West Virginia: A History

Chapter 18: The Industrial Age

The IndustrialAge Post-CMIWar EconomicUfe. West Virginia entered the Union with some ninety percent of its people engaged in agriculture and an economy yet in the domestic stage. Most industrial and commercial establishments, including gristmills, sawmills, carding factories, woolen mills, tanneries, blacksmith shops, and even general stores were farm related. This agrarian economy prevailed in many parts of the state well into the twentieth century. West Virginians, however, had for decades pressed for solutions to problems of capital, labor, and transportation that would unlock their vast mineral and timber resources. River Transportation. Critical to the growth of industry in West Virginia were adequate transportation facilities, including river improvements. Of major importance were federal inland navigation projects on the Ohio, Monongahela, Kanawha, Little Kanawha, and Big Sandy rivers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centures. Engineering difficulties and opposition from coal shippers and large coal-tow operators delayed improvements on the Ohio, in which the only lock and dam in 1900 was at Davis Island, five miles below Pittsburgh. In contrast, the Monongahela had fifteen locks and dams that gave it a navigable depth of nine feet from Pittsburgh to Morgantown and of seven feet from Morgantown to Fairmont. The Kanawha by 1898had ten locks and dams, built under the direction of Addison M. Scott, that provided a six-foot depth to Deepwater, above Montgomery and some ninety miles from its mouth. Improvements in the Big Sandy and Little Kanawha were less satisfactory. Those on the Big Sandy, begun in 1883, envisioned three locks and dams on the main stream and one each on its Levisa and Tug forks to maintain six feet of water. Because of competition from railroads, including the Norfolk and Western and the Chesapeake and Ohio, the original plans were abandoned, and in 1914 work on the river ceased. The Little Kanawha, primarily a carrier of petroleum and forest products, had four locks and dams built by the Kanawha Navigation Company by 1874 and a fifth erected by the federal government in 1891. The structures afforded four feet of water from Parkersburg to Creston, forty-eight miles upstream. Even with improvements, the rivers could not handle the mounting volume of coal traffic in West Virginia. As early as 1901coal tows on the Kanawha were 184 West Virginia: A History "double-locked," or broken in two for passage through lock chambers, and by 1926"triple-locking" was common. By 1912railroads had captured most of the industrial transport business. Only 688,939 tons of coal moved down the Kanawha, and none was shipped from West Virginia mines via the Monongahela . When railroads proved inadequate to the nation's needs in World War I, rivers again assumed importance. Every available boat and barge was pressed into service, and such firms as the Charles Ward Engineering Company of Charleston and the Marietta Manufacturing Company of Point Pleasant were kept busy producing needed rivercraft. Wartime experiences revived interest in a network of deep waterways from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. The completion in 1929of a new series of locks and dams in the Ohio, twenty-eight of them within the borders of West Virginia, gavethe Ohio a nine-foot slackwater navigation for its entire 981miles. These improvements stimulated activities on West Virginia rivers. Beginning in the mid-1920s the Monongahela carried the largest volume of freight of any river in the United States and was second only to the Rhine among rivers of the world. Its traffic, mostly in coal, exceeded that of the Panama Canal. Until 1926coal exports down the Kanawha were hampered by unsatisfactory facilities on the Ohio, but after that time barges from the Kanawha could not take full advantage of the nine-foot depth of the Ohio. With the completion in 1939of new dams, each with two locks, at Winfield, Marmet, and London, the Kanawha had a nine-foot navigation to Deepwater. The new structures encouraged other industries, including chemical manufacturing, and started an upward spiral of traffic that made the Gallipolis locks and dams, the largest in the world when they were completed in 1938, obsolete within two decades. With the inland river system strained by carrying three to four times the tonnage for which it had been designed and diesel-powered boats of all-steel construction replacing stem wheelers of the passenger-packet type, the United States Army Corps of Engineers began about 1950to plan a new series of fifteen high-lift dams in the Ohio. The new structures increased the lift...