Pax, West Virginia

The small town of Pax in Fayette County sits at the mouth of Pack's Branch on Paint Creek, and its name may simply be a compressed version of that branch name, though nobody recorded the decision precisely. What built Pax was the railroad. In nineteen oh two, the Deepwater Railway was completed through the Paint Creek valley connecting the Kanawha coalfields south to the Virginia line, and in nineteen oh seven that line became part of the Virginian Railway, which reached the Atlantic coast at Norfolk in nineteen oh nine, one of the most efficiently engineered coal roads in America.

Pax grew up as a commercial and residential hub serving the surrounding coal communities, and it was incorporated in nineteen twenty. Today more than three hundred buildings in Pax are recognized as a historic district, a surprisingly intact record of the early twentieth century coal-economy town, one of those places the railroad built and the railroad shaped in ways that outlasted the coal itself.