Miners in No. 2 Mine,Jewell Ridge, Tazewell County. Photograph.
Virginia Chamber of Commerce.
The Library of Virginia.
The success of Southwest Virginia's coalfields—lying in Buchanan,
Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott, Tazewell, and Wise Counties—is
inexorably linked to the expansion of railroads and to northern
capital. After the Civil War, rail companies expanded westward as
entrepreneurs and industrialists opened coal seams in Virginia's
southwestern region. Norfolk & Western shipped its first coal from the
Pocahontas Coalfield in 1883 and quickly developed lines through
Tazewell to Norton. The Louisville & Nashville built into Norton and
the Wise County coalfields by the 1890s. By 1900, companies developed
lines that delivered coal from southwestern Virginia to piers at
Hampton for shipment to both domestic and international markets.
Southwest Virginia coalfields supplied high-grade coking coal to fuel
the steel industry and steam coal for industrial and domestic use. The
boom economy created by mining in the early 1900s faltered during the
Great Depression but recovered during World War II. By the 1950s, many
of Virginia's veins, which had begun operations more than fifty years
earlier, were mined out.
Beginning in the 1880s, investors in New York and Philadelphia formed mining companies that purchased large tracts of land or negotiated mineral and timber rights in these rural counties. Before the boom ended in the 1920s, as many as 125 coal camps, or company towns, thrived in Southwest Virginia. The coal camps brought together, often for the first time, miners of different cultures and nationalities. To meet labor demands, mining and railroad companies advertised for and brought emigrants not only from other states, but also from Italy, Hungary, and Poland.