Appalachian Community Histories – Tacoma, Wise County: The Coal and Railroad Town That Almost Became the County Seat
Along Guest River in Wise County, Virginia, Tacoma is easy to overlook today. The community has long since lost the municipal government, railroad importance, and commercial center that once distinguished it from the surrounding countryside. Yet for a brief moment at the end of the nineteenth century, Tacoma was expected to become something much larger.
In 1890, Virginia lawmakers considered Tacoma important enough that they authorized a special election on moving the Wise County seat there from Gladeville. Promoters offered land for a courthouse square and thousands of dollars toward new county buildings. The Norfolk and Western Railway was arriving, coal development was accelerating, streets were being laid out, and investors were organizing companies around the new town. On the same day that the county-seat legislation was approved, Tacoma became an incorporated town.
The courthouse never came, but Tacoma did not disappear immediately. Instead, it developed into a small railroad and coal community where miners, farmers, tradesmen, merchants, physicians, railroad workers, and schoolchildren lived beneath the surrounding Wise County mountains. Two deadly mine explosions would place the community in national reports, while the Tacoma School eventually became the strongest surviving reminder of the town that promoters once imagined would help lead Wise County into the industrial age. The surviving records trace Tacoma through incorporation, railroad development, mining, business growth, the Great Depression, and the eventual surrender of its charter.
Before the Railroad Boom
People lived along Guest River before anyone drew streets for an incorporated town called Tacoma. Like much of early Wise County, the surrounding landscape was characterized by mountain farms, timber, creeks, narrow roads, and scattered settlements that existed before large-scale industrial development transformed southwestern Virginia.
The change came because the mountains contained resources that outside investors increasingly wanted. Coal and iron deposits had long been known in the region, but the lack of inexpensive transportation restricted development. The National Register nomination for Tacoma School notes that the nearest railroad tracks were still about forty miles away at Bristol during the early period of coal promotion. By 1891, however, the Louisville and Nashville, Norfolk and Western, and Southern rail systems had pushed into the broader coal region.
Tacoma happened to sit where geography and industrial ambition met. The community lay in the Guest River valley along the Clinch Valley extension of the Norfolk and Western Railway. That location was the foundation of nearly every grand plan made for the town during its early years.
Federal geologist Henry Gannett’s 1904 Gazetteer of Virginia later described Tacoma simply as a Wise County town on the Norfolk and Western Railway, standing at an elevation of 1,990 feet with a population of 247. That short entry captured what Tacoma had become by the opening years of the twentieth century: small, mountainous, and inseparable from the railroad.
The 1890 Plan to Move the County Seat
Tacoma’s most ambitious moment arrived almost as soon as the town formally appeared.
On March 6, 1890, the Virginia General Assembly approved legislation authorizing a special election on whether the county seat of Wise County should be removed from Gladeville and transferred to Tacoma. The law gives an unusually detailed view of how promoters imagined the county’s future.
Legislators noted that four railroad lines were under construction or nearing completion in Wise County and that new towns were rapidly developing along them. Gladeville, by contrast, sat on Sandy Ridge several miles from the nearest railroad. The act estimated its population at about two hundred and criticized the existing county buildings as inadequate. Tacoma was presented as the alternative, a new town in the Guest River valley directly on the Clinch Valley extension of the Norfolk and Western.
The legislation did not automatically transfer the courthouse. Instead, it created a process through which the question could be placed before Wise County voters after a petition from one hundred qualified freeholders. Tacoma’s supporters also had to provide substantial financial guarantees.
If the removal succeeded, the backers were required to donate $5,000 toward constructing a courthouse and clerk’s offices. They also promised at least one acre of land, free of charge, for a public square containing the new county buildings. The law even specified the ballots voters would cast, either “For removal” or “Against removal.”
The courthouse never moved to Tacoma. Later historical research on Wise County describes the effort to transfer the county seat there as unsuccessful, and Gladeville, later known as Wise, remained the governmental center.
Still, the proposal says a great deal about Tacoma in 1890. This was not merely a coal camp that happened to grow beside a railroad. Investors and supporters were attempting to build a planned town important enough to compete for the political center of Wise County.
Incorporation, Streets, and the Tacoma Improvement Company
March 6, 1890 brought another important development. Tacoma was formally incorporated as a town that same day.
According to the National Register research on Tacoma School, ambitious development followed. Tacoma was divided into lots, streets were named, and the Norfolk and Western constructed a depot. The Tacoma Improvement Company became part of that effort to turn railroad access and surrounding mineral wealth into a permanent community.
The company’s presence can be traced directly through Wise County property records. In October 1890, the Tacoma Improvement Company transferred a lot to trustees of the Tacoma School District for a schoolhouse and Masonic hall. The deed survives in Wise County Deed Book 30, page 343, providing documentary evidence that education and community institutions were part of Tacoma’s plans almost from the beginning.
Railroads soon made the wider transformation possible. The Interstate Railroad, organized during the 1890s, linked coal-producing communities to larger railroad systems, while the Norfolk and Western connected Tacoma to a transportation network extending far beyond Guest River.
The result across Wise County was dramatic. The National Register nomination records the county’s population increasing from 19,653 in 1900 to 46,500 in 1920. The number of operating coal mines in the region expanded even more rapidly, from thirty-nine in 1901 to 144 only four years later.
Tacoma never reached the size anticipated by its most optimistic promoters, but it became part of that industrial landscape.
Coal Beneath Tacoma
The coal around Tacoma was being studied almost as quickly as the town was being promoted.
Federal geological surveys from the 1890s examined the coal formations surrounding Tacoma, Coeburn, and neighboring portions of the Big Stone Gap coalfield. The 1894 geological description of the Estillville area recorded the Old Greeno-Bodine workings at Tacoma and examined coal seams around the community. Later geological studies continued to use Tacoma as a geographic reference point.
One important seam east of Tacoma was the Widow Kennedy coal. A later United States Geological Survey study described the seam as lying roughly four hundred to four hundred fifty feet above the Lee conglomerate and noted that its thickness could vary sharply even within relatively short distances.
Coal was not simply something beneath the landscape. It increasingly shaped employment, transportation, commercial activity, population, and daily life.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, federal population figures and later historic-register research describe Tacoma residents working as coal miners, farmers, sawmill laborers, and repairmen. The community’s population stood at 247 in 1900, dropped to 169 by 1910, and reached 298 in 1920. These figures reveal something important about Tacoma. Even during the great Wise County coal expansion, it remained a small town rather than becoming another Appalachia, Norton, or Big Stone Gap.
Disaster Underground
Coal brought employment to Tacoma, but it also brought danger.
On March 16, 1907, an explosion struck the Bond and Bruce mine at Tacoma. Contemporary newspaper reports initially stated that ten men were known dead, but later federal statistics established the death toll at eleven. Albert H. Fay’s United States Bureau of Mines compilation listed the Bond and Bruce disaster as a mine explosion at Tacoma that killed eleven men.
Only three years later, Tacoma appeared again in national mine-disaster records.
On December 14, 1910, an explosion occurred at the Greeno mine. The first reports were confused and frightening. An Associated Press dispatch published that day said twenty-six men had been entombed and that twenty-two were feared dead. The report also noted that federal mine-rescue personnel were being sent from Knoxville with rescue equipment.
Those early estimates proved too high. The later Bureau of Mines record lists eight deaths in the Greeno explosion at Tacoma.
The discrepancy between the first newspaper reports and the final federal count illustrates the confusion surrounding underground disasters. Families, rescuers, mine officials, and reporters often worked with incomplete information while rescue efforts were still underway. For Tacoma, the two disasters left nineteen confirmed deaths within less than four years.
They also placed this little Guest River community within the larger history of danger in the Appalachian coalfields, where industrial growth repeatedly demanded a terrible human price.
A Small Town with a Busy Main Life
Mine records tell only part of Tacoma’s story.
A 1917 Virginia business directory provides one of the clearest snapshots of everyday life. Tacoma had its own grocery business, blacksmith, barber, contractors, merchants, livestock dealers, lumberman, millwright, painter, physician, watchmaker, and other working residents. The directory lists the Tacoma Grocery Company alongside individuals such as barber T. L. Flanary, blacksmith A. D. Vaughan, lumberman J. M. Renfro, painter W. F. Seaver, and physician Wilburn Sparks.
The directory also identified a Methodist congregation in Tacoma. Its agricultural listings named farmers and residents around the community and described Tacoma as being on the Norfolk and Western Railroad, five miles from the county courthouse, with Coeburn serving as the banking town.
Such records make Tacoma easier to imagine as a living community rather than a name on an old map. A person could have visited a local store, gone to the blacksmith, consulted a physician, attended church, dealt in livestock, worked in timber, boarded a train, or gone underground to mine coal.
Tacoma was small, but it was not empty.
Tacoma School and the Center of Community Life
Of all the institutions created in Tacoma, the school proved the most enduring.
The Tacoma Improvement Company had provided land for educational use as early as 1890, but the surviving brick Tacoma School dates to the early 1920s. Wise County purchased land for the new school on October 8, 1921 for $1,750, and the building opened around 1922.
Its design was unusual for southwestern Virginia. Tacoma School was based on Plan No. 4 from a set of public-school designs adopted by North Carolina in 1911. The one-story brick building originally contained four classrooms and reflected the broader movement toward more permanent rural school construction during the early twentieth century.
The school quickly became more than a classroom building. In March 1927, the Wise County School Board approved the installation of electric lights by Old Dominion Power Company. By 1928, it was one of only four brick schoolhouses among twenty-one schools in the Gladeville District and carried an appraised value of $3,000.
The school also provided a place for public gatherings. In a community that never developed into the large town envisioned in 1890, the school became one of Tacoma’s principal shared spaces.
Depression and the End of the Town Government
Tacoma apparently reached its greatest population around 1930, when the National Register research estimated approximately five hundred residents. Yet the timing could hardly have been worse.
The Great Depression struck Wise County’s coal economy severely. School Board records cited in the Tacoma nomination document children missing classes because they lacked adequate clothing, teachers being asked to accept pay reductions, and shortened school terms as local officials struggled to keep the educational system operating.
For Tacoma, economic decline coincided with the end of municipal government.
On March 23, 1932, the Virginia General Assembly approved legislation repealing the act that had incorporated Tacoma forty-two years earlier. The law was brief and direct. The town charter granted on March 6, 1890 was repealed, although previously vested legal rights and interests were preserved.
Tacoma had gone from a place considered for the Wise County courthouse to a community without its own municipal charter in just over four decades.
The repeal did not mean that everyone left or that Tacoma ceased to exist as a community. It meant that the incorporated town created during the railroad boom had failed to develop into the lasting municipal center its founders envisioned.
Fire at the School
Even after the charter disappeared, Tacoma School remained.
A fire badly damaged the building in 1936. School records show that the property had been valued at $5,000 shortly before the fire. By January 1937, another building in Tacoma had been approved for temporary school use while reconstruction proceeded.
Beginning in May, the School Board authorized expenditures for labor and materials on the rebuilt Tacoma School. The restoration preserved much of the building’s earlier appearance, and children returned to a structure that remained recognizably tied to the original 1922 school.
The school would ultimately serve the Tacoma area until 1973.
Its survival is important because so much of the earlier town vanished. The railroad depot, municipal identity, businesses, and many other features of the boom period disappeared or changed, but generations continued to associate Tacoma with its school.
Coal Outlived the Incorporated Town
The end of Tacoma’s charter did not bring an immediate end to mining under its name.
Federal coal-price records from 1942 list G. S. Tate and the Tacoma Coal Company operating Tacoma Coal Company No. 2 in Wise County in the Upper Banner seam. Other federal records from the period also identify Tacoma Coal Company workings in the area.
Even more strikingly, the Tacoma name remained connected to coal production near the end of the twentieth century. Virginia coal-industry data from the 1990s identify Tacoma Coal Corporation and its Tacoma No. 1 operation in Wise County. The 1995 data reference classified Tacoma No. 1 as a surface operation and included it among the county’s licensed mining facilities.
The incorporated town had vanished decades earlier, but the industrial name endured.
A Highway Through the Old Community
The physical landscape changed again during the twentieth century.
During the 1980s, improvements to U.S. Alternate Route 58 created a four-lane highway through the area, physically dividing portions of the old Tacoma community. Meanwhile, postal identification increasingly connected local residents with nearby Coeburn.
Tacoma School nevertheless survived.
In 1993, a nonprofit community organization purchased the building and converted it into a community center. Four years later, Tacoma School was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places. Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources describes it as the primary surviving legacy of the once-promising coal town.
That description is especially fitting. Tacoma’s school lasted longer than its charter, its county-seat ambitions, and most of the commercial world that surrounded it.
The Town That Might Have Been
Tacoma’s history is partly a story about what happened and partly a story about what nearly happened.
Had Wise County voters and officials followed the vision laid out in the 1890 legislation, the courthouse might have stood beside Guest River. Lawyers, merchants, hotels, newspapers, banks, and government offices might have gathered around a Tacoma public square. Railroad passengers might have stepped from the Norfolk and Western depot into the county seat of one of Virginia’s great coal-producing counties.
Instead, Wise remained the governmental center while other railroad and coal towns grew larger.
Tacoma followed another path. It became a small community of miners, railroad workers, farmers, tradesmen, merchants, families, and schoolchildren. Its mines produced coal and tragedy. Its stores and workshops served local residents. Its school survived fire, economic depression, municipal dissolution, highway construction, and the disappearance of much of the town around it.
The history preserved in the original legislation, deeds, census figures, business directories, mine-disaster reports, school-board minutes, geological surveys, and maps makes Tacoma unusually visible for a community of its size. Those records show that the places which appear small on modern maps were not always considered unimportant.
For a few years around 1890, people looked at Tacoma and saw the future of Wise County.
Today, the old Tacoma School stands as evidence that the future turned out differently, but also that the town was real, ambitious, industrious, and worth remembering.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act Authorizing an Election upon the Question of the Removal of the County Site of Wise County from Gladeville to Tacoma.” Chapter 632, approved March 6, 1890. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1889–1890. https://modelingjimcrow.virginia.edu/volume/1889-90private/law/632
Virginia General Assembly. “An Act to Repeal an Act Entitled ‘An Act to Incorporate the Town of Tacoma, in Wise County, Virginia.’” Chapter 234, approved March 23, 1932. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia. https://modelingjimcrow.virginia.edu/volume/1932/law/234
Richardson, D. Darlene. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Tacoma School. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1997. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/097-0001_Tacoma_School_1997_Final_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Tacoma School.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. Last updated July 5, 2024. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/097-0001/
Walker, Austin. “Virginia Landmarks Register Spotlight: The Coal Industry in Wise County.” Virginia Department of Historic Resources, August 19, 2025. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/blog-posts/coal-industry-history-wise-county-southwest-virginia/
Gannett, Henry. Gazetteer of Virginia. Bulletin 232. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1904. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0232/report.pdf
Campbell, Marius R. Geology of the Big Stone Gap Coal Field of Virginia and Kentucky. Bulletin 111. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1893. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b111
United States Geological Survey. Description of the Estillville Sheet. Geologic Atlas of the United States, Folio 12. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1894. https://pubs.usgs.gov/gf/012/text.pdf
United States Census Bureau. Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Population. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/06229686v44-49ch2.pdf
Fay, Albert H. Coal-Mine Fatalities in the United States, 1870–1914: With Statistics of Coal Production, Labor, and Mining Methods, by States and Calendar Years. Bulletin 115. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12321/m1/1/
Hill Directory Company. Virginia Business Directory and Gazetteer. Vol. 2. Richmond: Hill Directory Company, 1917. https://ldsgenealogy.com/VA/books/Virginia-business-directory-and-gazetteer-1917-v-2-part-74.htm
Library of Virginia. “Bond Coal Company Ledger, 1905–1913.” Wise County Court Records. Archival finding aid. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/vi_vi01752
Library of Congress. The Big Stone Gap Post, Big Stone Gap, Virginia, 1892–1928. Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88061179/
Library of Congress. “Wise County, Virginia Newspapers.” Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/titles/places/virginia/wise/
United States Government. Federal Register. Vol. 7, February 25, 1942. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1942-02-25/pdf/FR-1942-02-25.pdf
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. Plans for Public Schoolhouses Approved by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction: With Explanations, Specifications, Bills of Materials, Estimates of Cost. Raleigh: E. M. Uzzell & Co., 1911. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=jxYiAQAAMAAJ
Addington, Luther F. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Centennial Committee and School Board of Wise County, Virginia, 1956. https://accessgenealogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-Story-of-Wise-County-Virginia.pdf
Johnson, Charles A. A Narrative History of Wise County, Virginia. Norton, VA: Norton Press, 1938. https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Narrative_History_of_Wise_County_Virgi.html?id=6RyGQfOhl18C
A. D. Smith & Co. South-west Virginia and the Valley: Historical and Biographical. Roanoke, VA: A. D. Smith & Co., 1892. https://books.google.com/books/about/South_west_Virginia_and_the_Valley_Histo.html?id=kynqb7RyliMC
Virginia Geological Survey. Bulletin 42. Charlottesville: Virginia Geological Survey. https://energy.virginia.gov/commercedocs/BUL_42.pdf
Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research. Virginia Coal: 1994. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech, 1994. https://energy.vt.edu/content/dam/energy_vt_edu/virginia-coal-complete-coal-and-energy-data-reference/Virginia_Coal_1994.pdf
Author Note: As someone who studies the coal towns and overlooked communities of Appalachia, I find Tacoma especially fascinating because it once came remarkably close to becoming the political center of Wise County. I hope this history helps preserve the story of a place whose mines, railroad, businesses, school, and extraordinary ambitions deserve to be remembered.