Buffalo Creek at the Time of the Flood
An excerpt from The Pittston Mentality (link) by Thomas N. Bethell and Davitt McAteer:
Buffalo Creek, in Logan County, is reasonably typical for the southern part of West Virginia – a long, winding hollow, snaking between steep ridges on both sides for more than 20 miles from the town of Saunders, at it’s headwaters, to the town of Man, where the creek empties into the Guyandotte River, which flows north to join the Ohio River at Huntington. The narrow valley is just wide enough for the creek, the railroad, and an almost unending line of company-built houses stretching along both sides of the tracks. There are occasional wide places in the valley where tributaries flow into Buffalo Creek, and in the wide places there used to be towns—small towns that nobody ever heard of, places like Kistler, Crown, Accoville, Braeholm, Fanco, Becco, Amherstdale, Robinette, Latrobe, Crites, Stowe, Lundale, Craneco, Lorado, and Pardee. Some of the names come from coal companies that no longer exist.
As coal towns go, these were old, most of them built before World War I. They were in varying stages of decline. Some of them were not much more than post office addresses. The old frame two-family houses were settling unevenly. Some had collapsed altogether. Others, considering their age and the haste with which they had been built, were in surprisingly good shape. As a general rule, if a house was freshly painted you could assume that a working miner lived there.
The population of Buffalo Creek has fluctuated with time, declining when the coal industry declined, recovering when the industry recovered. In 1970, coal had its best year since 1947, and a rosy glow of optimism suffused National Coal Association predictions for the future. Big companies opened new mines along Buffalo Creek and stepped up production in their old ones.
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