Winding Gulf Coalfield

The Winding Gulf Coalfield is located in western Raleigh County and eastern Wyoming County, in southern West Virginia. The Winding Gulf coalfield is named after Winding Gulf Creek, a tributary of the Guyandotte River. In the early 20th century, it was promoted as the "Billion Dollar Coalfield".

The nomadic Native Americans who hunted there for thousands of years ending in the Woodland Period and the early European settlers in the Virginia Colony and the Commonwealth of Virginia were generally aware of the "rock that burns" which lay below the rugged terrain of the mountainous area which became southern West Virginia. However, aside from some personal mines, no commercial value had been realized by the mid 19th century.

Noted British geologist David T. Ansted (1814-1880) was among the early experts hired by potential investors to survey promising coal fields along the New River in southern Virginia in the United States. In 1853, Dr. Ansted helped identify the rich bituminous coal seams which lay there. His work set the stage for a mining boom in the area, where he invested in land in what became the new state of West Virginia in 1863 during the American Civil War (1861-1865).

It took transportation and industrialized techniques to realize the commercial potential. A protégé of Dr. Ansted, William N. Page (1854-1932), became a leading industrialist and developer of iron furnaces, coal mines and railroads in the area, leading and managing such enterprises as the Gauley Mountain Coal Company for absentee investors, many of whom were based overseas in the United Kingdom. Page came to West Virginia to help complete the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O) between Richmond, Virginia and the Ohio River in the early 1870s, and helped develop branch lines to coal mining facilities. Former West Virginia Governor William A. MacCorkle described him as a man who knew the land "as a farmer knows a field." Beginning in 1898, Page began working on a scheme to expand into the Winding Gulf area, which was also in the sights of the C&O, whose main line ran along the New and Kanawha River Valleys.

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