Appalachian Community Histories – Warriormine, McDowell County: Warrior Coal Company, Shop Hollow, and Life Along War Creek
South of the city of War, where the mountains of southern McDowell County press tightly around War Creek, sits the community of Warriormine. The name itself tells much of the story. Warriormine grew as a coal settlement around the operations of the Warrior Coal Company during the industrial expansion that transformed the upper Dry Fork valley in the early twentieth century.
The community is easy to overlook today, particularly because War became the commercial center for the surrounding coal camps and eventually absorbed much of the area’s identity. Yet Warriormine once stood as a substantial settlement in its own right. Federal census officials counted 1,000 people there in 1940, while surviving maps, mining reports, marriage records, school rosters, company-store documentation, and an unusually detailed West Virginia University archival collection preserve evidence of the community that developed along War Creek.
The archival record even preserves another name for part of the settlement. Records from the McDowell County Evaluation Project identify the area as “Shop Hollow or Warriormines,” using a plural form that appears in historical material but has largely disappeared from modern usage. The collection contains aerial photographs, maps, school rosters, and field surveys showing occupied houses, vacant dwellings, churches, and other structures. It offers something rare for a small Appalachian coal community: the possibility of reconstructing not simply the mine, but much of the physical town surrounding it. Pasted markdown
The Railroad Opens the Upper Dry Fork
Warriormine emerged from the larger industrial transformation of McDowell County.
For much of the nineteenth century, southern McDowell remained difficult to reach. Steep mountains and narrow valleys restricted transportation, while the coal beneath those mountains had limited commercial value without an economical means of carrying it to distant markets. That situation changed as the Norfolk and Western Railway expanded through the Pocahontas coalfield.
The railroad followed the waterways wherever the terrain allowed. The Dry Fork Branch was constructed in stages between 1904 and 1907 and again between 1910 and 1913, serving communities that included Bradshaw, English, Yukon, Excelsior, War, Berwind, and Canebrake. Tracks through this valley connected once isolated mountain settlements to an industrial network stretching far beyond West Virginia.
War itself had become an important railroad and commercial point. The McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey records that the Norfolk and Western reached the community in 1904, established a depot, and adopted the name War for the settlement previously known as Miner’s City. As mines opened around the upper Dry Fork and its tributaries, War developed into the business center for the surrounding camps.
The timing was important. McDowell County was undergoing one of the fastest industrial expansions in Appalachia. By the end of 1910, the county contained 66 coal companies operating 99 mines, compared with only 31 companies and 31 mines a decade earlier. The population expanded with the industry as miners and their families arrived from other parts of Appalachia, Virginia, Kentucky, the Deep South, and Europe.
Warriormine belonged to the next chapter of that expansion.
The Warrior Coal Company Arrives
Local coal history research places the opening of the Warrior Mine around 1915 or 1916. The Warrior Coal Company developed its operation along War Creek, mining the coal seam beneath the surrounding mountains and building a settlement for the workforce that followed. Later photographs and historic-property documentation show the familiar components of a company coal camp: rows of residences, larger houses likely associated with management, a company store, transportation connections, and other buildings arranged within the narrow strip of usable land available along the hollow.
By the early 1920s, the company was operating on a substantial scale.
The annual report of the West Virginia Department of Mines for 1923 recorded the Warrior Coal Company among McDowell County’s producers and credited it with 181,767 tons of coal that year. The figure places Warrior among the numerous medium-sized operators that collectively made McDowell one of the most productive coal counties in the United States.
Warrior was never one of the enormous operations associated with companies such as United States Coal and Coke, but that distinction can obscure how significant a mine of this size was to the immediate community. Hundreds of thousands of tons of coal moving out of War Creek represented miners working underground, railroad cars being loaded, machinery being maintained, families occupying company houses, and money circulating through the store and neighboring businesses in War.
For Warriormine, the mine was not merely an employer. It was the reason much of the settlement existed.
Building Warriormine
Coal camps in southern West Virginia were shaped as much by geography as by corporate planning. In McDowell County, there was rarely enough level ground for a traditional town grid. Houses were instead fitted along creeks, roads, railroad tracks, and hillsides, sometimes rising in rows up narrow hollows.
The McDowell County Coal Heritage Survey describes company towns as settlements where mining companies frequently controlled housing, commercial buildings, and community infrastructure. Workers could purchase goods from company stores, sometimes using company-issued scrip, while rent and other expenses might be deducted directly from their wages. Standardized house plans gave many camps a distinctive appearance, although workers and later private owners frequently altered the buildings over time.
Warriormine followed this broader pattern, but surviving documentation makes it possible to see the community in greater detail than many similarly sized camps.
The West Virginia and Regional History Center’s McDowell County Evaluation Project contains both aerial photographs and field surveys for “Shop Hollow or Warriormines.” Those surveys recorded the location of occupied houses, vacant houses, churches, and other structures. School rosters from Warriormine survive in the same collection. Taken together, these records document a community that extended well beyond mine portals and tipples. It was a residential place filled with children, families, churches, roads, and neighborhood relationships.
That distinction matters. Coal-camp histories can easily become histories of corporations and production figures, while the people who inhabited the camps disappear behind the tonnage. Warriormine’s surviving records allow some of those residents to reappear.
Families Along War Creek
Federal census schedules and county records show that Warriormine was home to families whose lives crossed county and state lines throughout the central Appalachian coalfields.
The 1920 census identified Warriormine within Big Creek District. One surviving genealogical transcription places twelve-year-old Alice Shrader there with her father Lewis Shrader. Four years later, the McDowell County marriage register recorded Alice’s marriage to J. W. Freeman on July 4, 1924, at Warriormine. Freeman was twenty-three, had been born in Wise County, Virginia, worked as a miner, and was living at Warriormine when the couple married. Alice had also been born in Wise County.
Their story was not unusual.
Mining communities throughout McDowell County drew heavily from southwestern Virginia and neighboring Appalachian counties. A person might be born in Tazewell or Wise County, move across the state line for mine work, marry in McDowell County, and later move again as mines opened and closed.
Another set of records from the 1930s identifies miner Frank Altizer and Hazel Barnett as Warriormine residents in 1934. County marriage material repeatedly uses Warriormine as a residence or place of marriage, demonstrating that the community name had become part of everyday civil recordkeeping rather than simply an industrial designation.
Later records continued to preserve the connection. A 1957 marriage entry described Blaine Elbert Harmon as having been born at Warriormine and Jo Ann Harmon as both born and living there. By that point the original Warrior operation belonged to an earlier era, yet Warriormine remained a meaningful hometown identity.
A Community of One Thousand
The clearest statistical measure of Warriormine’s size comes from the United States Census Bureau.
In its publication listing the population of unincorporated communities in 1940, the Bureau of the Census identified Warriormine in Big Creek Magisterial District, McDowell County, and recorded exactly 1,000 residents. It was not a tiny collection of a few houses. At that moment Warriormine’s population exceeded that of numerous incorporated Appalachian towns.
The number also helps explain why the surviving records include schools, marriage entries, housing surveys, and other signs of a functioning community.
Warriormine existed beside a growing regional center. War provided stores, entertainment, churches, and other services for the surrounding coal settlements. At its height, the nearby city reportedly possessed three theaters, clothing and shoe stores, furniture businesses, fifteen churches, and schools including War Elementary and Big Creek High School. Warriormine families could therefore live inside a company settlement while remaining closely connected to a larger commercial town only a short distance away.
The relationship between the two communities eventually became so close that Warriormine came to be treated increasingly as part of the broader War area. Historically, however, census and archival records show that Warriormine maintained a distinct identity.
Danger Beneath the Mountain
Coal provided Warriormine’s livelihood, but mining also carried constant danger.
The West Virginia State Archives preserves a Department of Mines collection of coal mine fire and disaster reports. Among those records is a file specifically identified as “Warrior Coal Company, Warrior Mine, fatal accident, March 9, 1929.”
The catalog entry alone does not provide enough detail to responsibly reconstruct the accident or name the miner involved without examining the underlying investigation file. Its existence nevertheless demonstrates that Warriormine shared the dangers experienced throughout the southern coalfields.
Roof falls, machinery, haulage accidents, electrical equipment, explosives, gas, and other hazards made underground coal mining one of the most dangerous major occupations in industrial America. State mine inspectors collected information on these incidents because death and serious injury were regular features of the industry.
For families in communities like Warriormine, the mine whistle or word of an underground accident could transform an ordinary working day into tragedy.
The March 1929 Warrior Mine file is therefore more than an industrial record. It is evidence of a human loss within a community whose economy required men to enter the mountain each day.
The Warriormine Company Store
Among the most important buildings in almost every coal camp was the company store.
Warriormine had one of its own, and unlike many lost company buildings, enough documentation survives to know that it remained standing late into the twentieth century. During the statewide coal heritage survey conducted around 1990 and 1991, researchers prepared a West Virginia Historic Property Inventory form for the Warriormine Coal Company Store.
That survey was part of a major preservation project involving the National Park Service and the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. Historians documented thousands of coal-related structures throughout southern West Virginia. McDowell County received especially close attention because so much of its built environment had been created directly by the coal industry.
The Warriormine store was photographed during the 1991 documentation effort, but it did not survive. Later research identifies the building as demolished.
Its disappearance is representative of a much larger loss.
When historians returned to McDowell County approximately twenty-five years after the original Coal Heritage Survey, they found that between roughly one quarter and two fifths of the resources recorded during the earlier survey had disappeared. Company stores, mine structures, offices, clubhouses, and other industrial buildings were being lost at particularly high rates.
In Warriormine, the empty space where the company store once stood tells part of that story.
The End of the Warrior Mine
Secondary coalfield research places the closure of the original Warrior operation in 1938. If that date is correct, it ended roughly two decades of mining by the company that had given Warriormine its name.
Closure did not mean immediate abandonment.
The federal census still counted 1,000 people in Warriormine in 1940, suggesting that a well-established residential community survived the end of the original operation. Other companies continued mining in the surrounding area during the 1940s and 1950s, and later coalfield research associates names such as Jean Pocahontas Coal Company, Kestner Pocahontas Coal Company, and Fire Creek Coal Company with Warriormine or its immediate vicinity. Those later corporate connections deserve additional confirmation through state Department of Mines annual reports, but they fit the wider pattern of older coal properties passing through several operators.
The entire county remained heavily dependent on coal. McDowell’s production ultimately peaked at more than 29 million tons in 1942, even as individual mines opened, consolidated, or disappeared.
Warriormine therefore did not vanish when Warrior Coal Company stopped operating. Its houses, families, roads, schools, and neighborhood relationships survived the company that created the original camp.
Shop Hollow and the Postwar Community
Some of the best evidence for postwar Warriormine comes not from mining records but from social research.
The McDowell County Evaluation Project preserved material from the 1950s and 1960s at a time when coal communities throughout the county were entering another period of rapid change. Mechanization reduced the number of miners required underground, younger residents increasingly left in search of employment elsewhere, and many company-owned houses moved into private hands.
The project’s designation “Shop Hollow or Warriormines” is particularly valuable because it preserves local geography that may otherwise have disappeared from maps. Its aerial photographs and field surveys captured Warriormine during the transition from an active company-created settlement into a post-company residential community.
The houses themselves changed with their occupants. Porches were enclosed, rooms were added, outbuildings appeared, roofs and siding were replaced, and yards changed as automobiles became more important than company footpaths. Such alterations can make surviving coal housing difficult to recognize, but they are also evidence that the structures remained useful homes rather than museum pieces.
Warriormine was becoming something different, but it was still alive.
Reading Warriormine on the Map
The physical setting continues to reveal why the community developed as it did.
United States Geological Survey mapping of the War quadrangle identifies Warriormine, War Creek, the railroad corridor, surrounding mining features, and the steep terrain enclosing the community. The map places Warriormine within the same tightly connected landscape as War, Excelsior, Yukon, Berwind, and other upper Dry Fork settlements.
Modern county tax maps continue to preserve the name as well. Warriormine Road appears among parcels in the War and Big Creek District area, a bureaucratic survival of a community name created by a coal company more than a century ago.
These records illustrate how industrial geography can outlive industry. Mines close and tipples disappear, but roads, property lines, place names, and rows of houses continue to follow patterns established when coal companies first laid out the camps.
What Remains
Warriormine survives today less as a complete company town than as a landscape assembled from fragments.
Some former company houses remain. The company store is gone. Mining structures have largely disappeared or become difficult to distinguish from the reclaimed mountainsides. The boundaries between Warriormine and War are far less obvious than they would have appeared during the 1920s or 1930s.
Yet the historical record is remarkably strong.
State mine reports preserve the Warrior Coal Company’s production. A fatal-accident file preserves evidence of the danger underground. Federal census records count the residents. Marriage registers name the families. Maps locate the streets and mine landscape. The 1991 Coal Heritage Survey documented the company store before it disappeared. WVU’s aerial photographs and field surveys preserve Shop Hollow and Warriormine in a period of postwar transition.
Few surviving documents tell the entire story individually. Together, they reconstruct a community.
Why Warriormine Matters
Warriormine represents the kind of place that once defined much of southern West Virginia but can easily disappear from historical memory.
It was never the county seat. It did not develop the large commercial district of Welch or the regional importance of War. No giant corporate headquarters stood there. Its history instead belongs to the thousands of miners, wives, children, merchants, teachers, and neighbors who built lives around a mine whose name rarely appears in national histories.
For roughly a generation, Warrior Coal Company extracted coal from the mountains along War Creek. Around that operation grew houses, families, a store, schools, roads, and a recognizable community. By 1940, one thousand people called Warriormine home.
The original mine eventually closed. Other operators came and went. The company store disappeared. Houses were altered, demolished, or absorbed into the modern landscape surrounding War.
But Warriormine did not disappear completely.
It remains in census pages, mine reports, marriage licenses, aerial photographs, survey maps, property records, school rosters, and the names written along the roads of southern McDowell County. Those scattered records preserve something the coal companies themselves could not: evidence that behind every mine name on an old production table stood a community of people who made lives in the narrow valleys beneath the mountains.
Warriormine is one of those places, and its history is still written along War Creek.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia & Regional History Center. “McDowell County Evaluation Project, 1953, 1968.” West Virginia University Libraries. Collection includes aerial photographs, field surveys, maps, school rosters, and records specifically identifying “Shop Hollow or Warriormines.” Collection finding aid
West Virginia Department of Mines. Forty-First Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1923. Includes the Warrior Coal Company in the McDowell County mine listings and records 181,767 tons of production. Digitized annual report
West Virginia State Archives. “Department of Mines, Coal Mine Fire and Disaster Reports, AR1519–1536.” Charleston: West Virginia Archives and History. Includes the Warrior Coal Company, Warrior Mine fatal accident of March 9, 1929. Collection guide
United States Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population of Unincorporated Communities. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. Lists Warriormine, rendered “Warriornines” in the table, in Big Creek District, McDowell County, with a population of 1,000. Census 1940 census publication
United States Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population Schedule, West Virginia, McDowell County, Big Creek District. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1920. Warriormine enumeration, January 16, 1920, p. 62A. National Archives and Records Administration.
United States Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population Schedule, West Virginia, McDowell County, Big Creek District. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1930. Warriormine enumeration, April 19, 1930, p. 107B. National Archives and Records Administration.
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia.” Charleston: West Virginia Archives and History. Entry for Warriormine, McDowell County, 1930. West Virginia Culture West Virginia Place Names database
Dobson, Cindy, Stacy Sone, and Kim Valente. “Warriormine Coal Company Store.” West Virginia Historic Property Inventory. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, 1991. Prepared as part of the Coal Heritage Survey of southern West Virginia.
Aurora Research Associates, LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. Prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways. November 15, 2018. McDowell County survey resources
Dobson, Cindy, Stacy Sone, and Kim Valente. Coal Heritage Survey: Southern West Virginia Reconnaissance Study of Sites Related to the History of Coal Mining, Phase I, Final Report, Boone, Mingo, Wyoming, McDowell, and Logan Counties. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, 1991. The National Park Service identifies this survey as a major basis for its subsequent southern West Virginia coal heritage work. Irma
National Park Service. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1993. National Park Service study
Hennen, Ray V., and Robert M. Gawthrop. Wyoming and McDowell Counties. Wheeling, WV: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1915. An important contemporary geological source for McDowell County coal seams, War Creek, transportation, and the landscape immediately before Warriormine’s development. Google Books Digitized volume
United States Geological Survey. War Quadrangle, West Virginia-Virginia. 7.5-Minute Topographic Series. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey. Useful for Warriormine, War Creek, transportation corridors, and the surviving mining landscape.
McDowell County, West Virginia. Marriage Register, 1924, p. 145. McDowell County Clerk’s Office, Welch, WV. Entry for J. W. Freeman and Alice Shrader, married at Warriormine, July 4, 1924.
McDowell County, West Virginia. Marriage Register, 1927, p. 10. McDowell County Clerk’s Office, Welch, WV. Entry for Ballard Waldron and Vivian Beavers, married at Warriormine, April 28, 1927.
McDowell County, West Virginia. Marriage Registers, 1934–1936. McDowell County Clerk’s Office, Welch, WV. Includes multiple Warriormine residents and marriages, including George Johnson and Pauline Barnett on September 4, 1936.
West Virginia Public Service Commission. War Light and Power Company property, right-of-way, deed, and utility records. Charleston, WV. Includes references to “WARRIOR ADDn WARRIORMINE CAMP,” War Creek Coal Company, Cove Addition, and Norfolk & Western Railway property arrangements.
West Virginia & Regional History Center. “McDowell County Histories, 1958–1963.” West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. Includes locally produced county histories and historical material relating to McDowell County’s mining communities.
Welch Daily News. McDowell County Centennial Edition. Welch, WV, 1958. Preserved by the West Virginia & Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries.
Appalachian Regional Commission. “McDowell County, West Virginia.” Washington, DC: Appalachian Regional Commission. Accessed October 3, 2026. The ARC recognizes McDowell County as part of the Appalachian Region. Appalachian Regional Commission ARC McDowell County page
Schust, Alex P. Billion Dollar Coalfield: West Virginia’s McDowell County and the Industrialization of America. Harwood, MD: Two Mule Publishing, 2010. A detailed specialized history of the development of McDowell County and the Pocahontas coalfield.
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.
Stanley, Talmage A. The Poco Field: An American Story of Place. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Particularly useful for the social, economic, and cultural history of the Pocahontas coalfield in McDowell County. University of Illinois Press University of Illinois Press
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. University of Tennessee Press University of Tennessee Press
Lewis, Ronald L. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.
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.
Battlo, Jean. McDowell County: In West Virginia and American History. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1998. This is also used elsewhere on AppalachianHistorian.org for McDowell County community history research.
Author Note: Warriormine is one of the McDowell County communities whose history survives in pieces scattered across mine reports, census schedules, maps, marriage records, and photographs. I hope bringing those records together helps preserve the story of the families who made a home along War Creek long after the mine that created the community had changed or disappeared.