The Natonal Parks Dept. has information online about this part of the coal industy's history. The tipple dropped coal onto the railroad cars. There are also coal furnaces, now decorated in green. Reading about the work made me shiver for the ghosts of the men.
From theNPS website: The mining towns of New River Gorge were initially developed in very remote areas, requiring the miners to live in company constructed houses. The houses were strategically segregated between racial and ethnic groups, black from white, Welsh and English from Irish, Italians from Polish, in order to help prevent unionization efforts among the miners. In spite of these attempts at segregation and polarization, each miner, no matter what the color of their skin or background, was there to make a living and depended on each other for safety in such a dangerous underground environment. As one miner said “We are all black at the end of the day when we come out of that hell hole.”
Of which there were 80 in Nuttallburg. Coal was put into the oven where it was heated creating choking smoke emissions. The end consumer product was called "smokeless" coal.
