History
The nomadic Native Americans who hunted there for thousands of years ending in the Woodland Period and the early European settlers in the Virginia Colony and the Commonwealth of Virginia were generally aware of the "rock that burns" which lay below the rugged terrain of the mountainous area which became southern West Virginia. However, aside from some personal mines, no commercial value had been realized by the mid 19th century.
Noted British geologist David T. Ansted (1814-1880) was among the early experts hired by potential investors to survey promising coal fields along the New River in southern Virginia in the United States. In 1853, Dr. Ansted helped identify the rich bituminous coal seams which lay there. His work set the stage for a mining boom in the area, where he invested in land in what became the new state of West Virginia in 1863 during the American Civil War (1861-1865).
It took transportation and industrialized techniques to realize the commercial potential. A protégé of Dr. Ansted, William N. Page (1854-1932), became a leading industrialist and developer of iron furnaces, coal mines and railroads in the area, leading and managing such enterprises as the Gauley Mountain Coal Company for absentee investors, many of whom were based overseas in the United Kingdom. Page came to West Virginia to help complete the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O) between Richmond, Virginia and the Ohio River in the early 1870s, and helped develop branch lines to coal mining facilities. Former West Virginia Governor William A. MacCorkle described him as a man who knew the land "as a farmer knows a field." Beginning in 1898, Page began working on a scheme to expand into the Winding Gulf area, which was also in the sights of the C&O, whose main line ran along the New and Kanawha River Valleys.
The C&O was heavily working the New River Coalfield, and planning expansion into the Winding Gulf region. However, despite efforts to discourage him, Page introduced unwanted competition by what appeared at the time to be mysterious means. In what has become a popular tale of both U.S. railroads and business competition, the story was recorded and told by historian and rail author H. Reid in The Virginian Railway, published in 1961.
It turned out that William Page, who the C&O knew to be a bright man but of apparently limited financial means, had the secret backing of millionaire industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers (1840-1909). When the large railroads used their power to discourage the Page scheme, Rogers financed an expansion of the Deepwater Railway, originally planned as a West Virginia short line railroad of 80 miles, into a Class 1 railroad reaching all the way across Virginia over 400 miles to become the Virginian Railway, becoming a major third coal exporter at Hampton Roads in 1909. Despite the inefficiency of some duplicative facilities, the Winding Gulf Coalfield benefited from the two major railroad outlets, and became one of the most productive in the state.
The mining of coal in the Winding Gulf Coalfield began in the first decade of the 20th century and continues into the 21st century. The coal in this field is a low volatile coal, and the seams of coal that have been mined include Beckley, Pocahontas No. 3, Pocahontas No. 4, and Sewell. This is very high quality bituminous coal rated at approximately 15,000 Btu/lb (35 MJ/kg).
Read more about this topic: Winding Gulf Coalfield
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—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
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