New River Gorge: Fayette Station Road

Next, we're heading down Fayette Station Road to our first look at the bridge from underneath.

This road starts out through Lansing, a small community that began as a farming and coal mining town. It's quiet now, but picture the gorge a hundred years ago. It was a bustling, noisy, smoky place, with thousands of people living in it. New towns grew up around every bend of the river. Trains rolled through all day long, and smoke from coke ovens that burned around the clock hung in the valley and hid the views we come here for today.

Most of that is hard to see now. Over the years, the forest has grown back over the old towns and mine sites, and the ruins are tucked away under the trees. In summer, the leaves can even hide the river.

The coal itself is far older than any of it. About three hundred million years ago, long before the dinosaurs, this was a vast, flat, humid swamp, thick with trees, ferns and mosses. As the plants died, they piled up in the stagnant water and became peat. Buried under thousands of feet of sediment, the peat was pressed and heated for millions of years, until it hardened into coal. Here, it became a high grade of coal that would one day fire steel mills, ships and trains around the world.

In 1978, Congress made the gorge part of the National Park System, to protect the river and to tell the story of the people who lived and worked here.

Next, we're heading down to the river, to the old station at the bottom of the gorge.

People living near the gorge knew about its coal long before anyone mined it on a large scale. It showed in the cliffs, and Native Americans and early settlers may have gathered some of it for their own use. But the big seams sat mostly untouched until 1873, when the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway finished its line through the gorge.

That railroad changed everything. Suddenly the seaports of the East were connected, through this gorge, to Cincinnati, Saint Louis and Chicago. Businessmen moved in fast and opened mines. The railroad became the gorge's highway, linking towns that could hardly be reached any other way. African Americans came up from the South, and thousands of European immigrants came looking for work and a better life. There were so many trains that people down here could read the morning paper from Richmond or Cincinnati on the day it was printed. In 1910, more than two hundred people a day passed through the new train station at Thurmond, upriver.

The mines were built high on the walls of the gorge, and chutes and conveyors carried the coal down to the tracks. By 1905, about seventy-five mines were working in the gorge, between there and Hawks Nest.

Two of the towns grew up at the bottom of this road, one on each bank: Fayette, and South Fayette across the river. Fayette began with a landowner named Martin Blume. He sold the railroad the right to build through his land, and as part of the deal, he and his descendants could ride the trains for free, for as long as they ran. That bargain lasted more than a century. By 1875, two years after the first train, his town already had a post office, a depot, a store and a saloon. The town also had a three-story store, and even a garage where people left their cars while they traveled by train.

In the late 1800s, this road was unpaved, carried traffic both ways and was never plowed in winter. Mudslides were a constant problem, and they still are.

All the while, water trickles down through these hillsides, through layers of shale, sandstone and coal, and into the creeks that feed the river. One old mine on this slope, the Ajax, is now a honeycomb of flooded tunnels. And the river below has a long way to go. It starts in the mountains near Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and flows north. Past this gorge, it joins the Gauley to form the Kanawha, which runs to the Ohio, then the Mississippi. A drop of water from a spring on this slope may end up in the Gulf of Mexico.

Next, we're heading up the far side of the gorge, to Wolf Creek and the Kaymoor Trail.

This side was South Fayette, one of the first stops on the railroad's main line. Fayetteville, the county seat, sits up on top, and anyone headed there came by train to the bottom of the gorge first. From there, the trip up was by mule-drawn hack, an open-sided wagon with bench seats, pulled by a team of four mules. A county history from 1929 says the climb took an hour. Parts of that old wagon road are now a hiking trail.

By 1911, the traffic had outgrown the old road, and the county engineer, H. A. Gentry, designed a new one. The county put its prisoners to work on it, men serving time for misdemeanors, and the local paper promised one of the best stretches of road in the whole state. It was surfaced with layers of crushed and compacted stone. People first called it by his name, and it was the first road in its district improved with money from a bond issue.

When automobiles came, a taxi company from the county seat sent cars to meet every train, and the trip up the hill dropped to about fifteen minutes. The towns at the bottom never did get their electric line, though. Two attempts to run one down here, the second in 1914, both fell through.

Next, we're heading up toward the rim, to the Bridge Trail trailhead, where this tour ends. On the way up, the road passes under the big bridge one more time.

Between the 1870s and the 1950s, coal from this gorge helped build industrial America. It fed the country's trains, factories, ships and power plants. In 1927, West Virginia passed Pennsylvania as the nation's leading coal producer.

The work drew English, Irish, Italian, northern European and African American miners, and they lived on both sides of the river in houses the company owned. They shopped at the company store with company money, called scrip. They played on company baseball teams and in company bands. Underground, shared danger built strong bonds, whatever a man's race or homeland.

The work itself was brutal. Usually two miners worked a section together, often lying on their sides in a cramped, wet space that might be only three or four feet high. They cut under the coal seam with short-handled picks, blasted it loose with dynamite and shoveled it into a mine car, tagged with their payroll numbers. By the mid-1920s, a single miner could load more than ten tons in a day. Some of that coal went into ovens heated to two thousand degrees, to make coke, a hotter-burning fuel for making steel.

Above ground, life was hard in other ways. Miners were kept in debt to the company for their housing, tools and supplies, and were often cheated of their pay. Between 1890 and 1912, West Virginia's mines killed workers at a higher rate than any other state's. When miners organized unions, owners hired armed guards, fired union men and played workers against each other by race and class. Some of the most violent fights between labor and management in American history took place here in southern West Virginia.

Coal mining in the gorge has stopped. The forest has taken the towns back, and the cliffs above the old mines are now some of the most exciting rock climbing in the East.

Those cliffs at the top of the gorge are Nuttall sandstone. It's very hard rock, and it resists weathering because it's so full of quartz. A hundred years ago, though, the men who lived here weren't climbing the cliffs. They were working deep inside these hills, in the dark, side by side in seams too low to stand up in.