The Nuttallburg Coal Mining Complex and Town Historic District is located near Fayetteville, West Virginia in New River Gorge National River. The townsite is almost directly across from the Kay Moor mine and townsite, now abandoned. Like Kay Moor, the town is built around the railroad line at the bottom of the gorge, with an array of coke ovens and mining structures, as well as a bridge across the New River to South Nuttall.
Nuttallburg was closely associated with the Nuttallburg underground mine, a room and pillar mine that was sealed in 1958. The mine was established to develop the New River Coalfield in 1870 by John Nuttall, who correctly anticipated that the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad would be built through the New River Gorge. When the railroad arrived in 1873 Nuttall had built almost 100 houses, with 80 coke ovens, a variety of mine structures and a coal tipple on a railroad siding. Flat land by the river was dedicated to railroad and industrial use, leaving houses to seek perches on the hillsides. The town was racially segregated with white workers on the west side of Short Creek and black workers on the east side and between the railroad and the river. Because development stretched along both banks of the river, a pedestrian suspension bridge was built across the river by the Roebling Bridge Company in 1899.
The mines in the area were acquired by the Fordson Coal Company in the 1920s as "captive mines" to supply coal to the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford updated many of the mines' facilities at that time. However, Fordson sold the mine to the New River Coal Corporation in 1928, possibly because railroad regulations made coal transport to Michigan too difficult.
Most of the frame structures in Nuttallburg have succumbed to weather or have been salvaged for building materials. The National Park Service acquired the town, mining complex and surrounding area from the Nuttall Estate in 1998 and incorporated it into New River Gorge National River.
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“And in their blazing solitude
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“Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.””
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces—in nature, in society, in man himself.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)