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Coal Towns/Arno, Virginia
In 1890, Stonega Coke and Coal Company representative John Taggart built an experimental beehive-style coke oven near a coal seam he discovered on Preacher Creek. The oven worked and hundreds of that same style were build farther up Callahan Creek. By the end of 1908, the company returned to Preacher Creek where they began mining and built the town of Arno near the entrance of the hollow.
For more than a decade, small but profitable Arno thrived. Although hemmed in by the steep hills along the creek, the town stretched along the creek and into small hollows and had the typical public buildings of coal towns. With a commissary, doctor's office, theater, and churches, the residents, many of whom were black, lived and worked in a town that probably looked much like the other company towns of the area. In all, more than 130 houses were built in Arno during this initial phase.
Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, Arno grew with a booming coal and coke business. By 1924 however, conditions locally and otherwise undermined Arno . In 1922, the company began building Derby , a much bigger and more modern town, farther up the hollow. By 1924, the three Arno mines, which had averaged more than 300 employees during the preceding years, began shrinking. That year, only 120 men worked in Arno mine number three, the only remaining open mine, the next year 128, but by 1926 the mine was all but shut down employing only 43. Although the mines at Arno would recover somewhat during the later 1920s and 1930s, operations were closed there in 1940 as Derby established itself as one of the company's most profitable towns.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Arno remained occupied although the men either worked at Derby or one of the other local mines. By the early 1960s however, many of the houses and pulic buildings had been destroyed. In the early 1970s, Arno breathed one last unfortunate sigh when one side of a mountain of slate, piled next to the road decades before, gave way and crashed across the road and through several houses killing one person.
Drivers through Arno today see only shadows of what once existed. Apart from several scattered houses, footings from the public buildings sit along the road and an old mine entrance can be seen across the creek. The superintendent's home originally stood by the road at the mouth of the hollow, but now stands across Callahan Creek from Andover .
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This page last updated: May 31, 2005
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