Appalachian Community Histories – Virginia City, Wise County: The Coal Town the Bulldozers Swept Away
Along U.S. 58 Alternate west of St. Paul, a small white church stands on a hillside above the road. It looks almost too modest to carry the history assigned to it. The building measures only about twenty by thirty-two feet, with white weatherboards, a small bell tower, old wooden pews, and a pair of pianos inside. Yet according to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, it is the only surviving building from what was once Virginia City, one of the earliest coal communities to emerge during the industrial transformation of Wise County, Virginia.
Virginia City did not begin as a coal camp. Families had lived in the surrounding hollows and valleys for decades before railroad tracks and mining companies arrived. What transformed the settlement was the same combination that remade much of Southwest Virginia during the late nineteenth century: railroad construction, outside capital, and the discovery that coal buried beneath isolated mountain land could suddenly be carried to distant markets.
For a time Virginia City had mines, stores, a post office, a school, company houses, electric power, passenger trains nearby, and enough homes to make it one of the recognizable mining settlements of eastern Wise County. Then the industry moved, the mines closed and reopened, equipment disappeared, houses vanished, and eventually strip mining and bulldozers altered much of the ground where the town had stood.
The church remained.
Before Virginia City
Long before anyone called the place Virginia City, families were scattered through the country along Dry Fork and the surrounding hills. Research prepared for the National Register of Historic Places identifies families such as the Wrights, Trents, Hales, and McReynolds among the mostly Scots-Irish settlers of the area, along with German families including the Hilemans. By about 1860, roughly thirty-five families lived in the vicinity. By 1880, that number had grown to around fifty-five.
This was still a rural mountain landscape rather than an industrial community. Roads were limited, markets were distant, and coal had comparatively little value when it could not be moved cheaply beyond the mountains.
The railroad changed that equation.
During the 1880s the Norfolk & Western Railway had already demonstrated what rail access could mean in the Pocahontas coalfield of Tazewell County. As the railroad expanded westward, tracks eventually reached Norton and opened Wise County to large-scale commercial development.
Mining engineer Franklin Bache, writing while this transformation was actually taking place, emphasized just how sudden the change had been. He noted that meaningful development of the Wise County coalfield did not begin until the Norfolk & Western and Louisville & Nashville completed their extensions to Norton in 1891. Coal shipments of real significance followed in 1892. In 1893 alone, Bache reported approximately 149,600 tons shipped from fourteen Wise County mines.
Virginia City emerged almost exactly at that turning point.
The Railroad Creates a Coal Town
The Norfolk & Western passed through the area that became Virginia City as it pushed toward Norton. With railroad transportation available and speculation growing about the coal beneath the surrounding hills, the settlement quickly took on a new identity.
The Virginia City Post Office was established in June 1891, with William G. Harrison serving as its first postmaster. Around the same time, the Russell Creek Coal Company opened a mine and company store. The National Register research describes the operation as one of the earliest commercial coal mines in Wise County.
Russell Creek was entering a coalfield that was only beginning to reveal its industrial potential. Bache’s 1894 study of Wise County specifically placed Virginia City among the points from which the southern portion of the county’s coalfield could be developed. His contemporary assessment is valuable because it captures the optimism of the moment, before decades of mining had revealed which seams and communities would become the most profitable.
The company needed more than coal. It needed workers.
Coal companies across Wise County competed for labor during the early years of development. The National Register research notes that many local men were initially hesitant to enter mine work, particularly for the wages being offered. Experienced miners were brought from Pennsylvania, after which companies were increasingly able to recruit local workers. Churches, stores, housing, and other community institutions were not simply conveniences. They helped companies create settlements where miners and their families could live close to the workings.
Virginia City was becoming not merely a mine but a coal town.
The Russell Creek Mine and the Risks Underground
The world created by Russell Creek Coal Company was one in which miners entered a workplace that could change after every blast.
An 1898 case before the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, Russell Creek Coal Co. v. Wells, provides an unusually detailed glimpse into the dangers surrounding early Wise County mining. The case concerned an experienced miner injured when slate fell from the roof of a Russell Creek mine. Testimony discussed the responsibilities of miners and mine bosses, inspections of working rooms, roof support, blasting, and the practice of testing and propping loose material overhead.
The legal dispute centered on who bore responsibility for conditions underground, but the surviving opinion also exposes the everyday calculations miners had to make. A room that had been safe could become dangerous as coal was removed. Blasting could loosen rock or slate. Miners were expected to watch the roof and install props where needed, while mine bosses had supervisory responsibilities of their own.
For the families building lives around Virginia City and other early Wise County mines, coal brought wages and opportunity, but those wages came from an environment where the mountain itself could become unstable above a worker’s head.
The Jawbone Coal Beneath Virginia City
Virginia City’s industrial story was tied particularly closely to the Jawbone coal bed.
In 1907 the federal government obtained coal directly from a Virginia City mine for scientific testing. The United States Geological Survey described its “Jamestown No. 1” sample as bituminous run-of-mine coal from the Jawbone bed at Virginia City on the Norfolk & Western Railway. Federal inspectors examined the mine, collected samples, and recorded sections of the seam at points 3,200 and 2,400 feet northwest of the mine opening.
The sample was not merely examined locally. It was shipped for government testing and used in steaming and producer-gas experiments. The recorded mine samples contained about fifteen percent ash and produced roughly 12,400 to 12,900 British thermal units per pound depending upon the sample and condition tested.
Those numbers help explain a complicated part of Virginia City’s history.
It would be too simple to describe the Jawbone seam as worthless coal. Bache’s earlier assessment actually regarded Jawbone coal as well suited for domestic use. Yet Virginia City eventually found itself competing against other Wise County operations working coal that proved more desirable for the expanding industrial market. Later historical accounts remembered the coal around Virginia City as inferior to better grades being developed elsewhere, including around Toms Creek.
Coal had created Virginia City, but the particular coal beneath it would also limit how long the first great period of mining could last.
A Church for a New Community
As miners and their families settled around Virginia City, they needed institutions that belonged to life above ground.
Before a church building existed, ministers reportedly conducted services in private homes. Denominational boundaries appear to have been relatively flexible. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholic immigrant miners all formed part of the religious landscape surrounding the early community.
The Russell Creek Coal Company donated land for what became Virginia City Church and helped raise money for building materials. Local residents supplied labor.
There is a small disagreement in the surviving state records over precisely when the church was built. A 1995 Wise County architectural survey dates it to 1892, while the later National Register nomination places its construction around 1895 and associates the land donation with that year. The safer conclusion is that the church arose during Virginia City’s first few years as a developing coal community.
The simple frame building became more than a church. It also served as Virginia City’s first schoolhouse. For years there was no single resident pastor, and ministers of different denominations preached there. The building therefore occupied an unusual position in community life, functioning simultaneously as a religious gathering place, educational space, and social center.
The church would ultimately survive the mine, the company houses, and Virginia City itself.
George Lambert and the Industrial Virginia City
Russell Creek did not remain the sole operator of the Virginia City mines.
According to the National Register research, the company eventually abandoned its operation and leased it for ninety-nine years to a father-and-son partnership identified as the Rhodymires. The lease later passed to George Lambert, who operated two mines known simply as Number 1 and Number 2. Lambert eventually transferred his interests to the Virginia Iron, Coal and Coke Company.
Under Lambert, Virginia City acquired some of the physical machinery associated with a mature coal camp. A large wooden tipple stood roughly half a mile north of the church. Metal shakers processed coal there, first with steam power and later with electricity.
Around 1915 Lambert constructed a steam-powered electrical station near the tipple. Electricity went to the mines and company store and also reached the houses of some residents. It was not yet a universal household service, but its presence illustrates how industrial infrastructure was changing daily life even in a relatively remote Wise County hollow.
Rail transportation connected the settlement with a much wider world. By the 1920s, according to the historical research used in the National Register nomination, Norfolk & Western passenger trains ran four times each day between Norton and Bluefield.
Virginia City was no longer simply a collection of mountain families living near coal. It had become part of a transportation and industrial system stretching far beyond Wise County.
Work, Wages, and Company-Town Life
Coal-town development could bring conveniences that had been difficult to obtain in an isolated mountain settlement, but the company-town system was built around labor.
The National Register research reports that miners between about 1905 and 1916 sometimes earned as little as fifteen cents an hour while working ten-hour days. Wages later increased and the normal workday was reduced to eight hours.
Virginia City’s development followed patterns repeated across the Southern Appalachian coalfields. Companies concentrated houses around mines, provided commercial services, and supported institutions that helped attract workers. Wise County’s mining population became increasingly diverse as local mountain families worked beside African American miners and immigrants who had arrived from other parts of the United States and Europe.
The attachment research for this article points to surviving Russell Creek Coal Company minute books, Virginia mine-inspector records, federal coal analyses, census records, deeds, historic maps, photographs, newspapers, and personal recollections that could allow Virginia City’s population to be reconstructed household by household and mine by mine. Particularly important are state mine-inspection files specifically identifying the Virginia City operations during the 1920s.
Virginia City was never merely an industrial plant. Behind the mine statistics were families attending school, worshipping in the church, shopping at company stores, riding trains, and living within walking distance of the place where many of the men went underground each day.
Closure in 1921
The limitations of Virginia City’s coal eventually caught up with the town.
Virginia Iron, Coal and Coke Company operated the mines until 1921. That year the Virginia City mines closed, beginning a period that would permanently weaken the settlement.
Number 2 reopened around 1927, but the revival lasted only about a year. Afterward, the company sold the mining equipment, including the tipple and power station, to junk dealers. The machinery that had helped define industrial Virginia City was dismantled and hauled away.
Yet something unusual happened during the same period.
While the industrial center of the community was weakening, the little church entered one of the most important periods in its history.
Mary Martin and the Virginia City Church
In May 1922, shortly after the mines closed, Mary S. Martin arrived to conduct missionary work in the Dry Fork section of Wise County.
Martin was fifty-seven years old when she began. She found the Virginia City Church neglected and in need of repair, restored it as the center of her work, and began expanding her ministry into surrounding mining settlements.
Over the following decade she raised money for additional Presbyterian chapels at Bethany in 1929, Mount Olivet in 1931, and Bull Run in 1932. She reportedly taught Sunday school at each location and organized charitable work through Christian Endeavor and an auxiliary organization.
Her efforts eventually produced the Mary Martin Memorial Church organization, which brought the four chapels together. In 1937 a larger brick Gothic Revival church was erected in her name with approximately $4,000 in donations. Martin continued working in the region until her death in a Norton hospital in 1942.
Her work gave the old Virginia City building a life independent of the mine that had helped create it.
That distinction became increasingly important as the rest of the town disappeared.
Virginia City at Its Peak
Ironically, Virginia City reached its greatest physical extent during the same general period in which the original mining operation was beginning to struggle.
At its 1920s peak, historical research places roughly 175 houses in Virginia City, along with two stores, a stable, post office, church, and school.
The settlement covered a surprisingly broad area. The National Register nomination describes the historic community as extending approximately four miles north from Burton’s Ford toward Jimmy Wright Hollow and roughly two miles between the heights of Whetstone and Bull Hill.
Virginia City was therefore not a compact incorporated town laid out around a courthouse square or conventional Main Street. Like many Appalachian coal settlements, it stretched through narrow mountain geography, following hollows, transportation routes, mine openings, and usable patches of land.
To residents during the 1920s, however, it was undeniably a community. Hundreds of houses and the institutions surrounding them made the name Virginia City mean something quite different from the nearly empty landscape visitors encounter today.
Coal Returns, but the Town Does Not
Mining did not completely disappear after the old company operation was dismantled.
During the 1940s several smaller operators leased land from Virginia Iron, Coal and Coke Company and resumed mining around Virginia City. Together, these operations reportedly employed around 435 workers.
But employment did not recreate the old settlement.
Mining had changed. Transportation had changed. Workers no longer necessarily had to live in dense company housing beside the mine. Better coal deposits elsewhere remained more attractive, and Virginia City never recovered the economic importance it had enjoyed during its early decades.
The post office finally closed in 1956. The closure provided a quiet administrative ending to a place whose decline had been underway for years.
The name, however, continued to appear in the coal industry.
Virginia Iron, Coal and Coke Company later leased Number 2 to Jones Coal Company in 1966. The operation eventually passed through the Virginia City Number 2 Jawbone Coal Company and Eastover Mining Company. Decades after the original company town had largely disappeared, coal was still being extracted under names tied to Virginia City and the Jawbone seam.
The Jawbone Mine and Virginia City Coal Company
Virginia City’s name surfaced again in a major federal labor case during the 1980s.
Eastover Mining Company, owned by Duke Power, operated the Jawbone Mine in Wise County under a United Mine Workers of America agreement. When Duke decided to dispose of its Eastover mining properties, Virginia City Coal Company negotiated to purchase the Jawbone operation.
Federal court records show that the Jawbone Mine was closed on April 8, 1983, and its employees terminated before the sale was completed. The subsequent dispute centered on whether labor obligations under the National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement had been improperly avoided during the transaction.
The case belonged to a very different era from the Russell Creek miners of the 1890s. Machinery, corporate ownership, labor law, and mining methods had changed dramatically. Yet the same place name and the same Jawbone coal connected the two periods.
Almost a century after Virginia City first appeared alongside the railroad, coal was still pulling its name into courtroom records.
When the Bulldozers Came
Virginia City’s final disappearance was more physical than that of many abandoned coal camps.
Houses did not simply empty and collapse in place. Mining and later land alteration transformed much of the site itself. The surviving church was moved at least twice to accommodate mining operations and road construction, although the moves kept it within a few hundred yards of its original location.
Theodore A. Wright, who was born in 1905 and remembered the mining community, supplied perhaps the starkest description preserved in the National Register research. Looking back on what happened after the strip-mining era arrived, Wright wrote that the steel of bulldozers had swept Virginia City away.
It is difficult to imagine a more literal version of a forgotten Appalachian town.
The settlement did not merely lose population. Much of the landscape that contained its streets, houses, mining structures, and gathering places was reshaped until a visitor could pass through without realizing that a substantial community had once occupied the hills.
The Church That Outlived the Town
What survived was the Virginia City Church.
The little frame structure still contains much of its historic character, including weatherboard siding attached with old cut nails, wooden floors, antique pews, and its distinctive bell tower. It was placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in September 2005 and added to the National Register of Historic Places that November.
Its survival gives Virginia City something many vanished coal camps no longer possess: a physical witness.
The church remembers more than religion. It remembers the families who lived there before the mines, the arrival of the Norfolk & Western, Russell Creek Coal Company, miners entering the Jawbone seam, children attending school, immigrant workers worshipping beside longtime mountain families, George Lambert’s power station, the rise and fall of company mining, Mary Martin’s missionary work, and the generations who remained after the first boom had ended.
Virginia City’s story also demonstrates something important about Appalachian coal history. Industrial communities could rise remarkably quickly when a railroad, a coal seam, and investment converged. They could disappear almost as quickly when the economics changed.
In 1891, a post office and mine announced that Virginia City had arrived. At its height, roughly 175 houses covered the surrounding landscape. By the middle of the twentieth century, its strongest years were already behind it. Eventually even the ground on which much of the town stood was altered beyond recognition.
Yet on the hillside west of St. Paul, the little church remains.
For a town the bulldozers nearly erased, that surviving building is enough to say that Virginia City was here.
Sources & Further Reading
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Virginia City Church, Wise County, Virginia. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, DHR No. 097-0192, NRHP No. 05001263. 2005. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/097-0192_VirginiaCityChurch_2005_final_nomination.pdf.
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Virginia City Church.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. Last updated April 29, 2024. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/097-0192/.
Russell Creek Coal Company. Minute Books, 1890–1948. Accession 35139, Business Records Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/.
Virginia Department of Labor and Industry. Mine Inspector’s Reports and Correspondence, 1921–1944. “Virginia Iron Coal and Coke Co. Mines, Shaft Ridge, Soonse, Virginia City, 1921–1925.” Box 15, Folder 5. Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/.
United States Geological Survey. Sampling and Analyses of Coals in 1907. Bulletin 362. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0362/report.pdf.
Bache, Franklin. “Coal Measures of Wise County, Virginia.” Engineering and Mining Journal 57, no. 26 (June 30, 1894): 605–606. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1894-06-30-_Vol_57_Iss_26_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1894-06-30_57_26%29.pdf.
Bache, Franklin. “Coal-Sections Developed by Recent Operations in Wise County, Virginia.” Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 24 (1895): 70–80. https://www.onemine.org/documents/virginia-beach-paper-coal-sections-developed-by-recent-operations-in-wise-county-virginia-.
Russell Creek Coal Co. v. Wells, 96 Va. 416, 31 S.E. 614 (Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, November 17, 1898). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/russell-creek-coal-co-887200664.
The Big Stone Gap Post. Big Stone Gap, VA, 1892–1928. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88061179/.
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Newspaper Bibliography: Norton.” Virginia Newspaper Program. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?cities=Norton.
Tolson, Edward, et al. Wise County, Virginia; City of Norton Historic Architectural Survey. Richmond: Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1995. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/pdf_files/SpecialCollections/WS-057_Wise_County_Norton_Historic_AH_Survey_1995_Cost_share_report.pdf.
Addington, Luther F. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Centennial Committee and School Board of Wise County, 1956. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL52472909M/The_story_of_Wise_County_Virginia.
Hibbard, Walter R., Jr. Virginia Coal: An Abridged History. Blacksburg: Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research, Virginia Tech, 1990. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/items/273ed1ce-e50e-4c0a-996d-ba8cc991dace.
Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. https://utpress.org/9780870498855/coal-towns/.
Wise County Historical Society. The Heritage of Wise County and the City of Norton, 1856–2001. Vol. 2. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 2001. https://wisevahistoricalsoc.org/category/wchs/wise-va-history/page/2/.
McKnight, Brian Dallas, Jodi Deal, and Mary B. LaLone. Life in the Coal Camps of Wise County: In Honor of Wise County’s Sesquicentennial. Big Stone Gap, VA: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 2006. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/appalachian-collection/appalachian-studies-bibliography/appalachian-studies-bibliography-1994-2012/social-conditions-social-life-and-customs.
International Union, United Mine Workers of America v. Eastover Mining Co., 603 F. Supp. 1038 (W.D. Va. 1985). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/603/1038/1889290/.
International Union, United Mine Workers of America v. Eastover Mining Co., 623 F. Supp. 1141 (W.D. Va. 1985). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/623/1141/1513925/.
Author Note: Virginia City is one of those Appalachian places where almost an entire community can disappear while a single building remains to tell its story. I wanted to trace the town beyond its surviving church and remember the miners, families, railroad connections, and coal industry that once made this Wise County hollow a community.