Beckley, West Virginia

Beckley was founded in eighteen thirty-eight by General Alfred Beckley, who named it for his father, John Beckley, the first Librarian of Congress and the first Clerk of the House of Representatives. For most of the nineteenth century it was little more than a paper town on a Virginia hillside. Everything changed in the eighteen nineties when commercial shipments of smokeless bituminous coal began rolling out of Raleigh County.

A branch of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway reached Beckley around the turn of the twentieth century, and the opening of the Winding Gulf coalfield soon turned a village of three hundred forty-two people into a city of more than two thousand within a decade. Beckley became the capital of southern West Virginia's coal country and today anchors a region that still carries the deep marks of that industry.