Mabscott, West Virginia

Mabscott owes its name to an act of coal-camp romance. Cyrus Ellison Scott, a chemist who worked in the coal industry, named the town for his wife, Mabel Shinn Scott, of Shinnston, West Virginia. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway had already placed its Beckley Station here; the depot was soon renamed Mabscott, and the town became a critical junction for hauling coal out of the New River field.

Trains rolling from the Gulf mines, from Skelton, from Cranberry and Eccles all funneled through the Raleigh yard at Mabscott before heading east to market. For half a century the town was an industrial hub; today it is a residential community of roughly thirteen hundred people adjoining Beckley, the tracks mostly quiet, the depot gone, and the man who named a town for his wife long forgotten.