The Morgan House: Where West Virginia's Coal Era Began

The brick farmhouse that George Pinkney Morgan built near Rivesville in Marion County, West Virginia, between eighteen fifty-seven and eighteen sixty looks, at first glance, like a thousand other prosperous mid-nineteenth-century farmhouses in the Appalachian region. Two stories, red brick, Greek Revival trim, a family cemetery at the edge of the property with stones dating back to seventeen ninety-nine.

But George Pinkney Morgan was not an ordinary farmer. He was one of the first men in West Virginia to understand that the real value of his land lay not in the soil on top but in the coal seam running beneath it.

In eighteen fifty-eight, the year after he began building this house, Morgan co-founded the Marion Cannel Coal Company with investors from Baltimore and New York. Cannel coal, a dense, waxy variety that burned exceptionally hot and clean, was suddenly in demand for gas lighting in eastern cities. Morgan had railroad access on his land, the Baltimore and Ohio line having come through Marion County in the eighteen fifties. He could mine the coal and ship it east. This was the model that would transform the entire upper Monongahela valley within a generation.

Morgan was not the only person to see this opportunity, but he was among the earliest. The commercial coal development of Marion County, which accelerated through the eighteen eighties and nineties and made West Virginia one of the most important industrial regions in the country, traces its beginnings to men like him, farmer-inventors who recognized that the Appalachian highlands were sitting on an underground fortune.

The house still stands on US Route Nineteen in Rivesville, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since two thousand three. It is a quiet structure that carries a loud history: the starting point of a coal economy that employed hundreds of thousands of West Virginians, built company towns across the mountain counties, and fueled the industrial expansion of the eastern United States.