Thurmond, Nuttallburg, Kaymoor: The Towns the Coal Left Behind

Thurmond, West Virginia, had a bank, two hotels, a railroad depot that handled more freight than any station in the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway system east of the Mississippi, and a population of about four hundred sixty people at its peak. In nineteen ten, by various measures, it was one of the busiest and most prosperous small towns in the state. Today, five people live there. The post office is technically still open.

Thurmond was a coal town, built to service the mines along the New River Gorge and the railroad that moved the coal north. The Chesapeake and Ohio line runs along the river through the gorge, and Thurmond sat at a point where both sides of the canyon converged into a working geography: rail, river, coal, and the men who worked all three. The bank, the hotels, the saloons, the freight depot, the gambling houses that operated continuously until the nineteen thirties: all of it existed because the coal existed.

Nuttallburg, upriver, was a full company town in the stricter sense, meaning the Nuttall family and later the Ford family owned not just the mine but the houses the miners lived in, the store where they bought food, and the scrip currency they were paid in. Henry Ford leased Nuttallburg starting around nineteen twenty intending to develop an industrial complex. He stripped some coal, upgraded the infrastructure, and then sold his interest in the mine by nineteen twenty-eight. The mine buildings and the incline that transported coal to the railroad are still there, deteriorating on schedule.

Kaymoor, across the river, is accessible only by foot, down a trail that descends five hundred stairs cut into the canyon wall. The mine infrastructure at the bottom is intact enough that it reads as a working facility someone simply walked away from.

The park that now contains these towns was designated in twenty-twenty. It is, among other things, a museum of how a single resource shapes and then vacates a geography.