Kaymoor

The story

Kaymoor was an unusual coal operation: two complete camps for a single mine. The Low Moor Iron Company opened the works in 1899 to feed its Virginia blast furnaces, naming the town for James Kay, the man who built it. Kaymoor Top sat on the rim of the New River Gorge; Kaymoor Bottom lay hundreds of feet below at the river. There were no churches or saloons here — just company stores, schools, the mine, and the coke ovens.

The two halves were linked by a steep haulage incline and, for the miners on foot, a long wooden staircase. At its peak the mine employed more than 800 men, many of them immigrants and African Americans, and over 62 years it produced nearly 17 million tons of coal — an exceptionally long life for a coal town, most of which lasted only a couple of decades.

The seam gave out and postwar demand slumped; Kaymoor Bottom was abandoned by 1952, a 1960 fire took most of what remained, and the mine closed for good in 1962. Today the ruins are reached by the Kaymoor Miners Trail, whose final descent is a staircase of 821 steps down to the coke ovens and the shell of the processing plant.

What remains today

The coal-processing plant ruins, a long row of coke ovens, the mine portal and haulage incline, and the 821-step miners' staircase, in New River Gorge National Park.

From the archives

Kaymoor Coal Mine, South side of New River, upstream of New River Gorge Bridge, Fayetteville, Fayette County,

Kaymoor turns up on 82 digitized newspaper pages from West Virginia — read them free in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection.

Source: Library of Congress digital collections.