Partly cloudy early followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable..
Partly cloudy early followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.
Maturing trees rise amid the remnants of the power house that served mining operations at Stone Cliff, once home to more than 500 miners and their families. The town, occupied from 1880 through the 1940s, is now a part of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.
The powder house where explosives used in mining operations at Stone Cliff were stored is slowly being reclaimed by New River Gorge vegetation.
Corroded by decades of exposure to the elements, segments of wire and cable, along with assorted electrical fixtures blend in with the colors of the leafy forest floor at the New River Gorge ghost town of Stone Cliff.
Remnants of some of the 60 coke ovens that once operated at Stone Cliff can be seen on a rise above the CSX mainline and the New River.
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Maturing trees rise amid the remnants of the power house that served mining operations at Stone Cliff, once home to more than 500 miners and their families. The town, occupied from 1880 through the 1940s, is now a part of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.
The powder house where explosives used in mining operations at Stone Cliff were stored is slowly being reclaimed by New River Gorge vegetation.
Corroded by decades of exposure to the elements, segments of wire and cable, along with assorted electrical fixtures blend in with the colors of the leafy forest floor at the New River Gorge ghost town of Stone Cliff.
Remnants of some of the 60 coke ovens that once operated at Stone Cliff can be seen on a rise above the CSX mainline and the New River.
THURMOND — Even in its early 1900s heyday, the now-abandoned New River Gorge coal town of Stone Cliff was small, remote and seldom visited. But “peaceful” is a word few who lived here are likely to have used in describing the experience.
Most of the housing provided to those who worked in Stone Cliff’s two drift mines or tended its 60 coke ovens was confined to a thin strip of flat land wedged between the New River shoreline and the C&O Railway’s mainline tracks, just south of Thurmond. A short distance behind the tracks, the sheer sandstone wall for which the town was named rose 800 feet above the coal camp, allowing few sounds of human activity to escape, reverberating through the community and adding to the din.
“Our house was a company house that sat in the middle of a row of other company houses,” recalled Murray Shuff, who grew up in Stone Cliff during the 1930s and wrote about the experience in a memoir produced for the 1984 New River Symposium.
“There was only about 60 feet between our house and those C&O tracks, and our house shook from top to bottom almost all day long as the trains carried their heavy burdens of coal out of the railroad yard,” Shuff wrote.
Nightfall provided little relief from the noise and vibration, according to Shuff.
“Passenger trains continued to run throughout the nighttime hours,” he wrote. “They’d roar through Stone Cliff, waking everyone in town.”
Once awakened, townspeople were immediately aware of three things, according to Shuff: “The time of day, since the trains were always on time; the names of the trains, since they all had names or numbers, and how long you’d have to sleep before the next train came through.”
At 6 a.m., after the last of the night trains rumbled through town, a powerful whistle was sounded to indicate the imminent start-up of the power plant that supplied electricity to the coal company’s mines — but not its housing.
The electricity powered small rail cars that each hauled about 3,000 pounds of coal out of the mines, through portals located far up the face of the cliff behind the town. After the coal was weighed, it was dumped into a monitor — a steel container with a five-ton capacity — and sent down a steep rail incline, under the control of a cable and brake system, then processed at a tipple and loaded into railroad cars.
“This process went on all day and filled railroad car after railroad car,” Shuff wrote. “Those cars would strain against their heavy loads, gather up speed and rumble off down the tracks, keeping pace with production, and vibrating every house and building in town.”
Weight of the coal-laden monitors moving down the cliff powered the ascent of empty cars back to the mine portals. Miners started their workdays by riding the empty monitors up to the mine entrances.
Miners and their families lived in two-story, four-room houses with lean-to additions at the rear that housed kitchens and laundry rooms. With no indoor plumbing or water pumps, drinking water was carried to the homes from a spring, while water for washing or bathing was hauled from the river. Coal stoves in Stone Cliff’s company housing had chimneys with vents opening into each of the four rooms.
Shuff’s family lived directly across the railroad tracks from the power station, where he and his brothers were able to draw hot water from a boiler and carry it home, saving a longer haul from the river followed by heating time on their stove.
Among the earliest coal towns in the New River Gorge, Stone Cliff was established in 1880 by coal operator Noah Jenkins and Joseph H. Bramwell, an engineer from New York who, during the late-1870s, operated the iron-producing Quinnimont Furnace, about 20 miles upstream.
After helping Jenkins get Stone Cliff Collieries up and running, Bramwell moved south to the coalfields along the Mercer-McDowell County border. There, he supervised mining operations for a coal company and helped plan an exclusive residential community for coal operators that soon would include more than a dozen millionaires.
In addition to being the namesake of the Mercer County town, Bramwell in 1883 became its first postmaster and in 1889 was named the first president of the Bank of Bramwell. In the 1890s, after making a fortune in real estate sales in and around the new town, Bramwell bid farewell to coal country and moved to Switzerland.
Meanwhile, back in Stone Cliff, the operation launched by Bramwell and Jenkins was acquired by Joseph Beury, whose New River Coal Company operation at Quinnimont in 1873 became the first to ship coal from the New River Gorge to eastern buyers on the new C&O line.
By 1910, Stone Cliff’s population had peaked at 510, with Black miners and their families accounting for about 55% of the town’s residents. Despite being in the majority, Black children had to walk one mile upstream to the coal camp of Claremont to attend school, while white children were taught in a one-room school in Stone Cliff.
Stone Cliff had separate churches for Blacks and whites, although the Black church welcomed miners’ families from both races to attend annual appearances by the “Silas Green of New Orleans” variety show it hosted. Entertainers in the train-borne troupe included jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman and comedian Nipsey Russell, then a dancer.
In 1928, a bridge carrying two lanes of traffic across the New River opened at a former ferry crossing fronting Stone Cliff, making the town accessible to vehicular traffic for the first time and creating a prime local hangout for conversation when classes and work shifts ended.
In fall 1936, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, a Republican presidential candidate, made a campaign stop at Stone Cliff, accompanied by his running mate, Frank Knox.
“Landon made a speech from the rear platform of the train, while people cheered, flags waved and buttons shaped like sunflowers were thrown to the crowd by his aides,” Shuff wrote.
Following Landon’s loss to Franklin D. Roosevelt, company housing at Stone Cliff was wired for electricity as part of the second phase of FDR’s New Deal program, bringing radio, electric lights and other amenities to the town.
When his father took a job with another coal company in 1938, Shuff and his family left Stone Cliff. He served in the Navy in World War II, then received an appointment to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and became a marine engineer before joining Gulf Oil’s overseas research and development staff. He returned to West Virginia in 1959 and worked for Meadows Lumber Co. in Beckley, eventually becoming its president. He died in 2009.
Pugh Coal, the last coal company to operate at Stone Cliff, closed by the mid-1940s. In 1948, the town’s post office followed suit, and by the end of the decade, the town was abandoned.
Today, visitors can see the partially collapsed remnants of some of the town’s beehive coke ovens, the shell of a powder storage building and foundations and partial walls of its powerhouse. The townsite can be found about 1.5 miles upriver from Thurmond, just off the east end of the Stone Cliff Bridge on W.Va. Secondary Route 25.
The townsite lies on the opposite side of the river from the National Park Service’s Stone Cliff Campground and river access site.
Rick Steelhammer is a features reporter. He can be reached at 304-348-5169 or rsteelhammer@hdmediallc.com. Follow @rsteelhammer on Twitter.
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