After the Disaster: Re-creating Community and Well-Being at Buffa ...

Buffalo Mining Company (BMC) and a number of smaller coal companies used these tracks to transport coal in gondola cars from the half dozen mines in the ridges above the Buffalo Creek Valley down through the town of Man, then down along the Guyandotte River to the city of Logan (the county seat, fifteen miles downstream), and eventually to shipping ports on the Kanawha River near Charleston, the state capital.

The coal camps of Buffalo Creek varied in size, composition, and services. Some of them, such as Kistler, Amherstdale, Lundale, and Lorado, had hundreds of households, as well as schools, churches, repair shops, theaters, and company stores. Others, such as Stowe and Three Forks, consisted of little more than a few dozen dwellings and a church or two. Altogether, about 4,950 people lived in Buffalo Creek’s sixteen camps. Most of them depended on coal mining in some way or another, with perhaps 600 of them working regularly in the local mines. Hundreds more were retired or disabled. Housewives and children made up the bulk of the population. In contrast to many coal camps and other areas of Appalachia, Buffalo Creek’s coal mines had been operating at full production, or nearly so, for the better part of a decade before 1972. The standard of living of many of Buffalo Creek’s households had improved significantly during that time. Many families had achieved stable, working-class status. They had been able to purchase old, wood-frame, four-room houses without modern conveniences (often referred to as “four rooms and a path to the woods”) that the coal companies had built for their miners decades before that. The new homeowners then spent years upgrading those houses with modern plumbing and heating, adding on rooms, porches, and garages, and outfitting them with an abundance of appliances and consumer goods. They were “house-proud” people who felt they belonged in neighborhoods with other house-proud people who had achieved a fair share of the American dream of economic and social well-being, if not affluence. Writing in 1976, sociologist Kai Erikson described the status of Buffalo Creek’s people this way (as mentioned in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter):