Prosperity, West Virginia

The name Prosperity says everything about who built this town and what they hoped for. In the early twentieth century, coal operators opened mines in the ridges near Beckley, in Raleigh County. Like dozens of company towns planted across southern West Virginia in those years, Prosperity was a calculated act of optimism, a name that spoke of hope for a hollow in the mountains.

The coal came up, the company store opened, and families from across Appalachia and Eastern Europe arrived to fill the company houses. Today the community survives as a census-designated place, a quiet reminder that the coalfields named their towns not for what they were but for what the operators intended them to become.