The story
Nuttallburg was one of nearly fifty coal towns strung along the New River Gorge. English-born entrepreneur John Nuttall began buying the coal-rich land in 1870, and when the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway reached the gorge in 1873 he had already built dozens of houses and coke ovens, ready to ship the region's prized 'smokeless' coal to industrial cities hundreds of miles away.
Its most famous owner arrived in 1920, when Henry Ford bought the mines as part of a scheme to control every step of production for his River Rouge auto plant — the coal, the coke, the shipping, all of it. Ford's grand plan never fully worked and he sold out within a few years, but the town kept mining until the underground works were sealed in 1958.
The Nuttall family gave the site to the National Park Service in 1998, and after years of clearing and stabilization it is now considered one of the most complete coal-mining complexes left in the country. The star relic is the enormous headhouse and conveyor that carried coal down the gorge wall to the tipple — an industrial cathedral standing in the returning forest.
What remains today
The great coal conveyor and headhouse, the tipple, rows of coke ovens, foundations, and interpretive trails, inside New River Gorge National Park.
Questions from the field
- Did Henry Ford really own Nuttallburg?
- Yes — Ford acquired the Nuttallburg mines in 1920 to feed his River Rouge plant with coal and coke, part of a vertical-integration scheme he abandoned within a few years.
- What makes Nuttallburg special among coal ghost towns?
- It's regarded as one of the most complete surviving coal-mining complexes in West Virginia, including its intact conveyor, headhouse, tipple, and coke ovens, all stabilized by the National Park Service.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
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Check in at Nuttallburg — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
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Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
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Primary sources for this record
- — National Park Service — New River Gorge, Nuttallburg Historic Site
- — National Register of Historic Places — Nuttallburg Coal Mining Complex and Town Historic District
- — West Virginia Division of Culture and History records