SCENES FROM STONECOAL CREEK
There's not much left of Lillybrook, WV. But at one time this was a big mining community with two mines. In 1930 eight men on the hoot owl shift died in an explosion of the Lillybrook No. 1 mine. The town died out through the 1960s.
Jason writes, "My grandpa (Edgar M...) worked at the Lillybrook mine for a couple years, but his leg was crushed in an
accident. My dad said there was a slate slide after an explosion, and the slate crushed his leg (sometime around 1940?) but he lived for quite some time after (1972). I have a picture of his mining crew and part of the tipple. He quit mining shortly therafter I believe."
A vintage picture of Lillybrook showing one of the company stores, one of the tipples, and part of the camp
Tipple foundations at Lillybrook toppled over like Easter Island statues (or is that a stretch of the imagination too far?).
Last vestiges of the Pickshin, W.Va. coal camp, built in the late 1910s. Pickshin Coal Co. mined the Beckley seam here. It was one of the operations of coal baron J.C. Sullivan.
This collapsing church is indicative of the desolation and despair in Pickshin, WV today. Mead Pocahontas Coal Co. was a later coal operator here.
The defunct Stoco High School in Lego, WV. Stoco is a corruption of Stonecoal. The grassy pasture was their athletic field.
The coal mining camp at Lego.
This coal camp is Besoco, which comes from Beckley Smokeless Coal Co. The Leccony Smokeless Coal Co. took over by the 1930s. As late as the 1960s, Vecillio and Grogan were strip mining there.
A few remaining coal company houses at Besoco.
Besoco coal camp in 1974.
Don writes that this store is up the hollow from Besoco in a place called Hick Hollow, named after his great grandfather, Hick Garretson. It operated under the name A. W. Price Mercantile Store. This area is also known
as Josephine, and in the early 21st Century United Pocahontas was been mining coal at the Josephine No. 2 mine there.
The mining camp of East Gulf was the domain of the C.H. Mead Coal Co. in the 1920s. By 1960, this coal processing plant had been constructed there, possibly by Winding
Gulf Coals.
In this 1970s view of the East Gulf mine complex a large shop building or bath house is visable that is no longer there.
Additions were made to the East Gulf plant by later owner Westmoreland Coal Co. In the 1980s and 1990s owned by Maben Energy. It is shown here in the late 1990s when it was still active.
The big cloud of steam is from a rare hydrothermal dryer.
Left Fork Processing was rehabilitating the East Gulf plant in 2001, but it was idled in 2002.
When the price of met coal was right, the East Gulf plant was processing coal at full throttle in 2005. Note the full N-S hopper cars waiting to be pulled to the Elmore train yard in Mullens.
Sunrise over the railroad tracks at East Gulf, W.Va.
The company store at East Gulf, W.Va. was so new in this image that a sign had not even been placed on it.
Powder / dynamite storage shed in East Gulf.
November 1997 photo by author
1928 photo courtesy of W. Caldwell
February 2022 image by author
November 1997 image by author
November 2004 photo by author
November 1997 photo by author
September 2001 photo by author
November 1997 photo by author
September 2001 photo by author
Photo by Jack Corn, courtesty The U.S. National Archives
November 1997 photo by author
Image Courtesy VT ImageBase, housed and operated by Digital Library and Archives, University Libraries; scanning by Digital Imaging, Learning Technologies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Photo by Jack Corn, courtesty The U.S. National Archives
November 1997 photo by author
November 2002 photo by author
June 2005 photo
January 2001 photo by author
Image from "The Black Diamond" magazine via Google Books
February 2022 image by author