Flat Top, West Virginia

The Flat Top mountain that names this Mercer County community also names one of the most significant coalfields in American history. The Flat Top and Pocahontas field, straddling the Mercer and McDowell county line and running into Virginia, began shipping coal in the early eighteen eighties, with the earliest mining at Pocahontas, Virginia, in eighteen eighty-three, served by the Norfolk and Western Railway. Those first shipments opened a coalfield that would reshape the southern West Virginia economy for the next century, drawing tens of thousands of workers from across Europe and the American South.

The field's coal was among the best metallurgical-grade bituminous in the world, prized by steel mills up and down the eastern seaboard. The community of Flat Top sits quietly at the top of that legacy today.