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Coal Towns/Keokee, Virginia
Initially known as Crab Orchard, the village that became Keokee had existed since the first Europeans had settled there in the late 1700s. Mainly subsisting on the timber industry and farming, residents of Crab Orchard watched as the coal industry moved into their neighborhood in the early 1900s. Initial plans were laid by Charles Page Perin, a trained mining engineer and former employee of Carnegie Steel. His earlier work had taken him to Russia and India where he had established himself as an innovator in the steel industry.
After his initial work at Imboden in 1902, Perin focused his attention on Crab Orchard. Organizing the Keokee Coal and Coke Company, named after his wife, he had designed and built a formal town that differed dramatically from the traditional coal town architecture. In Keokee, as the town was becoming known, the public buildings were scattered rather than clumped together. Also, the homes were single family cottages, again sprinkled along the road giving a sense of privacy and individualism. With a depot, commissary, power plant, school, churches, a golf course, and other establishments, the town became an example of the good life that industrialism could bring to the local farmers, immigrants, and black migrants.
Perin's operation was almost too perfect. Running three different mines at the same time gave him an opportunity to experiment with technology. Ambitious to a fault, Perin's initial investment had ensured that Keokee was one of the most technically advanced coal and coke operations in the country, but that also saddled it with substantial debt. In a restructuring move, Perin combined the Keokee and Imboden operations in 1909 creating the Keokee Consolidated Coke Company. The next year, he sold his mining interests to Stonega Coke and Coal. Until the decline of the coal business in 1927, the Keokee operations ran smoothly and profitably, but that year, SC&C closed the mines and dismantled their town.
For the next twenty years, small mines dotted the landscape around Keokee along with farms. However, in 1947, the Stonega Company returned to the valley. That year, it opened mines at Glenbrook, just across the mountain from Keokee, in Kentucky . With new interests, SC&C decided to redesign and rebuilt the town to serve the Glenbrook mine. The flurry of activity that followed saw the second town in forty years built on the site. These new homes were more advanced than anything previously build on such a scale in the region. The one hundred new houses had electricity, indoor plumbing, telephone service, and an attached garage. Rather than renting the houses, the company then offered eighty of the structures for sale to employees who could finance them through payroll deduction. It seemed that even small country towns were realizing the middle class American dream.
After running coal for sixteen years, SC&C sold its Glenbrook interests along with the assets still owned by the company, including some of the houses. In the years that have passed since the sale, Keokee remains a well preserved mining community. Visitors can still see the old commissary, which is now used as a school gymnasium; the old power plant was later converted to a theater and now stands abandoned; the church in the woods is an original structure; and many of the 1947 houses remain standing.
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This page last updated: May 31, 2005
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