Case Study 2: The Norfolk and Western Railway — Opening the Coalfields

A Railroad Built for Extraction

The Norfolk and Western Railway did not come to the Appalachian mountains to serve the people who lived there. It came for what lay beneath their feet.

This is not interpretation. It is a matter of corporate record. The N&W was conceived, financed, built, and operated as a coal railroad — a steel pipeline designed to move the mineral wealth of the southern Appalachian coalfields from the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia to the port of Norfolk, Virginia, where it could be loaded onto ships and sold to the world. The communities along its route were incidental to this purpose. Some of them benefited enormously from the railroad's presence. All of them were shaped by it. And when the coal began to run out, the railroad's interest in those communities diminished accordingly.

The story of the Norfolk and Western Railway is the story of how infrastructure becomes destiny — how the construction of a railroad line through a particular valley, over a particular mountain, past a particular hollow, could determine whether the community in that location would flourish or stagnate, diversify or depend on a single industry, survive the twentieth century or be abandoned before it was half over. It is a story about the power of capital to reshape a landscape, and about the consequences of building an economy around the needs of a railroad rather than the needs of the people the railroad was supposed to serve.

Origins: From Regional Line to Coal Colossus

The N&W's origins were modest. The Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad — the N&W's predecessor — was a patchwork of smaller Virginia railroads consolidated after the Civil War under the control of William Mahone, a Confederate general turned railroad entrepreneur. The AM&O connected Norfolk on the Atlantic coast to Bristol on the Tennessee border, running through the Shenandoah Valley and the New River Valley along a route that had been a transportation corridor since the days of the Great Wagon Road.

The AM&O went bankrupt in the depression of the 1870s and was reorganized in 1881 as the Norfolk and Western Railroad (later Railway), under the control of Philadelphia banking interests led by the firm of E. W. Clark & Company. The new owners had a specific vision: they would extend the railroad westward from its existing route into the coal-bearing regions of the Appalachian Plateau, tap the immense coal reserves that geologists had been documenting for decades, and transform the N&W into a major coal-hauling railroad that would compete with the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Baltimore and Ohio for the lucrative coal traffic.

The coal reserves they were targeting were centered in the Pocahontas coalfield — a region straddling the Virginia-West Virginia border in what is now McDowell County, West Virginia, and Tazewell and Mercer counties, Virginia. The Pocahontas seam, a thick deposit of high-quality bituminous coal, would prove to be one of the most valuable coal deposits in the world. The coal was ideal for industrial use and for conversion to metallurgical coke — the fuel that powered the steel industry. The N&W intended to be the railroad that moved it.

The extension of the railroad into the coalfields was an engineering achievement of considerable magnitude. The route climbed from the New River Valley over the Allegheny divide and descended into the narrow valleys of the Tug Fork and the Elkhorn Creek, where the Pocahontas coal seams lay. The terrain was punishing — steep grades, sharp curves, narrow valleys, and the constant challenge of building roadbed across mountainsides that crumbled under their own weight. Tunnels had to be driven through ridges. Bridges had to be built across gorges. Miles of track had to be laid on shelves carved into steep hillsides.

The railroad reached Pocahontas, Virginia — the small town that gave the coalfield its name — in 1883. The first coal was shipped from the Pocahontas mine on March 12, 1883. Within a decade, the Pocahontas coalfield was one of the most productive in the nation, and the N&W was one of the most profitable railroads in America, its revenues driven overwhelmingly by coal traffic.

The Railroad as Economic Engine

The N&W's penetration of the coalfields had an immediate and transformative effect on the communities along its route. Where the railroad went, economic activity followed — or, more precisely, the kind of economic activity that the railroad's operators intended followed.

In the coalfields themselves, the railroad was the catalyst for everything. Before the N&W arrived, the coal seams of McDowell County and the surrounding region were known but inaccessible — there was no way to move coal to market in commercially significant quantities. The railroad provided that way. Within years of the railroad's arrival, coal companies were opening mines along every accessible seam, building company towns in every hollow, and recruiting workers from across the eastern United States and from southern and eastern Europe. The population of McDowell County, which had been approximately three thousand in 1880, swelled to nearly ninety thousand by 1950. The railroad had created an economy from scratch — but it was a single-commodity economy, wholly dependent on the continued demand for coal and the continued willingness of the N&W to haul it.

In the New River Valley — the broad, relatively moderate section of the railroad's route through Montgomery, Radford, and Blacksburg, Virginia — the railroad's impact was different and, in the long run, more sustainable. The New River Valley was too far from the main coal seams to become a coal-dependent community. Instead, the railroad connected the valley to national markets for agricultural products, attracted industrial employers who needed rail access, and supported the growth of educational institutions — most notably Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Virginia Tech), which benefited directly from the railroad's presence in Blacksburg.

The contrast between McDowell County and the New River Valley — both shaped by the same railroad, but shaped in fundamentally different ways — illustrates the railroad's role as a sorting mechanism. The railroad did not treat all communities equally. Its rates, its schedules, its routing decisions, and the economic activities it attracted were all calibrated to the railroad's own priorities. Communities that could offer the railroad what it wanted — coal, timber, and other extractable resources — received intensive development. Communities that offered other economic possibilities — agriculture, education, manufacturing — received rail service but not the same intensity of extractive investment.

Dual Role: Connection and Control

The railroad's impact on mountain communities was genuinely dual-natured, and it would be a distortion of history to present it as purely extractive. The railroad brought real benefits that mountain people valued and, in many cases, had desperately wanted.

Before the railroad, a family in the Tug Fork valley or the hollows of McDowell County might be two or three days' travel from the nearest town of any size. Medical care meant riding horseback over a mountain to the nearest doctor, if there was one. Mail was irregular. Manufactured goods — fabric, tools, sugar, salt, anything not produced locally — were expensive and scarce, available only through itinerant peddlers or annual trips to distant market towns. The railroad changed all of this. It brought daily mail. It brought stores stocked with goods. It brought passenger service that connected the most remote hollows to cities like Bluefield, Roanoke, and eventually Norfolk.

For some communities, the railroad also brought economic diversification. The junction towns along the N&W — Bluefield, Roanoke, Williamson, Radford — grew into commercial centers that served the surrounding coalfields and agricultural districts. Roanoke, which had been a tiny crossroads called Big Lick before the N&W made it a major junction in 1882, grew into a small city of nearly one hundred thousand people, with a diversified economy based on railroad shops, manufacturing, and commercial services. The railroad made Roanoke what it is today.

But the connection came with control. The N&W's rate structures ensured that raw materials — coal, timber, agricultural products — could be shipped out of the mountains cheaply, while manufactured goods shipped into the mountains cost more. This rate structure was not accidental; it was designed to maintain the mountains as a raw material supply zone and to prevent the development of local manufacturing that might compete with industries in the established manufacturing centers of the Northeast and Midwest. A mountain entrepreneur who wanted to build a factory and ship finished products out by rail faced freight rates that made his products uncompetitive. A coal operator who wanted to ship raw coal to Norfolk faced rates that were among the lowest on the railroad's schedule.

The result was a colonial economy — a term used by Appalachian scholars including John Gaventa, Helen Lewis, and others to describe the structural relationship between the mountain region and the national economy. Raw materials flowed out. Finished goods and profits flowed in one direction only — out. The railroads were the arteries of this colonial system, and the rate structures were the valves that controlled the flow.

The railroad companies' political influence reinforced this economic control. The N&W was one of the most politically powerful corporations in Virginia and West Virginia. Its lobbyists influenced state legislation on taxation, labor law, and railroad regulation. Its executives served on the boards of banks, land companies, and coal companies that together constituted an interlocking network of corporate control over the mountain economy. Challenging the railroad's interests was, in many communities, as politically futile as challenging the coal operators — and in many cases, the railroad and the coal operators were the same people, or were so closely allied as to be indistinguishable.

The Railroad's Legacy: What Remains

The Norfolk and Western Railway no longer exists as an independent entity. It merged with the Southern Railway in 1982 to form Norfolk Southern Corporation, which continues to operate many of the same routes through the Appalachian mountains. Coal traffic, which once constituted the overwhelming majority of the N&W's revenue, has declined sharply as the coal industry has contracted. The railroad that was built for coal is adapting, gradually and sometimes painfully, to a world that needs less of it.

But the railroad's physical legacy is literally carved into the landscape. The routes that N&W engineers surveyed and built in the 1880s and 1890s — following creek beds, tunneling through ridges, bridging gorges — still determine the geography of transportation in the southern Appalachians. The modern highways of the region often follow the same valleys that the railroad followed, because the terrain permits no other route. The towns that the railroad created — or killed, by bypassing them — still reflect the railroad's decisions a century and more later.

McDowell County, which the N&W opened to coal development, has experienced the full arc of the extraction pattern. From a population of approximately three thousand in 1880, it grew to nearly ninety thousand at its coal-era peak, and has since declined to fewer than twenty thousand — one of the poorest counties in America, its economy shattered by the collapse of the industry the railroad was built to serve. The railroad still runs through McDowell County, but it carries less coal every year, and the towns along its route — Welch, War, Iaeger, Keystone — are shadows of what they were.

The New River Valley, by contrast, has prospered — not because it was spared by the railroad but because it was used differently. The railroad connected the valley to national markets and educational institutions without creating the single-industry dependence that devastated the coalfield counties. Virginia Tech grew from a small agricultural college into a major research university. The valley attracted manufacturing, technology companies, and service industries that the coalfield counties could not. The same railroad that opened McDowell County to exploitation opened the New River Valley to diversification.

The difference was not in the railroad itself but in what the railroad found — or, more precisely, what lay beneath the ground along its route. Where the railroad found coal, it created a coal economy. Where it found something else — agricultural land, a college, a junction point — it created something different. The railroad was a tool, but the tool was wielded by capital, and capital went where the returns were highest. In the coalfields, the returns were extraordinary — for a time. And then they were gone.

Discussion Questions

1. The Norfolk and Western Railway was built to move coal, not to serve mountain communities. How does a region's economic fate change when its primary infrastructure is designed to serve the interests of outside investors rather than the needs of local residents? Can you identify modern parallels — infrastructure projects built for external purposes that shaped local communities?

2. The chapter contrasts McDowell County (coal-dependent, now impoverished) with the New River Valley (diversified, now prosperous). Both were served by the same railroad. What factors other than the railroad explain the different outcomes? How much of a community's economic destiny is determined by its natural resources, and how much by the choices made by the people and institutions that develop those resources?

3. The N&W's freight rate structure — cheap rates for raw materials shipped out, expensive rates for manufactured goods shipped in — is described as creating a "colonial economy." Is this analogy accurate? In what ways does the relationship between Appalachian coal communities and the national economy resemble the relationship between European colonies and their imperial centers? In what ways is it different?

4. Roanoke, Virginia was a tiny crossroads called Big Lick before the N&W made it a major junction. It grew into a city of nearly one hundred thousand people with a diversified economy. Why did Roanoke diversify while McDowell County did not? What role did the railroad's decision to place major facilities in Roanoke — shops, offices, a junction — play in the city's development?

5. The N&W's successor, Norfolk Southern, still operates in the Appalachian region, but coal traffic has declined sharply. What obligations, if any, does a corporation have to the communities that its predecessor created? If the N&W built McDowell County's economy, does Norfolk Southern bear any responsibility for McDowell County's decline?