John Nuttall saw dollar signs in the steep, muddy walls of the New River Gorge. In 1870, he bought up cheap tract land, betting that the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway would eventually cut through the canyon. He was right. When the tracks finally cleared in 1873, Nuttallburg became only the second town in the gorge to ship the region's famous smokeless coal. It was a rough, vertical existence. Miners lived in drafty wooden shacks that clung precariously to the cliffs. They breathed thick coal dust and worked in low seams, sometimes crawling on their bellies in spaces just three feet high. By the late 1800s, over three hundred people lived in this steep ravine, completely dependent on the company store for their survival.
Henry Ford stepped in during the 1920s. He wanted a vertical monopoly. He figured buying the Nuttallburg mine would supply coal directly to his massive River Rouge car plant in Michigan. Ford poured serious cash into the site. He built a 1,385-foot-long steel conveyor that still crawls down the gorge side like a giant zipper. He also tried to mandate clean living. This meant painting every company building a uniform utility gray. He even demanded the miners wash their faces before going home to their wives. Actually, the grand plan failed. The C&O railroad refused to let Ford run his own trains on their tracks, ruining his shipping logistics. Ford got fed up and sold out in 1928.
Today, the thick West Virginia forest is swallowing the town back up. But the heavy iron survives. You can still find eighty stone coke ovens lined up along the old rail bed. In these ovens, workers baked raw coal into pure carbon at extreme temperatures. The houses are completely gone. Nothing remains of them but crumbling stone foundations hidden under poison ivy and damp leaves. Now, the National Park Service keeps the rusted, skeletal tipple from crashing into the New River. It is a quiet, brutal monument to Appalachian industrialization.
- T Walker
What Makes Nuttallburg Coal Mining Complex and Town Historic District Special:
