Crab Orchard, WV

Crab Orchard is a Raleigh County census-designated place whose name came from crab apple trees, but its twentieth-century footprint was coal. The mine opened in 1920 under Crab Orchard Fuel, changed operators several times, and Gulf Mining ran it from 1940 to 1956. A tipple and trolley once moved coal through the camp, while company houses and mine buildings filled the valley. Only fragments remain now, including a superintendent's house and remnants of the mine.

Crab Orchard also carries an uncomfortable political history: Robert Byrd organized a Ku Klux Klan chapter there in the 1940s before later becoming a major national political figure and publicly condemning his past. That fact is part of the record, but it is not the whole place. Raleigh County's broader story is coal, railroads, company towns, mine disasters, and the communities that remained after production declined. Crab Orchard is a small southern West Virginia place where a name from the orchards sits alongside coal-camp remnants and a past that asks to be remembered without being turned into a slogan.