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Chapter 3. Pocahontas Coalfield and the N & W
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Chapter 3 Pocahontas Coalfield and the N&W Jordan Nelson was the first to actually exploit the splendid resource of Pocahontas coal that lay all around him, but he was not the first to know of its presence. Dr. Thomas Walker had written about the coalfield over a hundred years before. Thomas Jefferson, possibly drawing from Walker’s journal, even referred to the coal rich area of western Virginia in his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1782.1 Apparently, the first actual geological survey of the area comprising the Pocahontas field was made by Dr. William Barton Rogers, director of the Virginia Geological Survey from 1835 to 1841 and the first president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his “Report of the Geological Reconnoissance of the State of Virginia,” published in 1835, Rogers said the following regarding his observations in western Virginia: “No section of the whole state offers perhaps so much that is characteristic, either in its physical geography or geological structure, and none holds out richer promise of valuable practical results as soon as it shall be systematically explored. By far, the greatest portion, if not all, of its strata belong to a group of formations, distinguished not only in America but throughout the world, as being the chief depositories of bituminous coal.”2 Rogers made additional geological reports about western Virginia coal through 1841, but his and subsequent reports from other geologists emphasized the importance of coal in regions of the state that were more accessible to industrialists and mine operators. Navigable rivers such as the Kanawha, and railroads such as those built by the Baltimore & Ohio either before or during the Civil War, were providing necessary links from mine site to industrial user. Indeed, the possibilities for exploiting the raw materials of West Virginia led one writer to conclude, “A new era is now dawning. The capitalist has discovered, with keen vision, the abundant coal, iron, petroleum, and other wealth thus hidden, and the central location of the lands containing them; he has planted his money in these hills, and is determined to gather a golden harvest.”3 Butevenafterthree-quartersofacentury,ResourcesofWestVirginia, a volume that claimed to give a comprehensive assessment of the state’s mineral wealth, did little more than repeat what Rogers had reported 22 Pocahontas Coalfield and the N&W earlier. The authors, M. F. Maury and William M. Fontaine, wrote, “This country [McDowell County] is accredited with seams as thick as 12 feet, but there are no reliable observations to justify more than a mere mention of this fact.” Maury and Fontaine concluded that McDowell County “is very inaccessible, as may be gathered from the fact that not a single answer has been obtained to fifty circulars sent into it, asking for information . In consequence of this, we cannot give any detailed account of it.”4 Actually, had Maury and Fontaine been acquainted with Jedediah Hotchkiss they would have gotten a wealth of information. After Dr. Thomas Walker, Jedediah (“Jed”) Hotchkiss was the second person of prominence to be associated with the Pocahontas coalfield. Others were soon to follow. Some visited briefly, some stayed, and some never saw the area at all but attached themselves to the coalfield via second-party investors or as absentee land, mine, or railroad owners. An “author, lecturer, geological authority, editor of an industrial journal, entrepreneur, and friend of Northern and English capitalists” who “tirelessly promoted Virginia’s natural resources and industrial potential ,” Hotchkiss was described by an acquaintance as “a delightful conversationalist, a charming lecturer, and a man of commanding presence .”5 Hotchkiss was a New Yorker by birth (in 1828), but a trip to the Shenandoah Valley in 1847 turned him into a Virginian. He developed considerable skills as a geographer and mapmaker, and when the Civil War came Hotchkiss furnished maps for several Confederate generals, including Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. He set up shop in an “engineering and topographical office” in Staunton, Virginia, following the war. More important was his near evangelistic effort to convince anyone who would listen of what the abundant raw materials in this part of the country offered investors. Hotchkiss was especially interested in drawing attention to an area he had mapped in what now was southern West Virginia, an area identified by the high and elongated Flat Top Mountain that ran through it in a near north-south direction. It was at the southern end of the mountain where Jordan Nelson had begun chipping away at the coal outcrop described...