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Mining in the USA Part 31: West Virginia Compiled by Amy White Associate Editor WorldWide Drilling Resource ® West Virginia has a long and storied history of mining natural resources. Salt was one of the first resources to be developed in the state. In 1797, Elisha Brooks erected the first salt furnace in Kanawha Valley at the mouth of Campbell’s Creek. He produced as much as 150 bushels a day and sold it to settlers for curing butter and meats. West Virginia’s salt industry grew until it reached its peak in 1846, producing 3,224,786 bushels. The Kanawha Valley was one of the largest salt manufacturers in the U.S until a devastating flood in 1861. Due to the flood and Civil War destruction, the Dickinson furnace at Malden was the only salt manufacturer to survive into the 20th century, though the state has large reserves of rock salt below the surface with potential for future use. Iron was nearly as important as salt in terms of pioneer survival, as it was needed for a variety of household and agricultural purposes. The iron industry developed early in West Virginia’s history when small, workable iron veins were discovered in many areas of the state. Furnaces were set up in these locations for smelting ore and to manufacture bar iron for blacksmiths. Production began in 1760 at “The Bloomery,” near Harper’s Ferry, on the lower Shenandoah River. George Washington con- sidered this iron to be superior; thus, in 1794, he established the federal arsenal and gun factory at Harper’s Ferry. By the late 1800s, the smaller iron ore furnaces of West Virginia could no longer compete with production from more accessible, larger iron beds in Minnesota and Michigan. By World War I, only one of the state’s iron mines remained in operation. Limestone was another valuable resource to early settlers in West Virginia, who burned local limestone to produce agricultural lime. Numerous small pits on Briery Mountain, Preston County, prove early farmers quarried Greenbrier Limestone. The Shenandoah Valley in Jefferson and Berkeley Counties, has extensive limestone and dolomite deposits, and the valley became the state’s center of limestone production early on. Large quarries in Berkeley, Jefferson, and Monongalia Counties still produce millions of tons of limestone annually. West Virginia also has Oriskany sandstone which forms the summit of Warm Springs Ridge in Morgan County. It contains at least 98% silica and is used for high-grade glass manufacturing. Access to suitable sand and inexpensive fuel have made West Virginia one of the leading glass manufacturing states in the U.S. The resource most people think of when West Virginia comes to mind is coal. The Mountain State has enormous reserves of bituminous coal with deposits occurring in all but two of its 55 counties. Coal was reportedly mined as early as 1810 when a mine was operated near Wheeling, in the northern panhandle. Growth of the salt industry led to the opening of coal mines to supply furnace fuel during the 1820s and 1830s. Other coal fields began to develop in the state and the commercial coal in- dustry continued to grow with the arrival of railroads in coal fields. The year 1883 was especially important in West Virginia’s coal history with production totaling close to 3 million tons. Large-scale surface mining of coal did not begin until 1914. With the development of huge shovels and draglines, the overburden could be removed more easily. Two more peaks occurred in the state’s coal production history: in 1927, production reached over 146 million tons, and in 1947, it peaked at more than 173 million tons. Though West Virginia has a rich history of coal production, the future of the industry is in question due to a series of federal regulations making it increasingly difficult to mine and burn coal, along with gigantic western coal seams making it hard for eastern producers to compete. In a State of the State address in January 2016, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin said, “Even the most optimistic among us realize it is unlikely coal will ever reach production levels of the past.” Even so, West Virginia is still one of the county’s top coal-producing states. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administrations’s most recent estimates, West Virginia still has 1.7 billion tons of recoverable coal. Image courtesy of Taber Andrew Bain 27 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® MAY 2016