The Heart of West Virginia:

Blackwater Canyon

A wilderness mecca of cultural, historic and recreational tourism.

Nestled at the foot of these mountains along the North Fork of the Blackwater River in Tucker County, the small town of Coketon offers residents and tourists a rich lesson in West Virginia history.

Along the river lies an old railway that now serves as a hiking and biking trail. Along the trail are the structural remains of a once-flourishing coal and coke industry and the foundation of the Coketon Colored School.

The Blackwater Canyon has been featured in many publications by many writers, artists and photographers, but none was ever as famous as the articles in Harper's Monthly Magazine that made the Blackwater Canyon famous in the first place.

David Hunter Strother wrote under the pen name, Porte Crayon, to bring his dynamic tales and mysterious illustrations of a fishing expedition to life in his articles The Virginian Canaan and The Mountains.

Left: In 1887, Henry Gassaway Davis ordered the construction of a railroad through the Blackwater Canyon to mine, burn and shuttle coal. Davis Coke and Coal Company and its surrounding communities -- Thomas, Davis, Parsons, Douglas and Coketon -- flourished from this industrial revolution until the company's demise in the 1920s. The industry left the 10,000-acre Blackwater Canyon flat and burned. Now, the Canyon is regenerated and the former railway serves as a hiking and biking trail.

More information on the Blackwater Trail.

Despite early transportation, no serious competitors barked at the heels of Henry Gassaway Davis in the early 1880s when he created his railway-based Upper Potomac coal empire. As Black Diamond magazine asserted, without Davis, “development would have come ultimately, but it would not have progressed to the extent he made possible.”

In 1884 the WVC&P reached the town of Thomas in Tucker County, to build a 6.3-mile branch line from Thomas to the town of Davis. The WVC&P opened a Blackwater Hotel, named for the Blackwater River whose spectacular falls lay just two miles from Davis.

Preliminary prospecting and engineering work completed showed that the Upper Freeport seam outcropped at Coketon. Along this outcrop, at locations suitable for plant sites and tipple locations, two drifts were driven in the coal in the above year and were called Coketon Mines No.1. By 1893, coke-making was underway at three locations in Tucker County. By far the largest of these operations consisted of 327 beehive ovens at the town of Coketon. There coal from the Upper Freeport (Davis) seam was coked. Upper Freeport coal likewise fed the forty-four ovens of the Cumberland Coal Company at the town of Douglas, which lay south of Coketon.
In 1906, when West Virginia’s Department of Mines began recording miners’ races and nationalities, 4.3 percent of this field’s miners were Black, 14.5 percent Italian, 11.3 percent Lithuanian, and 7.2 percent Polish. A decade later, in 1927, Black miners composed 1.8 percent of the workforce. Italians remained by far the largest foreign contingent, but their proportion had fallen to 6.8 percent.

On February 29, 1916, a coal-dust explosion ripped through the Davis Company’s Kempton mine. All but one of the 1,911 Elk Garden victims were American, but all fifteen of the Kempton victims were foreigners, fourteen of them Austrian and one Italian. The Davis company listed foreign workers only by number.

In 1887, J.R. Clifford was admitted to the bar by the West Virginia Supreme Court.  In 1898, Clifford won a landmark civil rights and education case, Williams v. Board of Education.  The Tucker County School Board of Education tried to cut the public school year for African-American students from eight months to five months, while the students in the “white school” continued to receive the full eight-month school year.  Clifford encouraged the teacher, Carrie Williams, to continue teaching for the entire nine months and file a lawsuit against the school board for her back pay.  The Tucker County Courts ruled  in favor of Williams, and the Tucker County Board of Education appealed the decision. In 1898, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals decided in favor of equal educational rights for African-American students in West Virginia.

J. R. Clifford: Blackwater Hero - Web page sponsored  by Friends of Blackwater, Inc.