Winifrede, West Virginia

Winifrede sits along the Kanawha River on one of the oldest developed coal seams in West Virginia. In February eighteen fifty, a company called the Winifrede Mining and Manufacturing Company was organized by investors out of Philadelphia to mine the Fields Creek drainage. A narrow-gauge railroad was built to haul coal to barge-loading docks on the Kanawha, and mining began in earnest.

The Winifrede seam became one of the principal coal seams in the entire Kanawha field, and by eighteen eighty-two the company had erected dozens of dwellings for workers and extended the rail line. The name itself is said to come from a woman in Philadelphia connected to those original investors, though exactly who she was has been lost to time. The Civil War hurt the early business, because the Kanawha salt industry, the first big customer for this coal, was damaged by military occupation and never fully recovered.

The Winifrede Railroad was chartered in eighteen eighty-one and began service in eighteen eighty-two. It was rebuilt to standard gauge, with about ten miles of track, a connection to the Chesapeake and Ohio, and a barge loading facility on the river. By nineteen eleven, five mines were running along Fields Creek, but the mines closed in the nineteen twenties as demand fell, and operations resumed around the turn of nineteen thirty-one.

Today the line is the Big Eagle Railroad, about six miles long, and it hands loaded coal trains to a major freight railroad near Chesapeake, mostly for export. The barge loading stopped in twenty thirteen. The mines were controlled almost entirely from Pennsylvania and later Philadelphia throughout their history, an early example of outside capital extracting Appalachian coal while the community above the seams bore the costs.