Appalachian Community Histories – Yukon, McDowell County: Railroad Camp, Coal Town, and a Long Record of Mine Disaster
Yukon, West Virginia, is easy to pass over on a modern map. It sits in the narrow valleys of McDowell County near Lomax, English, Caretta, Excelsior, and War, in a section of the southern West Virginia coalfields where one community often seems to run into the next. Yet Yukon left behind a documentary record far larger than its size might suggest. Mine reports, court cases, railroad photographs, newspapers, state records, census schedules, and federal investigations preserve pieces of a community that grew beside the Norfolk and Western Railway and became inseparable from the history of the Pocahontas coalfield. Pasted markdown
The railroad came first. A major historic-resource survey prepared for the West Virginia Division of Highways places Yukon directly on the Norfolk and Western’s Dry Fork Branch, a line constructed in stages between 1904 and 1907 and again between 1910 and 1913. Along the same branch stood Auville Yard, Apple Grove, Garland, Bradshaw, English, Excelsior, War, Berwind, and Canebrake. The railroad did more than provide transportation for people living in these valleys. It opened the country to industrial mining and created the framework around which new settlements could develop.
An earlier coal heritage study described the Yukon and Lomax area as a residential district that had originally been constructed to serve as a railroad camp. As coal development expanded, the settlement became a coal camp and eventually enveloped the older town. That distinction is important because Yukon was not simply a collection of company houses built around a mine opening. Its early history was tied to the railroad that made large-scale coal development possible in the first place.
Within a few years, however, coal would define nearly every part of Yukon’s history.
The Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company
A contemporary account in the March 25, 1911, issue of the Engineering and Mining Journal provides one of the clearest surviving descriptions of Yukon’s early industrial development. The journal reported that the Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company had been formed to consolidate the Hall Mining Company and War Creek Coal Company, both operating on Dry Fork. The new concern had also taken over property belonging to the Sawyer estate. According to the report, this property contained about 4,200 acres owned outright and another 5,200 acres held under lease, while development work had advanced far enough that coal shipments were expected soon. H. M. Myers of Bramwell was listed as manager, with his offices at Yukon.
The scale of that acreage shows how rapidly the mountains surrounding Yukon were being transformed into an industrial landscape. Beneath ridges that had previously been difficult to reach lay seams valuable enough to justify railroads, mine portals, tipples, company houses, power systems, haulage roads, and all the other infrastructure necessary to move coal from underground workings to distant markets.
Yukon’s development came during an extraordinary period of growth in McDowell County. The 2018 Coal Heritage Survey found that the county had 31 coal companies and 31 mines in 1900. By the end of 1910, only a decade later, it had 66 companies operating 99 mines. County coal production rose during the same period from about 4.6 million tons to 13.7 million tons. By 1923, 84 companies were operating 138 mines in McDowell County. Yukon belonged to this wider explosion of industrial development that reshaped the valleys of southern West Virginia.
Company records also became intertwined with the courts. McDowell County Circuit Court files preserve cases involving the Yukon Coal Company and Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company as early as 1912 and 1913. Among them were J. F. Johnson v. Yukon Coal Company, Ray V. Spangler v. Yukon Pocahontas Coal Company, Sam Spangler v. Yukon Pocahontas Coal Company, and litigation between the Dry Fork Colliery Company and Yukon Coal Company. These surviving files offer another window into a town where property rights, leases, employment, debts, and industrial development were constantly being negotiated as mining expanded. Pasted markdown
Yukon, Susanna, and the Problem of Place Names
The historical record becomes more complicated because Yukon does not always appear under the same name.
One of the most important examples concerns Susanna. The West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training lists the December 15, 1917, explosion at Yukon No. 1 as occurring at Susanna rather than Yukon. Federal material also refers to the operation as the Yukon Mine of the Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company at Susanna. Later disasters at the company’s mines are plainly identified with Yukon.
This does not necessarily mean that the records describe entirely separate places. Coalfield geography often overlapped. A mine could be known by the company’s name, a mine number, a railroad station, a post office, or a nearby settlement depending on which agency, newspaper, or company created the record.
Yukon itself was clearly recognized as a community and postal location during this period. State publications listed Yukon among McDowell County post offices, while mine records frequently used Yukon as the address for company operations and employees. Researchers trying to reconstruct families who lived there must therefore look beyond a single place name. Yukon, Susanna, Yukon No. 1, Yukon No. 2, Lomax, and the surrounding portion of Big Creek District can all lead to records connected with the same industrial landscape.
That overlapping geography becomes especially important when following the string of mine explosions that made Yukon one of the more repeatedly scarred mining communities in McDowell County.
The Nearly Forgotten Explosion of 1913
Yukon’s first major recorded disaster presents something of a historical mystery.
The current West Virginia state list of major mine disasters contains no Yukon explosion for 1913. It moves from major disasters in 1912 to those of 1914 without listing one at Yukon. Yet the United States Bureau of Mines later stated that an explosion occurred in the connected Yukon No. 1 and No. 2 mines in 1913 and killed thirteen people.
The reference appears in the Bureau’s 1960 Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States, compiled from earlier federal investigative material. While discussing the 1928 Yukon disaster, the report noted that previous explosions in the connected Yukon mines occurred in 1913, 1917, and 1924, killing thirteen, eighteen, and twenty-six miners respectively. According to the federal summary, all three were gas explosions ignited by open lights.
The absence of the 1913 event from the present state disaster table does not invalidate the federal record, but it does leave unanswered questions. The exact date, victims, circumstances, and investigation deserve further research in West Virginia Department of Mines annual reports, newspapers, coroner records, and surviving Bureau of Mines files.
For now, the safest conclusion is that a federal historical investigation recognized a 1913 Yukon explosion that killed thirteen miners, while the current West Virginia disaster list does not include it. That difference is worth preserving rather than smoothing over, because conflicting records are themselves part of historical research.
Eighteen Men Killed at Yukon No. 1 in 1917
Four years later there is no such uncertainty about the catastrophe that struck Yukon No. 1.
Between four and four-thirty in the afternoon of December 15, 1917, an explosion tore through the Yukon Mine of the Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company. Twenty-two men were underground. Four had traveled beyond the area reached by the explosion and survived. The other eighteen died. Thirteen were killed by the violence of the blast, four were asphyxiated, and another man apparently died from burns or the poisonous gases that followed the explosion.
Federal investigator E. B. Sutton concluded that gas had most likely been ignited by an open light at the face of an entry. The state today lists the disaster as the Yukon No. 1 explosion at Susanna and records eighteen victims.
Newspapers carried the news almost immediately. The Charleston Gazette reported on December 16 under the headline “Eleven Men Are Dead in Blast at the Yukon, McDowell-Co. Field,” reflecting the incomplete information reaching reporters during the earliest hours after a mine disaster. The final death toll was higher. The difference illustrates why contemporary newspaper reports must sometimes be read beside later investigative findings rather than used alone. The West Virginia State Archives preserves the newspaper reference in its coal-mine disaster bibliography.
The 1917 explosion occurred during an era when open-flame lamps remained a deadly source of ignition in gassy mines. Methane itself might accumulate silently in poorly ventilated workings. Once flame reached the mixture, an explosion could ignite suspended coal dust and carry destruction far beyond the original pocket of gas.
At Yukon, that danger would return.
The Powder Magazine Explosion of 1918
Not every fatal accident at Yukon occurred deep underground.
The McDowell Times reported another deadly incident at Yukon No. 1 on August 23, 1918, when a powder magazine exploded. James Parks, described as a tipple boy and powder clerk, and James Payne, a miner, were killed. The newspaper also reported another miner, Wilbert Harris, as having received fatal injuries, although the printed date associated with his death is internally inconsistent and should be treated cautiously.
The newspaper believed Parks may have been opening a keg of powder when it exploded, setting off the remaining supply.
This smaller tragedy rarely appears beside the better-known disasters of 1917, 1924, and 1928, yet it helps recover another side of mining life. Danger did not begin at the mine portal. Explosives, machinery, railcars, tipples, slate falls, haulage systems, and electrical equipment made the entire industrial complex dangerous.
For families living in Yukon, the mine and its hazards were not distant workplaces. They stood beside homes, roads, railroad tracks, and gathering places.
The Yukon No. 2 Disaster of 1924
On March 28, 1924, disaster struck again, this time in Yukon No. 2.
The official West Virginia disaster table records twenty-four men killed. Contemporary McDowell County reporting also used the figure twenty-four. The McDowell Recorder announced on April 4 that twenty-four miners had lost their lives and that all of the bodies had been recovered. In a separate article that same day, the newspaper reported that a coroner’s jury had exonerated mine management and identified powder as the cause. A week later the paper was still following the case, reporting that “startling developments” were expected and that investigators had been working on the matter.
Federal records complicate the story.
The Bureau of Mines historical summary gives twenty-six deaths rather than twenty-four. It states that three miners used abandoned, unventilated workings as a shortcut to reach their working places and that their open lights ignited accumulated gas. Coal dust was thrown into the air, allowing a violent explosion to spread through much of the mine. The same federal history later listed twenty-six deaths for the disaster.
There is therefore no responsible way to give a single number without acknowledging the disagreement. West Virginia’s official state database and contemporary McDowell Recorder coverage give twenty-four deaths. The later federal Bureau of Mines history and federal-linked mining-disaster records give twenty-six.
Whatever the final accounting, the explosion was catastrophic for a small community. More troubling was the pattern it represented. If the Bureau of Mines record of the 1913 explosion is included, Yukon had already suffered three major explosions within eleven years.
The worst was still not the last.
Seventeen Dead at Yukon No. 1 in 1928
Shortly before eight o’clock on the evening of May 22, 1928, forty men were underground at Yukon No. 1 when another explosion ripped through part of the mine.
Seventeen men died. Twenty-three escaped without assistance and without injury. Unlike the uncertainty surrounding some earlier Yukon disasters, the 1928 event was examined in considerable detail by the United States Bureau of Mines.
Investigators believed gas had accumulated after a ventilation door was left open. A mining machine operating in the affected section apparently ignited the gas. The explosion was then carried by coal dust, although it remained confined to a comparatively limited area of the workings. Federal investigators noted that the mine had not been rock dusted or watered in the affected areas. They also found that the mining machine was a nonpermissible type, meaning it was not designed to prevent electrical equipment from igniting methane in a hazardous atmosphere.
The details reveal how much mine safety depended on seemingly ordinary actions. A ventilation door left open could alter airflow. Gas could accumulate where men expected breathable air. A machine that functioned normally under safe conditions could become an ignition source. Coal dust lying on entries and working places could extend an explosion beyond the original pocket of methane.
The Bureau of Mines concluded that the machine crew may not have tested the area for gas before beginning work, although investigators acknowledged that the gas could have accumulated after an earlier examination. The historical summary later described the explosion as a gas and dust blast ignited by an open-type mining machine.
The Welch Daily News carried the blunt headline “Yukon Blast Kills 17” on May 23. The following day it reported that the bodies of four missing miners had been recovered. The Charleston Gazette likewise reported that missing miners were believed dead.
Among those killed were men whose addresses were listed as Yukon, War, and Honaker, Virginia. Their home communities remind us that a coal mine’s workforce extended beyond the rows of company houses immediately surrounding the operation. Men traveled through the Dry Fork region and across the Virginia line for work, tying Yukon into a much broader Appalachian labor network.
A Community Beyond the Mine Disasters
It would be easy to write Yukon’s history as nothing but a sequence of explosions. Doing so would preserve the tragedies while losing the town.
Yukon was also a place where people raised families, visited businesses, participated in elections, attended social events, rode trains, and built institutions of their own. Newspapers provide some of the best evidence because they capture parts of community life that formal mine reports rarely considered important enough to preserve.
One particularly revealing example appears in the April 7, 1939, McDowell Times. An advertisement announced a “Colored Opening” at Birch Park in Yukon, featuring the Alhambra Room of the Fraternity Club and music by Cal Greer and his orchestra. Tickets were available not only in Yukon but also through businesses in Welch, Keystone, and Northfork.
That advertisement offers a glimpse into African American social life in the southern West Virginia coalfields. McDowell County’s mines attracted Black workers during the industrial boom, part of the larger migration of labor into the Pocahontas coalfield. Yet company reports that carefully recorded tonnage, machinery, and fatalities rarely documented what workers and their families did when the shift ended. Newspapers, advertisements, church records, census schedules, and community notices help fill that gap.
The McDowell Times also carried election notices identifying residents associated with Yukon, reports of crimes and accidents in the community, and advertisements for local businesses. Taken together, these fragments show that Yukon possessed a social world extending well beyond the mine portal.
Changing Companies and an Industrial Landscape
The corporate history surrounding Yukon continued to change during the late 1920s and 1930s.
Later litigation preserved details of a January 1911 mineral lease associated with Yukon interests. A federal tax case records that rights under the lease were assigned on March 15, 1929, to the Yukon Pocahontas Fuel Company. The lease itself extended far into the future and used per-ton royalties for coal and coke, evidence of the complicated web of landowners, coal companies, mineral estates, and leases underlying Appalachian mining.
A remarkable visual record survives from just a few years later. On November 6, 1932, a photograph now preserved by Virginia Tech was taken of the “Pocahontas Fuel Company, Yukon Mine, Yukon, West Virginia.” The image belongs to a collection of materials relating to the Norfolk and Western Railway and provides a rare primary photographic record of the operation during the Depression era.
Such photographs are valuable because they allow the landscape itself to become evidence. Railroad tracks, mine buildings, loading facilities, hillsides, houses, and industrial structures can reveal relationships that written records leave unexplained. At Yukon, where railroad and coal development were intertwined from the beginning, the Norfolk and Western photographic record is especially significant.
The railroad remained embedded in the geography long after the early mining boom. Even much later Norfolk Southern material continued to identify Yukon as a point on the Dry Fork Branch, alongside Lomax, War, Atwell, Bradshaw, and other communities whose origins had been shaped by coal transportation.
The Records Yukon Left Behind
Unlike some smaller coal camps whose histories survive largely through family memory and scattered photographs, Yukon left behind unusually rich archival evidence.
The West Virginia State Archives’ Department of Mines collection specifically identifies a Yukon file in Box 18 among its McDowell County records. The same archival system preserves mine disaster reports and related material, including records for the May 22, 1928, Yukon explosion.
Federal census schedules offer another path into the community. Because Yukon was connected with Big Creek District and sometimes appeared beside or beneath other place names, household reconstruction requires patience. Yet those schedules can reveal who lived there, where residents were born, whether they rented or owned their homes, what occupations they held, and how many members of a household depended upon mine wages.
Court records preserve another layer of history. Mine company lawsuits reveal ownership structures that rarely appear in newspapers. Compensation cases expose individual deaths and injuries. Mineral-right litigation traces deeds and leases backward through generations. Each record adds another piece to a place that can otherwise look, from a modern highway, like little more than another narrow coalfield settlement.
What Yukon’s History Tells Us
Yukon’s story mirrors much of the history of industrial Appalachia, but the concentration of surviving records makes it unusually revealing.
The community began with transportation. The Norfolk and Western pushed its Dry Fork Branch through the mountains, and a railroad camp took shape along the line. Coal interests followed and expanded. By 1911 the Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company was assembling thousands of acres and preparing large-scale operations. Mines, railroad tracks, homes, businesses, and social spaces filled a narrow valley where industrial activity had scarcely existed a generation earlier.
Then came the cost.
The Bureau of Mines recorded thirteen deaths in a 1913 explosion that is now absent from West Virginia’s official disaster list. Eighteen miners died in 1917. A powder explosion killed workers in 1918. Twenty-four or twenty-six men, depending upon the surviving record consulted, died in 1924. Another seventeen died in 1928.
Yet those disasters are only part of Yukon’s history. The town also contained families, railroad workers, miners from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, restaurants, recreation, political activity, and the ordinary routines of coalfield life. Birch Park’s dance advertisement, a census household, a courtroom file, and a Norfolk and Western photograph can tell as much about the place as an explosion report when read together.
That is what makes Yukon important. It was never simply a mine name attached to a disaster table. It was a community created by the meeting of railroad capital, mineral wealth, and human labor in one of the most intensely mined regions of Appalachia.
Today the scale of that industrial world is harder to see. Mines have closed, structures have disappeared, and vegetation has reclaimed slopes once crowded with workings and rail infrastructure. But beneath the altered landscape lies a remarkable paper trail.
In Yukon, the records still allow us to hear the railroad arriving, watch coal companies assembling their holdings, follow miners underground, trace families into company houses, see people gathering at Birch Park, and count, with uncomfortable uncertainty, the men who did not come home.
Sources & Further Reading
Aurora Research Associates LLC. Coal Heritage Survey Update Final Report: McDowell County, West Virginia. 2018. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/survey.pdf
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
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://wvupressonline.com/node/577
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/
Engineering and Mining Journal. “Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company.” March 25, 1911. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/The_Engineering_and_Mining_Journal_1911-03-25-_Vol_91_Iss_12_%28IA_sim_engineering-and-mining-journal_1911-03-25_91_12%29.pdf
Humphrey, H. B. Historical Summary of Coal-Mine Explosions in the United States, 1810–1958. Bulletin 586. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1960. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12740/
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/
National Archives and Records Administration. “Records of the United States Bureau of Mines, Record Group 70.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/070.html
National Coal Heritage Area. A Coal Mining Heritage Study: Southern West Virginia. 1993. https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/national-coal/coal-mining-heritage.pdf
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/
Sutton, E. B. Report of Explosion in Yukon Mine of the Yukon Pocahontas Coal Company at Susanna, West Virginia, on December 15, 1917. U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1917. https://www.usdeadlyevents.com/1917-dec-15-yukon-pocahontas-coal-co-yukon-no-1-mine-explosion-susanna-wv-18/
Tams, W. P., Jr. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History. Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1963. https://books.google.com/books?id=GcIgAQAAIAAJ
Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. https://books.google.com/books?id=nF-963i4uiUC
United States Bureau of Mines. Report of Explosion, Yukon No. 1 Mine, Yukon-Pocahontas Coal Company, Yukon, McDowell County, West Virginia, May 22, 1928. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1928. https://www.usdeadlyevents.com/1928-may-22-yukon-pocahontas-coal-mine-no-1-gas-and-dust-explosion-yukon-wv-17/
United States Geological Survey. War Quadrangle, West Virginia-Virginia. 7.5-Minute Series. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey. https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/StagedProducts/Maps/USTopo/PDF/WV/WV_War_20110120_TM_geo.pdf
Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives. “Pocahontas Fuel Company, Yukon Mine, Yukon, West Virginia.” Norfolk and Western Railway historical photograph, November 6, 1932. https://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/items/show/36581
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
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1917. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1917.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1919. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1919.pdf
West Virginia. West Virginia Blue Book. Charleston, WV, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Reports of the Department of Mines. Charleston, WV, various years, especially 1911–1930. https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22West+Virginia.+Department+of+Mines%22
West Virginia State Archives. “Department of Mines Records, AR 1790.” West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. Accessed October 3, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar1790.html
The Sunday Star. “Eleven Killed by Blast in West Virginia Mine.” December 16, 1917. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_gonzo_ver01/data/sn83045462/00280658327/1917121601/0135.pdf
The McDowell Times. “Powder Magazine Explosion at Yukon No. 1.” September 27, 1918. Library of Congress. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/wvu/batch_wvu_phaser_ver02/data/sn86092050/00279550286/1918092701/0993.pdf
McDowell Recorder. “Twenty-Four Miners Lose Their Lives.” April 4, 1924. Cited in West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
McDowell Recorder. “Management of Yukon Mines Exonerated.” April 4, 1924. Cited in West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
McDowell Recorder. “Startling Developments Expected.” April 11, 1924. Cited in West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
Welch Daily News. “Yukon Blast Kills 17.” May 23, 1928. Cited in West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
Welch Daily News. “Bodies of the Four Missing Miners.” May 24, 1928. Cited in West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History, “Articles on West Virginia Coal Mine Disasters.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/notewv/coalminedisasters.html
The McDowell Times. “Colored Opening! At Birch Park, Yukon, W. Va.” April 7, 1939. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092050/1939-04-07/ed-1/seq-1/
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training. “WV Mine Disasters 1884 to Present.” Accessed October 3, 2026. https://minesafety.wv.gov/historical-statistical-data/wv-mine-disasters-1884-to-present/
Yukon Pocahontas Coal Co. v. Ratliff, 175 Va. 366, 8 S.E.2d 303 (1940). https://app.midpage.ai/document/yukon-pocahontas-coal-co-v-6820210
Yukon Pocahontas Coal Co. v. Ratliff, 181 Va. 195, 24 S.E.2d 559 (1943). https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/yukon-pocahontas-coal-co-894875066
West Virginia State Archives. “McDowell County Circuit Court Records.” Includes J. F. Johnson v. Yukon Coal Company, Ray V. Spangler v. Yukon Pocahontas Coal Company, Sam Spangler v. Yukon Pocahontas Coal Company, and Dry Fork Colliery Company litigation, 1912–1913. West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/ar/ar2094.html
Author Note: Yukon is one of the McDowell County communities whose surviving record is unusually rich, but the sources do not always agree, particularly concerning the 1913 and 1924 mine disasters. I have preserved those disagreements in this history because acknowledging uncertainty is an important part of accurately reconstructing the coalfield past.