovation, investment, railroad construction, international commerce, and technological modernization. There was also danger underground, dependence on a single industry, company control over important parts of daily life, racial segregation in the wider school system, layoffs, mechanization, and eventual population loss.
Superior also reminds us that the smallest Appalachian coal towns were connected to enormous economic networks. A miner working beneath a McDowell County mountain could be producing fuel for steelmaking in Canada. A company decision made far from West Virginia could determine how many days he worked that week. A railroad tunnel carved through the mountain could connect his community to national and international markets.
The houses may be gone, and the Lake Superior Coal Company may have disappeared as a corporation in 1959, but Superior remains part of the larger story of how coal reshaped southern West Virginia. Beneath the modern landscape is the outline of Dixon, the Lake Superior mines, the company store, Superior-Maitland schoolchildren, railroad workers, immigrant miners, Black miners, families waiting for men to come home from underground, and generations whose lives were tied to the coal beneath the mountains.
That is the history still carried by Superior.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia Archives and History. “Lake Superior Coal Company Collection, Ms2007-054 / Ms80-93.” West Virginia State Archives, Charleston. Collection includes mine records, equipment lists, accident material, mine maps, and fire boss and section boss books. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/manuscripts.html
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Annual Report, 2006–2007. Charleston: State of West Virginia, 2007. Includes information concerning the Lake Superior Coal Company archival collection. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/annualreport/annualreport0607.pdf
West Virginia Archives and History. “Neil Robinson Collection, Ms2021-209.” West Virginia State Archives. Includes Dixon-Pocahontas Fuel Company correspondence, 1908 labor records, and 1909 North Side and South Side core sample reports. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms2021-209.html
West Virginia Department of Mines. “Lake Superior Coal Company No. 2 Mine Explosion, October 3, 1925.” In Coal Mine Fire and Disaster Reports, Ar1519-1536. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar1519-1536.html
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Eastern Regional Coal Archives Accession List.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. Includes the W. E. Smith Collection, Accession 86-10, containing Lake Superior Coal Company payroll records from 1941. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Pocahontas Operators Association Records and Photographs, Accession 81-1.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. In Eastern Regional Coal Archives Accession List. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Reynolds Collection, Accession 04-360.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. Includes a panoramic photograph of the Lake Superior Coal Company at Superior, ca. 1925. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. “Coalfield Oral History Collection, Accession 86-11.” Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. In Eastern Regional Coal Archives Accession List. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Lake Superior Coal Co. — 1 Store & 1 Office, Order 5D1.” 1930. Box 1, folders 29–30, Minter Homes Corporation Records, A&M 3654. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/154919
West Virginia Secretary of State. “Lake Superior Coal Company.” Business Organization Detail, organization no. 68370. Records incorporation on February 21, 1913, and termination by merger on December 31, 1959. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://apps.sos.wv.gov/business/corporations/organization.aspx?org=68370
West Virginia Secretary of State. “Cannelton Coal Company.” Business Organization Detail, organization no. 44886. Includes the December 31, 1959, merger of Lake Superior Coal Company into Cannelton Coal Company. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://apps.sos.wv.gov/business/corporations/organization.aspx?org=44886
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston: State of West Virginia, 1923. Includes Lake Superior Nos. 1 and 2 at Superior. https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22West+Virginia.+Department+of+Mines%22
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Reports of the Department of Mines. Charleston: State of West Virginia, various years. https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22West+Virginia.+Department+of+Mines%22
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “Historical and Statistical Data.” Charleston: State of West Virginia. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Charleston: State of West Virginia. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/
United States Department of the Interior. Federal Register 2, no. 233, December 3, 1937. Includes federal coal-price schedules identifying Lake Superior Coal Company’s Superior Nos. 1 and 2 mines. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1937-12-03/pdf/FR-1937-12-03.pdf
United States Government. Federal Register 8, October 29, 1943. Includes F. O. Harris of Lake Superior Coal Company among coal-company operating officials. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1943-10-29/pdf/FR-1943-10-29.pdf
Algoma Steel Corporation, Limited. Fifteenth Annual Report for the Year Ended April 30, 1950. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario: Algoma Steel Corporation, 1950. Discusses Lake Superior Coal Company and Cannelton Coal & Coke Company as West Virginia subsidiaries. https://dalspaceb.library.dal.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/42b4a6f0-9b2e-4e9e-bd24-bcacce3cc182/content
Algoma Steel Corporation, Limited. Annual Report. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, 1960. Discusses the consolidation of Lake Superior Coal Company and Cannelton Coal & Coke Company. https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/images/hrcorpreports/pdfs/6/631802.pdf
“Lake Superior Coal Company Recruitment Advertisement.” Magyar Bányászlap, 1917. Contemporary Hungarian-language advertisement recruiting miners for employment at Superior, West Virginia. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/60581/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1917_041.pdf
Magyar Bányászlap. Report concerning layoffs, mechanization, and reduced work at Lake Superior Coal Company No. 4 Mine, Superior, West Virginia, 1954. https://misc.bibl.u-szeged.hu/66643/1/magyar_banyaszlap_1954_010.pdf
Coal Age. Article concerning construction and concrete lining of the Lake Superior Coal Company No. 1 mine shaft at Superior, West Virginia. August 25, 1921. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1921-09-17-_Vol_112_Iss_12_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1921-09-17_112_12%29.pdf
“Trolleyphones at Lake Superior Coal Company.” Coal Age 52 (November 1947): 100–102. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electronics-Collection/Electronic-Engineering-Master-Index-1947-1948.pdf
Dixon-Pocahontas Fuel Co. v. Myers Grain Co., 71 W. Va. 715, 77 S.E. 362 (1913). https://openjurist.org/71/wva/715/dixon-pocahontas-fuel-co-v-myers-grain-co
Morehead State University. “Lake Superior Coal Company.” Arthur Kilgore Mine Scrip Collection. Superior, West Virginia, ca. 1920. Morehead State University ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kilgore_scrip_collection/69/
West Virginia Archives and History. “McDowell County Circuit Court Records, Ar2094.” West Virginia State Archives, Charleston. Records span 1857–1981 and include litigation involving individuals and companies in McDowell County. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “McDowell County Records.” West Virginia State Archives. Includes deeds, court records, naturalizations, and other county materials useful for tracing coal-company property and residents. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “Naturalization Records.” West Virginia State Archives. Includes McDowell County naturalization records useful for researching immigrant miners and their families. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/natural.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Births.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_bcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Marriages.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_mcsearch.aspx
West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia Vital Research Records: Deaths.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/vrr/va_dcsearch.aspx
United States Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: McDowell County, West Virginia, Browns Creek District. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1920. https://www.archives.gov/research/census
National Archives and Records Administration. “1930 Census Records.” Washington, DC. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930
National Archives and Records Administration. “1940 Census Records.” Washington, DC. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/start-research
National Archives and Records Administration. “1950 Census Records.” Washington, DC. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1950
West Virginia State Gazetteer and Business Directory. Entries for Huger and Olmsted, McDowell County. Contemporary directory identifying Huger as the Norfolk & Western railroad name and Olmsted as the postal community. https://ldsgenealogy.com/WV/books/West-Virginia-state-gazetteer-and-business-directory-pt-1-part-43.htm
West Virginia Archives and History. “Place Names in West Virginia: H.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Includes the McDowell County community of Huger. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamh.html
United States Geological Survey. “USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer, topoView.” Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Useful for tracing Superior, Huger, Maitland, railroads, roads, streams, and mine features over time. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways. Charleston: West Virginia Department of Transportation, 2018. Includes documentation of the Norfolk & Western Huger Tunnel at Superior. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Carter, Alice E. “Segregation and Integration in the Appalachian Coalfields: McDowell County Responds to the Brown Decision.” West Virginia History 54 (1995). Includes information concerning Superior-Maitland Elementary School and school integration. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh54-5.html
West Virginia Archives and History. “McDowell County History Sources.” Charleston: West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Includes indexed newspaper articles, photographs, manuscripts, and references concerning Lake Superior Coal Company and Superior. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html
Chatman, J. L. “Jay.” McDowell County Coal and Rail. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/mcdowell-county-coal-and-rail-9781467121927
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield. Pocahontas, VA: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://www.bramwellwv.com/superiorindex.html
CoalCampUSA. “Superior-Maitland.” Coalfields of the Appalachian Mountains. Accessed October 16, 2026. https://coalcampusa.com/sowv/flattop/superior/superior.htm
Bramwell, West Virginia. “Superior, WV Mining Community.” Accessed October 16, 2026. https://www.bramwellwv.com/superiorindex.html
Author Note: Superior’s story is preserved in an unusually rich collection of company records, mine reports, photographs, payrolls, and memories from the Pocahontas coalfield. I hope this history helps preserve the people and community behind a McDowell County coal town whose physical landscape has largely disappeared.