War, McDowell County: From Miners City to Coal, Commerce, and Big Creek High School

Appalachian Community Histories – War, McDowell County: From Miners City to Coal, Commerce, and Big Creek High School

In the southern end of McDowell County, where narrow valleys leave little room between streams, railroad tracks, roads, and mountainsides, the city of War grew into something different from many of the coal camps around it. Coal created the conditions for the town, and the Norfolk and Western Railway gave it access to the larger industrial world, but War was never simply one company’s collection of houses beside a mine. It became a commercial and civic center for an entire section of the coalfield.

Families came down from the surrounding communities to shop on McDowell Street, attend school events, watch movies, visit churches, and conduct business. Miners living in camps scattered along the Dry Fork and its tributaries might work for different companies, but War increasingly became one of the places where their lives intersected.

The city reached its greatest importance during the middle decades of the twentieth century, when McDowell County was producing enormous quantities of coal and approaching 100,000 residents. Yet War’s history begins before its incorporation, before its high school, and even before the name War appeared in West Virginia’s official place-name records. The community began under another name, Miners City.

Before War, There Was Miners City

The West Virginia State Archives preserves one of the simplest but most important pieces of evidence about the community’s early identity. Its official place-name file records War in McDowell County under the year 1906 and notes that the place was formerly known as “Miner’s City.” The later McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey likewise identifies Miners City as the predecessor of War and connects that name to the small mining operations that developed in the surrounding area during the late nineteenth century.

That early settlement belonged to the larger transformation taking place across McDowell County. The county had remained thinly populated for much of the nineteenth century because steep mountains and poor transportation limited large-scale development. Everything changed when outside investors, land companies, coal operators, and railroads began opening the Pocahontas coalfield.

The numbers show how quickly the transformation occurred. McDowell County had 7,300 residents in 1890 and 18,747 by 1900. By 1910 the population had climbed to 47,856. In the same era, the number of miners expanded dramatically, drawing workers from elsewhere in Appalachia, the American South, Europe, and other parts of the world. The mountains around Miners City were no longer isolated from industrial America. They were becoming part of one of the most productive coal regions in the nation.

War’s location placed it directly inside that expanding network. The Dry Fork valley provided one of the natural corridors through the mountains, and the railroad would eventually follow it past communities such as Yukon, Excelsior, War, Berwind, and Canebrake. What had begun as a small mining settlement was about to become a railroad town and regional marketplace.

The Railroad and the Name War

The Norfolk and Western Railway was the essential link between McDowell County coal and distant markets. Its main line entered the eastern part of the county during the late nineteenth century, while branch lines gradually reached deeper into the hollows where new mines were being developed. According to the Coal Heritage Survey, the Dry Fork Branch was constructed in stages between 1904 and 1907 and again from 1910 to 1913. War was one of the communities served by that line.

Local histories used by the survey state that the railroad reached Miners City in 1904 and constructed a depot. The West Virginia place-name record identifies War by 1906, providing a useful archival date for the transition from the old name to the new one. From then forward, War appeared increasingly in government records, mining reports, deeds, maps, and official publications.

The accepted explanation is that the town took its name from War Creek, which runs through the community. Later state and local histories go further, claiming that War Creek itself commemorated an eighteenth-century conflict involving settlers and Shawnee people. The West Virginia Blue Book repeats a tradition that the name came from a battle near the headwaters of the creek around 1788.

That portion of the story deserves caution. The documentary record clearly supports the former name Miners City, the later name War, and the connection between the town and War Creek. The much older story explaining exactly how War Creek received its name is harder to establish. Without a surviving eighteenth or nineteenth-century account confirming the event, it is safer to describe the battle explanation as a longstanding local tradition rather than proven fact.

By 1920, War had developed enough to become an incorporated municipality. State records say the incorporation was carried out through the McDowell County Circuit Court, and later municipal registers continued to identify 1920 as the official incorporation year.

Building War One Lot at a Time

One of the richest primary sources for understanding early War was created for a reason that had nothing to do with writing town history. In 1954, the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia decided a property dispute known as Kertesz v. Falgiano. Because the disagreement depended on old deeds, lot lines, maps, fences, additions, and surveys, the court reconstructed decades of property history in extraordinary detail.

The case repeatedly refers to Beavers Addition to Miners City, later War. It describes lots running between the Norfolk and Western right-of-way and the Dry Fork, properties fronting McDowell Street, old walkways between buildings, and surveys used to determine where one owner’s land ended and another’s began. In doing so, the opinion preserves a fragment of War’s physical development that might otherwise have disappeared from the historical record.

The chain of deeds reaches back into the first years after the name War appeared. On January 16, 1908, A. D. Beavers conveyed property to W. S. Bowling. That October, Bowling and his wife transferred lots to the War Creek Coal Company. The coal company retained property there for decades before conveying its remaining real estate in the area in 1942.

Even more valuable is a map introduced as evidence in the lawsuit. The court described a large map of the Town of War prepared by engineer H. A. Kiser on December 10, 1923. It showed portions of Beavers Addition and provided the basis for later efforts to locate property lines. Somewhere behind an ordinary property lawsuit, therefore, survives evidence of a detailed professional survey of War during the height of the coal boom.

The same court record follows War into the automobile age. In 1946 a brick building was erected on McDowell Street that housed War Motor Sales. A photograph preserved by West Virginia University from about 1948 shows War Motor Service with a wrecker parked outside, providing a visual companion to the property descriptions in the court case. Together, the photograph and court record capture a town whose economy had expanded far beyond the mine portal.

Coal Beneath the Mountains Around War

War became a business center because coal surrounded it.

The West Virginia Department of Mines directory for the year ending June 30, 1923 identifies the Pocahontas Domestic Coal Company at War and lists Pocahontas Nos. 1 and 4 and Pocahontas No. 2 among its operations. These state mine reports placed War directly inside the industrial machinery of the Pocahontas coalfield, where companies operated underground mines in multiple seams and shipped their product through the Norfolk and Western system.

Yet War differed in an important way from many nearby places. Much of McDowell County consisted of company towns where a coal operator built the houses, store, school, and other facilities needed by its workforce. War developed more like Northfork, Keystone, Iaeger, and Welch, communities identified by the Coal Heritage Survey as commercial and social centers that served the smaller mining camps surrounding them.

That distinction mattered. A miner might live in Berwind, Excelsior, Yukon, Caretta, Coalwood, Bartley, or another nearby settlement, but his family did not necessarily remain inside that community for every part of daily life. Railroad connections and mountain roads brought people into War for goods and services that smaller company camps could not provide.

Excelsior itself became closely tied to the city. Named for the Excelsior Pocahontas Coal Company, the community developed along the Dry Fork, the railroad, and what became West Virginia Route 16. The Norfolk and Western constructed a siding there during the early twentieth century, and mining continued in the area until the 1940s. As these mines and camps multiplied around War, the city’s importance grew with them.

McDowell Street and a Coalfield Downtown

At its height, War had the kind of downtown that can be difficult to imagine when looking at the community today.

The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey describes three theaters, clothing and shoe stores, furniture businesses, and approximately fifteen churches. Rather than serving only people who happened to live inside the municipal limits, those establishments drew customers from an entire network of southern McDowell County coal communities.

McDowell Street became the physical expression of that role. Businesses crowded into the narrow strip of buildable land between the mountains, streams, roadway, and railroad. Property descriptions from the Kertesz case show buildings pressed against lot lines with the Dry Fork behind them and the Norfolk and Western nearby. It was a landscape created as much by geography as by town planning. There simply was not much flat ground to waste.

A federal map prepared by the United States Bureau of the Census in 1948 captures War near its mid-century peak. Compiled from earlier county and federal mapping, the detailed town plan records streets, boundaries, transportation lines, and the compact physical arrangement of the city. It is one of the best surviving primary sources for seeing War not merely as a place-name but as a functioning Appalachian city.

Even the 1940 Census enumeration instructions reveal how established the municipality had become. Enumeration District 24-12 specifically identified “War Town” and the “War Town Jail” within Big Creek Magisterial District. By then War had municipal government, businesses, schools, transportation, churches, and the civic infrastructure expected of a small city.

War at Its Mid-Century Peak

The 1940 Census counted 1,277 residents in War. Ten years later, the federal count reported 4,002, an increase of more than 200 percent. That number requires some explanation because part of Big Creek District had been formally annexed into War in 1945. The apparent population explosion therefore represented both genuine coalfield growth and a significant expansion of the town’s legal boundaries.

Still, the larger picture is unmistakable. War had become one of southern McDowell County’s major population centers during the same period when the county itself approached 100,000 residents. The 1950 Census also recorded a diverse population in War, reflecting the larger demographic history of the Pocahontas coalfield, where Black miners, immigrants, native Appalachians, and migrants from other parts of the country had worked and built communities for generations.

Coal was the economic foundation beneath this growth, but the people living in and around War created the institutions that turned an industrial settlement into a community. Churches filled the valleys. Businesses lined downtown streets. School events brought families together. Football games could become community-wide occasions.

Few institutions represented that shared identity better than Big Creek High School.

Big Creek High School and the Pride of War

War Elementary School opened in 1923, followed by Big Creek High School in the early 1930s. The name of the high school was significant. It was not simply War High School. Big Creek represented the larger district, and students came from communities scattered throughout the surrounding coalfield.

Big Creek High School opened on January 4, 1932, and eventually became one of the most enduring symbols of the region. Its athletic teams, particularly football, created loyalties that extended well beyond the city limits.

In 1957, that loyalty reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. Big Creek finished the regular football season undefeated, as did Weir High School and West Fairmont High School. When Big Creek was left out of the state Class AA championship game, two of its players became plaintiffs in a legal attempt to challenge the decision. The resulting case, West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission v. Wagner, preserves an unusually detailed primary account of a high school football controversy that mattered enough to reach the state’s highest court.

Big Creek later became nationally familiar for another reason. Homer Hickam and his friends attended the school while conducting the rocket experiments that became the foundation of Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys. The story eventually helped connect War and nearby Coalwood to audiences far beyond West Virginia. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey identified the surviving Big Creek gym, dating to about 1950, as individually eligible for the National Register of Historic Places because of its local educational significance.

For generations of families, however, the school’s importance did not depend on football championships or famous alumni. It was where children from separate hollows became classmates, where communities met in gymnasiums and grandstands, and where a district whose towns were divided by mountains developed a shared identity.

Mechanization and the Long Decline

War’s prosperity depended on the enormous workforce required by the surrounding coal industry. When that workforce began shrinking, the effects eventually reached nearly every part of town life.

Mechanization accelerated during the 1950s. Mines could produce large quantities of coal with fewer workers, and employment declined even when production remained substantial. The Coal Heritage Survey traces the gradual contraction of the industry through the following decades, with older companies closing operations as seams were exhausted, markets shifted, and the economics of mining changed.

For War, the decline became particularly visible from the 1960s onward. Fewer mine jobs meant fewer families. Fewer families meant fewer customers on McDowell Street, fewer students in schools, and less demand for the theaters, stores, and services that had once made the city a destination for surrounding communities. The Coal Heritage Survey explicitly connects War’s population decline to the closing of nearby mines. By 2010 the city’s population stood at 862.

The loss of Big Creek High School made the transition especially visible. After years of debate over consolidation in McDowell County, Big Creek closed in 2010 and its students joined those from Iaeger at the new River View High School in Bradshaw. Research on the consolidation fight described the closing not simply as an educational change but as the loss of a gathering place, an economic presence, and one of War’s strongest community symbols.

Five years later, as officials prepared to demolish the deteriorating old school, fire swept through the building. Investigators later ruled the July 2015 blaze an arson. The old gym was preserved, but much of the school that had served Big Creek for more than three quarters of a century was gone.

Reading War Through What Remains

War is not an abandoned coal camp. People still live there, businesses remain, churches continue to serve their congregations, and the city still occupies the narrow valley where War Creek, the Dry Fork, the railroad, and mountain roads shaped its growth.

What has changed is the scale.

The surviving landscape can be read against the archival record. The 1948 Census map shows the streets of a busy mid-century city. The 1923 Kiser map preserved in the Kertesz litigation reaches back further into the period when subdivisions and commercial lots were still being defined. Mine reports identify the coal operations that supported the surrounding population. Photographs preserve garages and businesses. Census records preserve the names and households of people who lived there. The historic resource survey documents buildings that survived into the twenty-first century.

There have also been efforts to find a new use for War’s geography and history. McDowell County’s comprehensive planning documents note that a Hatfield-McCoy Trails trailhead opened in War in 2018, bringing ATV visitors directly into the community and encouraging new tourism-related activity downtown. It is a very different economy from the one that once filled coal trains and theaters, but it again depends on War serving as a stopping place for people moving through the surrounding mountains.

Why War Matters

War tells a larger story about the industrial history of Appalachia.

It began as Miners City, a name that could hardly have been more direct about the economic forces changing southern West Virginia. The railroad connected it to national markets. Coal companies operated in the mountains surrounding it. Property owners divided the valley into additions and commercial lots. Stores, theaters, churches, garages, and schools followed. By the middle of the twentieth century, War was not merely a settlement beside a mine. It was one of the places that held the surrounding coalfield together.

Then the same industrial economy that had produced War changed. Machines reduced the number of miners required underground. Companies disappeared. Families left. Schools consolidated. Businesses closed. Buildings that had once stood in the center of community life were demolished, burned, or left empty.

Yet the documentary record allows much of that earlier city to be reconstructed.

A 1908 deed still records the War Creek Coal Company acquiring lots in Beavers Addition. A 1923 engineer’s map preserves the arrangement of the town during the boom. A 1948 federal map captures War near its height. A photograph preserves a wrecker outside War Motor Service. A 1957 court decision records how fiercely residents cared about their high school football team. Taken together, these sources restore something that population statistics alone cannot show.

They reveal a city built in a place where there was almost no room to build one, squeezed between coal-bearing mountains and the Dry Fork, connected to the outside world by rails, and sustained for decades by thousands of people who came out of the surrounding hollows to make War the commercial and civic heart of Big Creek.

Sources & Further Reading

United States Bureau of the Census. War, McDowell Co., West Virginia. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1948. Map. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/98681102/

West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Entry for War, McDowell County, formerly Miner’s City. West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamw.html

Kertesz v. Falgiano, 140 W. Va. 469, 84 S.E.2d 744 (1954). Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1954/10662-2.html

West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Circuit Court Records.” Collection AR2094. West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html

West Virginia State Archives. “County Records on Microfilm: McDowell County.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/bluenote.html

United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Enumeration District Descriptions, McDowell County, West Virginia, ED 24-12. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940. National Archives and Records Administration. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1940_Census_Enumeration_District_Descriptions_-West_Virginia–McDowell_County-_ED_24-12,_ED_24-13,_ED_24-14,ED_24-15–NARA-_5888412.jpg

United States Bureau of the Census. 1950 Census of Population. Volume I: Number of Inhabitants, West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/population-volume-1/vol-01-51.pdf

National Archives and Records Administration. 1950 Census Enumeration District Maps: West Virginia, McDowell County, War, ED 24-19 to 24-23. 1950. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1950_Census_Enumeration_District_Maps_-West_Virginia(WV)_-McDowell_County–War–ED_24-19_to_23–NARA-_75639288.jpg

United States Geological Survey. Welch, West Virginia-Virginia. Historical Topographic Map, 1924. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey. https://store.usgs.gov/product/925804

West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf

West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book, 2002. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 2002. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_2002.pdf

West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1923. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_(IA_annualreportofde41west).pdf

West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines, 1910. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1910. https://books.google.com/books?id=dkBOAAAAYAAJ

West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines, 1931. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1931. https://books.google.com/books?id=x5e6E-Mj9qAC

West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “West Virginia Mine Map Archives.” Charleston, WV. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/west-virginia-mine-map-archives/

United States Government. Federal Register. Vol. 11, no. 217, November 6, 1946. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Includes Yukon Coal Company, Yukon No. 1 Mine, War Creek Seam, and War as a shipping point.

Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Pocahontas Mines Collection, 1883–1997.” Ms2004-002. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/3408

Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Map of McDowell Co., West Virginia, and Tazewell Co., Virginia.” Pocahontas Mines Collection, Box 589. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/109021

Craft Memorial Library. “Eastern Regional Coal Archives.” Bluefield, WV. https://craftmemorial.lib.wv.us/eastern-regional-coal-archives

West Virginia State Archives. “Newspapers on Microfilm: McDowell County.” Includes Big Creek Home News, published in War from 1978 to 1981. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/newspapers/mcdowell.html

“War, WV It’s Still Alive and Well, Too.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, September 4, 1977. Listed in the West Virginia State Archives McDowell County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html

“War McDowell Co., Southernmost City Folksy Flavor.” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, March 12, 1989. Listed in the West Virginia State Archives McDowell County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mcdowell.html

West Virginia University Libraries. “War Motor Service, McDowell County, W. Va.” ca. 1948. West Virginia History OnView. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/013468

United States Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Town of War, McDowell County, West Virginia: Flood Elevation Determinations.” Federal Register, May 11, 1984. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1984-05-11/pdf/FR-1984-05-11.pdf

West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission v. Wagner, 102 S.E.2d 901 (W. Va. 1958). Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1958/10939-2.html

Tickle v. Barton. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, 1956. https://law.justia.com/cases/west-virginia/supreme-court/1956/cc831-2.html

Aurora Research Associates. 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. “Coal Heritage Survey Historic Property Inventory: War to Yerba.” 2018. https://www.aurora-llc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/CoalHeritage_War_to_Yerba_Index_by_SurveyNo.pdf

Hatcher, Thomas C. “The City of War, West Virginia.” In The Heritage of McDowell County, West Virginia, 1858–1995, vol. 1. War, WV: McDowell County Historical Society, 1995.

Hatcher, Thomas C. “McDowell Town Names: Where Did They Come From?” In The Heritage of McDowell County, West Virginia, 1858–1999, vol. 2. War, WV: McDowell County Historical Society, 1999.

Battlo, Jean. McDowell County: In West Virginia and American History. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1998. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/appalachian-collection/appalachian-studies-bibliography/appalachian-studies-bibliography-1994-2012/social-conditions-social-life-and-customs

Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Two Mule Publishing, 2010. https://search.worldcat.org/title/666823075

Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. West Virginia Geological Survey County Report. Morgantown: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Prodesc/proddesc_10446.htm

National Park Service. Coal Company Stores in McDowell County, West Virginia. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64500726_text

Gillenwater, Mack H. “Cultural and Historical Geography of Mining Settlements in the Pocahontas Coal Field of Southern West Virginia, 1880–1930.” PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1972.

Lambie, Joseph T. From Mine to Market: The History of Coal Transportation on the Norfolk and Western Railway. New York: New York University Press, 1954.

Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1963.

Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p007656

Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. https://utpress.org/9780870493416/miners-millhands-and-mountaineers/

Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813142463/uneven-ground/

Lewis, Ronald L. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813192741/black-coal-miners-in-america/

Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

McDowell County Commission. “History of McDowell County.” Welch, WV: McDowell County Commission. https://mcdowellcountycommission.com/history/

Gillenwater, Mack H. “Company Towns.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1440

e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “McDowell County.” West Virginia Humanities Council. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1577

National Park Service. “Introduction to the West Virginia Mine Wars.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/introduction-to-the-west-virginia-mine-wars.htm

National Park Service. “McDowell County Courthouse.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mcdowell-county-courthouse.htm

West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “William Archer, Journalist, Research Papers Regarding McDowell and Mercer Counties.” A&M 4388. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6481

Appalachian Regional Commission. “McDowell, West Virginia.” Washington, DC: Appalachian Regional Commission. https://www.arc.gov/states_counties/mcdowell-west-virginia/

Author Note: War was more than another coal town in McDowell County. Its history as Miners City, a railroad and commercial center, and the home of Big Creek High School shows how mining communities throughout southern West Virginia became connected through business, education, transportation, and shared identity.