154 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The presence of coal in Virginia, West Virginia, and
Kentucky was well established by the 1870s. Yet it
was Jedediah Hotchkiss who mapped and profiled
the economic potential of the region for investors.
In his hands, maps were instruments of development,
for the greatest obstacle to Appalachian mining
was geography: without railroads, there was no
way to transport coal to market, much less to make
it profitable. The map at right highlights the role
Hotchkiss played in attracting railroad investors from
Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and London.
In 1873 Collis Huntington financed the first
railroad across the mountains of West Virginia,
designed to ship coal to Richmond. The Chesapeake
& Ohio Railway was largely built by African Americans
who had been freed during the Civil War. Many of
these men lost their lives constructing this railroad
through difficult and dangerous terrain. The
completion of the C&O railroad launched a twenty-
year boom in the region that was directly aided by
maps such as this, which guided both land sales and
future rail routes.
In 1881 Hotchkiss learned from his friend Frederick
Kimball, vice president of the newly organized
Norfolk & Western Railway, that the company would
invest in the coal fields of southern Virginia. Kimball
sought guidance from Hotchkiss, who in turn gave
him maps and information detailing the unmatched
potential of the Great Flat-Top Coalfield in Tazewell
and Mercer Counties. Kimball’s tip also led Hotchkiss
to purchase 60,000 acres of rich coal fields further
west in McDowell County.
Within two years Kimball had become president of
the Norfolk & Western Railway, and took Hotchkiss’
advice about building a route to the coal fields along
the Bluestone River. In 1882 the railroad founded the
town of Pocahontas as a hub for its nearby mining
operations, and the following year it delivered its first
MAPPING THE MOTHERLODE
Jedediah Hotchkiss, “Map of Part of
the Great Flat-Top Coal-Field of
Va. & W. Va.,” 1886
load of coal to Norfolk. The company’s headquarters
in Roanoke transformed that sleepy town of under
700 in 1880 to over 16,000 within a decade.
The Norfolk & Western’s decision to invest in the
Great Flat-Top Coalfield was enormously profitable,
and prompted Kimball to expand its railroad route
further. Hotchkiss drew this map to encourage
investment by others along that new route. Particularly
audacious was Kimball’s decision to extend the railroad
3,000 feet through Great Flat-Top Mountain (at the
left edge of the map), to the motherlode in McDowell
County. This became the most productive coal county
in West Virginia. Kimball then pushed even further by
forging the railroad north to the Ohio River to serve
massive new coal markets in the Midwest and the Great
Lakes. Hotchkiss was right: railroad companies could
reap their greatest rewards by owning both the mines
and the modes of transportation that brought coal
to market.
Maps such as this drew capital to the Virginias
and Kentucky, and Hotchkiss was uniquely equipped
to produce them. The coal boom in this region meant
that some of the first detailed maps of Appalachia
profiled the region in economic terms for distant
investors. These early maps emphasized railroads,
coal outcroppings, and new mining prospects. Maps
have long been instruments of economic decision
making, but this region was initially mapped in detail
because of its mining potential.
Before the Civil War, the people of southern
Appalachia had been subsistence farmers. With
the advent of mining they became enmeshed in an
international market that would determine not just
the price of coal but also the conditions of their work
and life. Engaged in mining, they remained dependent
upon the land, but now lived in isolated company towns
that were often divided along racial and ethnic lines.
At the mercy of outside forces, miners experienced the
same lack of control that characterized the lives of their
counterparts in factories and fields across the country.
For those whose families had farmed independently
for generations, the disruption made them more than
a little suspicious of the outside world. Coal mining
advanced American industrialization, but not without
significant human and environmental costs.