Appalachian Community Histories – Venus, McDowell County: Gary No. 10 and Life in a U.S. Steel Coal Camp
A little more than a mile beyond Gary, West Virginia, the houses of Venus climb a steep mountainside above the Tug Fork. Some sit on terraces cut into slopes where flat ground was scarce. A cemetery stretches along both sides of the highway, the railroad follows the narrow valley, and the forest has reclaimed many places once dominated by mine buildings, tracks, and the daily movement of hundreds of workers.
The name Venus, however, tells only part of the story.
For much of its history, the people who lived there knew their community simply as No. 10. Government records, company documents, census schedules, maps, and later historical accounts variously identify the place as Venus, Gary No. 10, No. 10 Works, and Operation No. 10. Those names lead back to the same industrial community, one created during the first decade of the twentieth century as part of United States Steel’s enormous Gary Hollow coal operation. Pasted markdown
Venus existed because U.S. Steel needed coal. Yet, as with so many Appalachian company towns, the community eventually became something more than the industrial purpose for which it had been built. Families raised children there, planted gardens against the hillsides, shopped at the company store, watched baseball games, celebrated the Fourth of July, and built memories in a place that outlasted the company that created it.
U.S. Steel Comes to Gary Hollow
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mountains surrounding what became Gary Hollow contained some of the most valuable metallurgical coal in the United States. The Pocahontas seams of southern West Virginia produced high-quality, low-sulfur coal particularly suited to the manufacture of coke and steel.
The United States Steel Corporation wanted that coal under its own control.
With financier J. P. Morgan behind the larger enterprise and Bramwell banker Isaac T. Mann acting as an important intermediary, corporate interests secured access to roughly 50,000 acres of coal-bearing land in McDowell County. The United States Coal & Coke Company was chartered in 1902 to develop the property as an affiliate of U.S. Steel. Work soon began around Gary, named for U.S. Steel chairman Elbert H. Gary.
What followed was development on a scale unusual even in the booming southern West Virginia coalfields. Mine portals were driven into the mountains, railroad branches reached deeper into the hollows, coke ovens appeared beside the tracks, and company houses spread over every usable patch of ground. Instead of developing one isolated mining camp, U.S. Coal & Coke constructed an interconnected industrial system of numbered mines and supporting settlements.
By 1909, the Engineering and Mining Journal reported twelve mines operating in the Gary system. The article described a highly organized mining complex working valuable Pocahontas coal and connected to the larger steel-producing machinery of U.S. Steel.
Near the upper end of this developing landscape stood Operation No. 10.
Its community became Venus.
Building Venus and Mine No. 10
Historic preservation researchers date the development of Venus and Gary No. 10 to approximately 1907 and 1908. A Norfolk & Western Railway engineering drawing dated February 23, 1907, documented railroad construction through the developing Gary system at almost exactly the moment No. 10 was being created. State mine reports from 1907 and 1908 likewise belong to the first generation of records documenting this expansion. The research material for Venus identifies these early records as some of the strongest primary sources for reconstructing the community’s beginnings. Pasted markdown
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey describes Venus as the satellite settlement serving U.S. Coal & Coke’s Operation No. 10. Its location was approximately a mile and a half east of Gary, squeezed between the Tug Fork, railroad, road, and steep surrounding mountains.
Housing construction accompanied the opening of the mine. Some dwellings stood near the river, but much of the community climbed onto the mountainside, where rows of houses followed narrow streets and terraces. The terrain gave Venus a vertical quality found in many McDowell County coal camps. A worker might leave a house high on the slope, descend toward the tracks and industrial works, and enter a mine extending for miles beneath the mountains surrounding his home.
Venus also contained a particularly recognizable company-house form. Preservation researchers found two-story, side-gabled houses with one-story shed-roof wings extending from their ends. Similar repetitive housing designs were one of the defining characteristics of planned coal towns. Rather than houses appearing slowly according to the preferences of individual owners, the company could erect large numbers of dwellings according to standardized designs intended to place workers close to the mines.
Many of those houses became one of the community’s most important surviving links to its company-town years.
Mining Beneath No. 10
The coal beneath Venus connected the community to an industrial network stretching far beyond McDowell County.
The Gary operation exploited the Pocahontas coal seams, including the important Pocahontas No. 3 and No. 4 seams. The 1909 Engineering and Mining Journal described coal at Gary ranging roughly from four and a half to eight feet in thickness and explained the drift-mining methods used across most of the system. It presented Gary as an unusually large and technologically sophisticated mining operation for its time.
Coal from communities such as Venus did not remain in West Virginia. It entered the vertically integrated world of U.S. Steel, where control of raw materials was central to the corporation’s enormous industrial power. McDowell County coal helped supply steel-making facilities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. What happened underground at No. 10 therefore formed one small part of a chain connecting Appalachian miners to furnaces, mills, railroads, factories, buildings, ships, and other products of industrial America.
By 1916, the scale of the larger Gary operation was difficult to overstate. A U.S. Coal & Coke advertisement in the McDowell Times announced that eleven mines and 2,000 coke ovens were working six days each week. The company was recruiting additional miners and coke workers, evidence of the labor required to keep the system operating.
No. 10 was one piece of that machine, but the people entering its portals experienced industrial expansion on an intensely human scale. Mining meant long shifts underground, roof falls, machinery, blasting, coal dust, loaded mine cars, and the constant judgment required to work beneath thousands of tons of rock.
The danger never entirely disappeared.
The People of the Gary System
The workers who sustained U.S. Coal & Coke came from remarkably different backgrounds.
A West Virginia mine report from 1915 counted 1,479 hand-loading miners throughout Gary. They included native-born white miners, African Americans, Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Poles, and other European immigrants. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, the larger Gary area had become one of the most diverse industrial communities in West Virginia.
Venus belonged to that larger social landscape.
The federal census offers one of the best ways to recover its residents by name. In 1920, schedules identified the settlement as “No. 10 Works.” By 1930, enumerators were recording households under “Venus Town,” while federal enumeration descriptions in 1940 explicitly placed Venus alongside Gary, Alpheus, and Wilcoe in Adkin Magisterial District. These records allow the history of Venus to move beyond corporations and mine production toward individual families, occupations, birthplaces, children, immigrants, and the generations who actually inhabited the community. Pasted markdown
Such records matter because the company-town landscape could make U.S. Coal & Coke appear to be the central character in every story. The company owned the mine, erected the houses, operated the store, controlled large portions of the land, and influenced many aspects of community life. Yet the company did not raise the children, tend the gardens, create neighborhood friendships, play the ball games, fill the churches, or preserve the memories that allowed Venus to remain a community long after its industrial purpose began to fade.
The Company Store, Ballfield, and Everyday Life
Venus had a company store but apparently lacked some of the larger amenities found in Main Gary. Residents could travel between the neighboring communities, and the broader Gary system contained schools, churches, stores, athletic facilities, entertainment, and other institutions serving thousands of people.
One of the richest surviving descriptions of everyday life at Venus comes from local historian Buddy French, who interviewed Rudy Kelly in 2007. Kelly had been born at No. 10 in 1920 and remembered the community from childhood.
According to his recollections, children from No. 10 walked through the woods toward Gary to attend school. He remembered the company store selling live chickens that customers took home to prepare themselves. He also recalled a company farm on the mountain, with fruit trees, cattle, and vegetable gardens that helped supply fresh produce. Because these details survive through oral history rather than contemporary company documentation, they are best treated as personal memories of community life, but they provide something official production reports cannot. They show what No. 10 looked like through the eyes of someone who grew up there.
The ballfield was another center of life.
Historical photographs preserve the U.S. Coal & Coke baseball team at the No. 10 field during the 1920s. Local history also remembers football games, Fourth of July celebrations, and, in later years, traveling carnivals using the same ground. Company-sponsored recreation served corporate purposes by encouraging stability and community identification, but residents could make those spaces their own. A ballfield built within a company town could become the setting for childhood memories that had little to do with coal production.
That distinction is important. Venus was constructed by a corporation, but it was lived in by families.
A Mine That Never Became Safe
Modern photographs can make an old coal camp appear almost peaceful, particularly after forest has reclaimed former industrial sites. The working landscape was different.
Mining remained dangerous even after decades of improved machinery, ventilation, inspection, and safety regulation.
On October 1, 1973, twenty-three-year-old Vestal Kenneth Hensley of Skygusty was killed at Gary No. 10. The following day’s Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported that Hensley was entering the mine when a slate fall occurred around two in the afternoon. He left behind his wife and family.
His death came more than sixty years after the opening of No. 10.
By then, generations of miners had entered the workings beneath Venus. Machinery had changed dramatically since the early days documented by the 1909 Engineering and Mining Journal, but the fundamental danger of underground geology remained. A falling section of roof or slate could still turn an ordinary workday into a family tragedy.
Hensley’s death provides a reminder that the history of Venus cannot be reduced to picturesque company houses or nostalgia for coal-camp life. The community existed beside dangerous industrial work, and nearly every household would have understood the risks carried underground each morning.
When the Company Began to Leave
By the second half of the twentieth century, the economic structure that had created Gary Hollow was changing.
Mechanization reduced the number of miners necessary to produce coal. The American steel industry faced changing markets and competition. Individual mines exhausted accessible reserves or became less economical. Layoffs and closures gradually weakened communities whose existence had depended upon one enormous industrial employer.
The relationship between U.S. Steel and the houses of Venus changed as well.
The 2018 heritage survey reports that around 1970 U.S. Steel sold its residences in Gary and the surrounding communities to residents and other private owners. Local recollections place the transition around 1971. Either way, the change represented the end of one of the defining features of the traditional company-town system. Families who had rented homes from their employer could become private property owners.
The buildings might look much the same from the road, but their relationship to the people inside them had fundamentally changed.
The houses no longer existed simply because U.S. Coal & Coke needed workers near Mine No. 10. They could remain after the company’s industrial reason for maintaining them disappeared.
The Closing of Gary No. 10
Different sources give slightly different dates for the final withdrawal of U.S. Steel from the broader Gary district, partly because mines and facilities did not all shut down on the same day.
For Gary No. 10 itself, federal records offer a particularly useful date. The Environmental Protection Agency’s abandoned-mine database lists Gary No. 10 in McDowell County as sealed on February 28, 1984.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey likewise places the end of U.S. Steel’s operations in the area in 1984, while a recent U.S. Geological Survey history describes mining in the Gary district continuing into 1985 before active mines were closed or transferred. Other local histories use 1986 when describing the final end of the Gary Hollow era. These dates are not necessarily contradictory. They reflect the staggered collapse of a sprawling industrial system in which individual mines, properties, and operations closed at different times.
For Venus, the most specific surviving federal record points to February 1984 as the end of Gary No. 10.
The mine that had given the community its familiar name was finished.
The community was not.
What Survives at Venus
When preservation researchers returned to Venus in the twenty-first century, they found enough of the original coal-camp landscape to consider it historically significant.
The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey recommended a Venus Historic District with a period of significance extending from 1907 through 1968. It identified twenty-eight contributing resources and recognized the settlement for its association with the coal industry, the U.S. Coal & Coke Company, and company-town architecture.
Individual surveys documented surviving houses along Venus Road, Hillside Street, Cross Street, Hill Street, and other parts of the community. Many were dated to approximately 1907, placing them close to the founding of No. 10 itself. The research compiled for this article identifies the preservation survey as one of the strongest sources for understanding not only the origins of Venus but what remains physically visible today. Pasted markdown
That survival is important.
Coal tipples can disappear. Railroad sidings can be pulled up. Mine openings can be sealed. Company stores can be demolished, and forests can grow over industrial sites until a visitor sees little evidence of what once happened there.
Houses are different.
As long as people continue living in them, they preserve the shape of the community. Their repeated forms, narrow streets, hillside lots, porches, retaining walls, steps, and relationships to the valley reveal how a coal company organized space more than a century ago.
Venus is therefore not simply the former location of Mine No. 10.
It is a surviving piece of Gary Hollow.
Why Venus Matters
Venus represents a type of Appalachian history that can easily disappear beneath the reputation of larger places.
Gary receives attention because it was the center of one of the greatest coal operations in West Virginia. Welch appears in histories as the county seat. Nearby communities are remembered for company stores, railroads, disasters, labor struggles, or surviving architecture.
Venus was smaller.
Yet its history allows the larger story of industrial Appalachia to be seen at the scale of one community.
Here, U.S. Steel’s search for metallurgical coal became rows of houses on a McDowell County mountainside. Corporate investment became a railroad spur and a mine portal. National steel production became the daily underground labor of local men. Company paternalism became a store, rented houses, recreation, and services. Immigration and Black migration became neighbors and coworkers. Industrial danger became a widow receiving news that her husband would not return from the mine.
Then industrial decline became something else entirely. The company houses were sold, the mine was sealed, and the corporation withdrew.
Venus remained.
The people who continued to call the place home transformed what had begun as Gary No. 10 from a temporary appendage of an industrial corporation into a community with a history of its own.
Today the old houses on the hillside, the cemetery beside the road, the surviving streets, and the hidden underground workings preserve different pieces of that story. Together they make Venus one of the many places in McDowell County where the history of coal is still written directly onto the landscape.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1907. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1907. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde41west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1908. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1908. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde26west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1910. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0CwXAQAAIAAJ
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1918. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1918. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde36west
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1919. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1919. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofde37west
Walker. “Coal Mining Methods at Gary, West Virginia.” Engineering and Mining Journal 88, no. 1 (July 3, 1909): 6–10. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1909-07-03-Vol_88_Iss_1%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1909-07-03_88_1%29.pdf
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Map and Profile of the Right Fork Spur of the Sand Lick Branch of the Tug Fork Branch of the Ohio Extension of the N&W Railway Co.” Drawing B355, HS-CC10672. February 23, 1907. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=122583
United States Coal & Coke Company. “1000 Miners and Coke Drawers: 11 Mines and 2000 Coke Ovens Working Six Days Per Week.” Advertisement. McDowell Times (Keystone, WV), May 19, 1916, 2. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/1916-05-19/ed-1/seq-2/
United States Steel Corporation. Annual Reports. New York: United States Steel Corporation, various years. HathiTrust Digital Library. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011453849
United States Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. McDowell County, West Virginia, Adkin Magisterial District, schedules for No. 10 Works. Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. McDowell County, West Virginia, Adkin Magisterial District, schedules for Venus Town. National Archives Microfilm Publication T626, Record Group 29. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. McDowell County, West Virginia, Adkin Magisterial District, Venus. National Archives Microfilm Publication T627, Record Group 29. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940
United States Coal Commission. Completed Mining Community A Schedules with Camp Ratings, December 1922–June 1923. National Archives Identifier 6293264, Record Group 68, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-068-coal-commission
United States Public Health Service. Sanitary Surveys of Coal Communities, April–June 1923. National Archives Identifier 6278177, Record Group 68, National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/record-groups/rg-068-coal-commission
United States Coal Commission. First Report of the United States Coal Commission. House Document 67-533. 67th Cong., 4th sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/SERIALSET-08215_00_00-052-0533-0000
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Hal Scrugham Collection, A&M 4306. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. Includes “No. 10 Plant, U.S. C. & C. Co., Gary, W. Va.” https://ip-150-68.dynamic.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6376
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. USX Collection. Accession 89-100. Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. U.S. Coal & Coke Company payroll books and corporate records, 1901–1950. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. Mike Hornick Collection. Accession 88-54. Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. Records, photographs, payroll ledgers, and research materials concerning Gary and U.S. Coal & Coke. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Eastern Regional Coal Archives. Norfolk & Western Railway, Pocahontas Division Superintendent’s Records. Accession 89-91. Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia. https://www.wvgw.net/mcdowell/articles/ERCALIST.pdf
Bluefield Daily Telegraph. “Slate Fall Kills Miner at Gary No. 10 Mine.” October 2, 1973. https://newspaperarchive.com/bluefield-daily-telegraph-oct-02-1973-p-1/
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Abandoned Coal Mine Methane Opportunities Database. Entry for Gary No. 10, McDowell County, West Virginia. EPA abandoned-mine record
U.S. Geological Survey. Historical Topographic Maps: Gary Quadrangle, West Virginia. topoView. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways, 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Historic Property Inventory Form Index: Northfork to Vivian. July 2018. Includes Venus resources MD-4837 through MD-4861. https://www.aurora-llc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Coal_Heritage_Northfork_to_Vivian_HPI_Index_by_SurveyNo.pdf
Orr, Elisabeth, Stefania Staniscia, and Charles Yuill. “Gary Hollow, 38 Church Street, Gary, McDowell County, West Virginia.” Historic American Landscapes Survey No. WV-6. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0557/
McGehee, C. Stuart. “U.S. Coal & Coke Company.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/808
McGehee, C. Stuart. “Gary.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/2025
Garay, Ronald G. U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. University of Tennessee Press
McGehee, Stuart. “Gary: A First-Class Operation.” Goldenseal 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 28–35. West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/goldenseal/gseal1.html
French, Buddy. “Venus, West Virginia, Better Known as Gary No. 10.” Bramwell WV. Includes a 2007 oral-history interview with Rudy Kelly. https://www.bramwellwv.com/venuscommunity1.html
French, Buddy. “Venus, WV, Gary No. 10 Mining Complex.” Bramwell WV. https://www.bramwellwv.com/venusminingcomplex2.html
CoalCampUSA. “Venus, WV (Gary No. 10).” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://coalcampusa.com/sowv/flattop/venus/venus.htm
West Virginia Coal Heritage Highway Authority. McDowell County Coal Camp Map. https://coalheritage.wv.gov/visitors/Coal%20Camp%20Maps/MCDOWELL.pdf
Author Note: Venus began as a numbered U.S. Coal & Coke operation, but generations of families transformed Gary No. 10 into a community with an identity of its own. I hope this history helps preserve the miners, families, company houses, and memories that remain part of Gary Hollow’s story.