Williamson: Heart of the Billion Dollar Coalfield

Williamson, West Virginia is the county seat of Mingo County and the self-styled Heart of the Billion Dollar Coalfield. The site was open farmland as late as eighteen ninety, transformed almost overnight when the Norfolk and Western Railway drove its main line through the Tug Fork valley and opened the bituminous coal seams beneath. The town was incorporated in nineteen oh five and named for landowner Wallace Williamson.

By nineteen thirty its population had reached nearly ten thousand. Downtown Williamson is still anchored by a building that says everything about the era: the Coal House, completed in nineteen thirty-three, its exterior walls built from sixty-five tons of locally mined coal, a literal monument to the commodity that built and then slowly diminished this place. The population today is just over three thousand.

The Tug Fork forms the state line here, Kentucky is on the other bank.