Appalachian Community Histories – Wharncliffe, Mingo County: Hatfields, Railroad Rivalries, and Coal at the Head of the Tug
Wharncliffe sits in one of those corners of Appalachia where geography has always mattered more than population. Tucked into southern Mingo County near the Tug Fork and the meeting place of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, the community developed along a landscape of steep mountains, narrow creek bottoms, railroad grades, and coal seams. It never became a large incorporated town, but its location placed it in the path of several forces that transformed southern West Virginia.
The Norfolk and Western Railway passed through the Tug Valley. Ben Creek provided a route northward into the mountains. The coalfields beyond Wharncliffe attracted railroad companies searching for new tonnage, while the Tug Fork connected the community to settlements stretching toward Williamson and Kentucky. Federal engineers later treated Wharncliffe as an important reference point when surveying this rugged part of the state.
Wharncliffe also found itself connected to one of Appalachia’s most famous family conflicts. In 1899, newspapers across the country reported the arrest of William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield at Wharncliffe, along with his son Bob Hatfield and son-in-law John Dingess. The details of the arrest reveal that Wharncliffe was already more developed than its small size might suggest. There was railroad service, U.S. mail, Hatfield homes on the hillsides, and at least one saloon.
Later, railroad corporations fought over who would control the connection between Wharncliffe and the rich coal territory of the Guyandot Valley. The dispute eventually reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
For a small mountain community, Wharncliffe accumulated a surprisingly large historical footprint.
Before There Was a Mingo County
One difficulty in tracing Wharncliffe’s earliest history is that Mingo County did not yet exist when the community first appeared in the documentary record.
Mingo County was created in 1895 from territory that had previously belonged to Logan County. West Virginia Archives and History lists 1895 as the county’s date of formation, while later state records continued to describe it as having been formed from Logan. This matters when searching for early Wharncliffe records because anything created before 1895 may have been filed under Logan County rather than Mingo.
One of the earliest strong indications that Wharncliffe had developed into a recognized community comes from postal history. The historical post office database assembled from the work of Cameron Blevins and Richard Helbock gives 1893 as the opening year for the Wharncliffe post office. Because that date predates the establishment of Mingo County, the original appointment records should be searched among the federal postmaster records for Logan County as well as the later Mingo County files.
The date does not necessarily mean Wharncliffe was founded in 1893. Families undoubtedly lived throughout the surrounding creeks and mountains before a federal post office appeared. It does, however, give the community an important documentary marker. By the early 1890s there was enough settlement and communication with the outside world to justify a named postal location.
The origin of the unusual name itself remains uncertain. Later references have associated it with the English name Wharncliffe, but there is not enough strong contemporary evidence to confidently identify who selected the West Virginia name or why. Until a postmaster appointment, railroad document, deed, or local newspaper identifies the naming circumstances, it is better to leave the origin open rather than turn a possibility into fact.
The Hatfields at Wharncliffe
By the end of the nineteenth century Wharncliffe had become closely associated with members of the Hatfield family.
The most dramatic evidence arrived in September 1899.
On September 12, the Huntington Advertiser reported that a posse traveled toward Wharncliffe aboard the Norfolk and Western Railway. According to the newspaper, members of the posse concealed themselves in a baggage car so that the Hatfields would not see them coming. Their first target was Bob Hatfield.
Bob approached the train to place U.S. mail aboard it. Instead of completing an ordinary postal exchange, he suddenly found armed men confronting him. He was taken into custody, after which the posse moved toward his hillside home.
There they found Devil Anse Hatfield asleep.
The newspaper described the capture as surprisingly peaceful. Devil Anse awoke surrounded by armed men, while another member of the family, Cap Hatfield, managed to escape from the house and disappear through a nearby cornfield toward the mountains. John Dingess was then located in a saloon operated by Bob Hatfield and arrested as well. The prisoners were taken from Wharncliffe to the jail at Williamson.
The episode is important for more than the Hatfield story.
Almost accidentally, the newspaper gives a snapshot of Wharncliffe in 1899. The Norfolk and Western was sufficiently established for the posse to use a passenger or mixed train as part of its operation. U.S. mail was being transferred at the community. Bob Hatfield had a residence on the hillside and operated a saloon nearby. Several members of the extended Hatfield family were living in the surrounding mountains.
Wharncliffe was therefore not simply a place-name on a map. It functioned as a recognizable mountain settlement tied to the railroad and postal system.
The newspaper evidence also demonstrates why contemporary accounts must sometimes be treated carefully. The Huntington Advertiser emphasized the remarkable fact that no blood was shed and portrayed Devil Anse as surprised while sleeping. A syndicated account printed elsewhere later that month claimed that the Hatfield leader fought the posse and fired several shots. The two versions cannot both be literally accurate in every detail.
That contradiction is useful rather than troublesome. It shows how quickly stories about the Hatfields could grow as they traveled beyond the Tug Valley. The local Huntington account contains unusually specific details about the train, the mail, Bob Hatfield’s house, the saloon, and the prisoners’ transfer to Williamson. The more distant syndicated version presented a more dramatic outlaw story to readers who already knew the Hatfield name.
For Wharncliffe history, the local account is particularly valuable because of what it tells us about the community itself.
A Railroad Community Takes Shape
Railroads increasingly defined Wharncliffe during the first decades of the twentieth century.
An original Norfolk and Western engineering drawing dated July 22, 1904 shows proposed double tracking between Vivian and Naugatuck and specifically covers the section from War Eagle to Wharncliffe. The huge engineering plan included proposed tunnels, bridges, crossings of the Tug Fork, and improvements designed for a railroad carrying increasingly heavy traffic through difficult mountain country.
Two years later another set of surviving railroad documents placed Wharncliffe at the beginning of something even more ambitious.
A Guyandot and Tug River Railroad right-of-way drawing dated May 23, 1906 documented property required from J. S. P. Stafford in Mingo County. The Norfolk and Western Historical Society identifies its parent drawing as a “Map of Revised Alignment and Right of Way, Wharncliffe to Gilbert.” The same archival record is also linked to a larger map showing proposed right-of-way from Wharncliffe toward Pineville.
These are not maps created decades later to explain what happened. They are working railroad documents produced while companies were actively examining routes, property ownership, grades, and possible construction.
Wharncliffe was becoming a gateway.
Federal surveyors documented the same landscape. The U.S. Geological Survey’s leveling work in West Virginia included a route explicitly described as running from Man south through Gilbert to Wharncliffe. Surveyors recorded a benchmark four miles north of Wharncliffe on Ben Creek and another at the Norfolk and Western bridge over Ben Creek. Later federal leveling records followed the Norfolk and Western west from Wharncliffe toward Glen Alum.
To someone reading those records today, the repeated measurements may look routine. At the time they represented something larger. The mountain landscape was being measured, mapped, bridged, and connected to an industrial transportation network.
Wharncliffe at the End of a Proposed Railroad
The strategic importance of Wharncliffe appears even more clearly in federal records discussing transportation along the Tug Fork.
A congressional document described Wharncliffe as approximately 31.7 miles above Williamson and identified it as the terminus of the projected Guyandot and Tug River Railroad. The proposed railroad was intended to reach through Mingo and Wyoming counties into enormous areas of coal and timber land. The same document noted numerous sidetracks between Williamson and Wharncliffe used for coal and timber transportation. At some locations, coal from the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork was even carried across the river for shipment on the Norfolk and Western.
That description places Wharncliffe within a larger industrial geography.
Williamson was becoming the major railroad center of the lower Tug Valley. The Norfolk and Western main line followed the river through Mingo County. Branches reached into tributary valleys where timber and coal could be gathered. Wharncliffe stood farther upriver where engineers imagined another connection running northward toward the Guyandot coalfield.
For railroad planners, a community did not have to contain thousands of residents to be important. It needed to sit in the right place.
Wharncliffe did.
The Battle for the Gilbert to Wharncliffe Railroad
The greatest evidence of Wharncliffe’s transportation significance came during the 1920s and early 1930s, when the proposed railroad connection between Gilbert and Wharncliffe became part of a struggle among some of the largest railroad interests in Appalachia.
The Chesapeake and Ohio, Norfolk and Western, and Virginian railroads all competed for coal traffic coming out of southern West Virginia.
The Interstate Commerce Commission eventually authorized the Norfolk interests to construct approximately ten and one-half miles of railroad between Gilbert and Wharncliffe. The Chesapeake and Ohio fought the decision, and the controversy reached the Supreme Court in Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company v. United States. The Court decided the case in 1931.
The Supreme Court’s opinion reads almost like an economic history of the southern West Virginia coalfields.
It described enormous coal deposits south of the Kanawha and New rivers and explained how the Chesapeake and Ohio, Norfolk and Western, and Virginian competed to carry that coal toward eastern ports and western markets. In 1927, mines served through the Virginian system were producing and shipping coal at an annualized rate exceeding twelve million tons. Millions of tons were being handed to connecting carriers for transportation westward.
The proposed connection at Wharncliffe could change those transportation patterns.
The Supreme Court noted that the route through Gilbert and across the divide to Wharncliffe would be forty-one miles shorter than the existing route through Matoaka for certain westbound traffic. Norfolk and Western officials also expected the new connection to serve additional coal deposits and allow the company to compete for traffic moving out of the Guyandot Valley.
The Court explained that the line would not simply transport existing traffic. It could carry coal and lumber developed along the new route itself.
In that sense, Wharncliffe stood at the end of a railroad connection that represented millions of tons of potential freight.
The dispute was never really about the size of Wharncliffe. It was about what Wharncliffe connected.
The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the federal authorization, allowing the Norfolk and Western interests to proceed. The decision preserved competition between major carriers and confirmed that the Interstate Commerce Commission could consider competitive service when deciding whether new railroad construction served the public interest.
For Wharncliffe, the result strengthened a role the community had been developing for decades. It became a railroad junction between the Tug Valley and the interior coalfields.
Wharncliffe in the Railroad Record
By the early 1930s Wharncliffe was firmly established in official railroad documentation.
The Interstate Commerce Commission issued an accident investigation concerning the Norfolk and Western Railway at Wharncliffe on August 10, 1932. The surviving federal report is preserved today within the National Transportation Library’s collection of railroad accident investigations.
Its existence is significant even beyond the accident itself. Federal railroad investigators treated Wharncliffe as a defined operating location within one of the country’s major coal transportation systems.
State records tell a similar story about the community.
The 1921 West Virginia Blue Book included Wharncliffe among the post offices of Mingo County. By 1933, the New Descriptive Atlas of West Virginia placed Wharncliffe in Stafford District alongside Gilbert, Glen Alum, Baisden, War Eagle, Hampden, Justice and other neighboring settlements.
The map of southern Mingo County was filling with names, many of them tied directly or indirectly to coal, timber, railroads, postal routes, and the families who settled the creek valleys.
Wharncliffe had survived long enough to become one of them permanently.
Coal Beneath the Mountains
Railroad development at Wharncliffe only makes complete sense when viewed alongside the mineral wealth of the surrounding mountains.
Coal had always been the great prize behind many of the transportation schemes that targeted southern West Virginia, and mining remained important around Wharncliffe long after the first railroad expansion.
Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration records offer unusually detailed information about this later industrial period.
The Mountaineer Mine operated by Mingo Logan Coal Company near Wharncliffe began production on June 26, 1991. By January 1995, MSHA reported that the mine entered the Lower Cedar Grove coalbed through ten drift openings. The seam averaged approximately sixty inches in height. The operation employed 305 people and produced an average of roughly 30,000 tons of raw coal per day using continuous mining and longwall operations.
Those figures illustrate the enormous scale of modern Appalachian mining.
Wharncliffe might have remained a small community, but industrial operations in its surrounding mountains were moving tens of thousands of tons of coal every working day.
The Black Bear Preparation Plant provides an even clearer connection between mining and the railroad.
In October 1995 MSHA described the Wharncliffe facility as containing a deep mine coal stockpile, silo storage, a truck dump, haul roads, and other industrial infrastructure. Coal reached the plant from one surface mine and two underground mines through trucks and an overland conveyor. Once processed, it traveled by conveyor to a railroad loadout where coal cars were filled for shipment. The plant employed fifty people and processed an average of about 30,000 tons of coal per operating day.
Nearly a century after a posse had hidden aboard a Norfolk and Western train to surprise the Hatfields at Wharncliffe, trains were still central to the community’s reason for occupying this particular piece of Appalachian geography.
Only the cargo and scale had changed.
The Landscape That Shaped Wharncliffe
The physical landscape is essential to understanding the community.
Wharncliffe developed within a narrow mountain environment where railroads, roads, creeks, houses, and industry compete for limited level ground. Ben Creek reaches into the mountains while the Tug Fork provides the larger river corridor. Federal surveys repeatedly used railroad bridges and creek crossings as reference points because those structures anchored transportation through otherwise difficult terrain.
The railroad engineering maps tell the same story visually. Proposed tunnels, bridges, property lines, and repeated Tug Fork crossings show engineers trying to force an efficient transportation system through a landscape that offered few easy routes.
This geography helped create the pattern found throughout the southern Appalachian coalfields. Homes climbed the slopes or occupied narrow bottoms while railroad tracks followed rivers and creek valleys. Mines penetrated mountains that rose immediately behind settlements. Communities that appeared isolated by road could nevertheless occupy important positions on national freight networks.
Wharncliffe is an especially clear example.
More Than a Hatfield Footnote
It would be easy to remember Wharncliffe only because Devil Anse Hatfield was arrested there.
The story is certainly worth preserving. Few documents capture the place so vividly as the 1899 newspaper account of Bob Hatfield approaching the train with the mail, armed men appearing from a baggage car, Devil Anse being awakened in a hillside house, Cap Hatfield escaping through a cornfield, and John Dingess being taken from Bob Hatfield’s saloon.
Yet Wharncliffe’s history did not begin or end with the Hatfields.
Its postal history reaches into the period when the area still belonged to Logan County. Its railroad history includes original Norfolk and Western engineering maps from the beginning of the twentieth century. Federal surveyors used Wharncliffe as the endpoint of routes through the mountains. Congressional records identified it as a proposed railroad terminus for the development of coal and timber. Railroad competition over the Gilbert connection carried the community’s name all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
Then coal mining carried the industrial story into another century.
Why Wharncliffe Matters
Wharncliffe demonstrates how misleading population alone can be when measuring the historical importance of an Appalachian community.
There was never a great downtown here. Wharncliffe did not become another Williamson, Bluefield, or Huntington. Its importance came from location.
The Tug Fork, Ben Creek, Norfolk and Western tracks, surrounding coal seams, and routes toward Gilbert placed the community at a natural crossroads between the Tug Valley and the mountains beyond it. The Hatfields used that landscape as a home. Railroad corporations saw it as a gateway. Coal companies used it as an industrial base. Federal engineers surveyed it, federal regulators investigated it, and eventually the Supreme Court discussed a railroad bearing its name.
Today the post office remains one of the simplest reminders that Wharncliffe endured. The mountains still rise tightly around the community, and the railroad continues to follow a route shaped by more than a century of attempts to move people, timber, and coal through the Tug Valley.
Wharncliffe’s story is therefore not simply the history of another small coalfield settlement.
It is the story of how an Appalachian place could remain small on the map while sitting directly in the path of events much larger than itself.
Sources & Further Reading
Huntington Advertiser. “Devil Anse Hatfield Arrested.” September 12, 1899. Contemporary newspaper account reproduced by Brandon Ray Kirk, “Devil Anse Hatfield Arrested (1899),” March 7, 2017. https://brandonraykirk.com/2017/03/07/devil-anse-hatfield-arrested-1899/
The Abbeville Press and Banner. “Hatfield’s Capture.” September 27, 1899, 2. Historical Newspapers of South Carolina, University of South Carolina Libraries. https://historicnewspapers.sc.edu/lccn/sn84026853/1899-09-27/ed-1/seq-2/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971.” Microfilm Publication M841, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Harris, John T., comp. and ed. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia Archives and History. “Mingo County History Sources.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Gannett, Samuel Stinson, and David Henry Baldwin. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1908, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 399. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b399
Marshall, Robert Bradford. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1896 to 1915, Inclusive. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 632. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/b632
Norfolk and Western Railway, Office of the Chief Engineer. “Guyandot & Tug River Railroad Company, Right of Way Required from J.S.P. Stafford, Mingo County West Virginia.” Drawing C-810A, May 23, 1906. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=199836
Guyandot and Tug River Railroad Company. “Right of Way Required from James Bailey in Wyoming County WV.” Drawing C-849, July 14, 1906. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=185623
Norfolk and Western Railway Company. “Guyandot & Tug River Railroad.” Commercial and Financial Chronicle 85, September 14, 1907, 662. Digitized by FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/cfc/cfc_19070914.pdf
Norfolk and Western Railway Company. “Guyandot & Tug River Railroad.” Commercial and Financial Chronicle 87, no. 2255, September 12, 1908. Digitized by FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/commercial-financial-chronicle-1339/september-12-1908-497068/fulltext
United States Congress. House. Tug and Levisa Forks, Big Sandy River, Ky. and W. Va. 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., House Document No. 1159. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-06622_00_00-028-1159-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-06622_00_00-028-1159-0000.pdf
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co. v. United States, 283 U.S. 35 (1931). Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/283/35
United States Interstate Commerce Commission. Report of the Accident Investigation Occurring on the Norfolk and Western Railway, Wharncliffe, WV. August 10, 1932. National Transportation Library. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/46035
United States Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration. Fatal Powered-Haulage Accident, Mountaineer Mine, Mingo Logan Coal Company, Wharncliffe, Mingo County, West Virginia. January 2, 1995. https://arlweb.msha.gov/FATALS/1995/FTL95C01.htm
United States Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration. Fatal Falling Material Accident, Black Bear Preparation Plant, Mingo Logan Coal Company, Wharncliffe, Mingo County, West Virginia. October 30, 1995. https://arlweb.msha.gov/FATALS/1995/FTL95C38.htm
United States Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration. Fatal Powered-Haulage Accident, Mountaineer Mine, Mingo Logan Coal Company, Wharncliffe, Mingo County, West Virginia. November 1, 1996. https://arlweb.msha.gov/FATALS/1996/FTL96C32.htm
Outerbridge, William F. Geologic Map of Parts of the Majestic-Hurley and Wharncliffe Quadrangles, Pike County, Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-748. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1968. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq748
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Browning-Weaver Family Papers, 1885–1990. A&M 3175. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. The collection specifically indexes Wharncliffe among its geographic subjects. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1413
Kenny, Hamill. West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains. Piedmont, WV: Place Name Press, 1945. https://books.google.com/books/about/West_Virginia_Place_Names.html?id=61YlAAAAMAAJ
Brumfield, Darrell C. Stories About Gilbert, West Virginia and Surrounding Communities. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1993. Listed in the West Virginia State Archives’ Mingo County bibliography. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Smith, Nancy Sue. An History of Mingo County, West Virginia. Williamson, WV: Williamson Printing Company, 1960. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Smith, Nancy Sue. History of Logan and Mingo Counties, Beginning in 1617. Williamson, WV: Nancy Smith, 1966. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
What’s the Matter With Mingo? Williamson, WV: Mingo Republican Print, 1938. West Virginia Archives and History collection. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Author Note: Wharncliffe is a reminder that some of Appalachia’s smallest communities stood directly in the path of much larger events. I hope this history helps preserve a place where Hatfield history, railroad expansion, and generations of coalfield life came together along the Tug Fork.