The Tug Fork of the Big Sandy is a uniquely notorious Appalachian river, the primary setting of the infamous Hatfield and McCoy clans and their legendary feud, multiple environmental disasters, devastating floods, and rugged, isolated frontier existence.

If you’re looking for a place on nobody’s holiday destination list, I’ve got just the place for you. The Tug Fork valley, which forms most of the border between Kentucky and West Virginia, is one of the most desolate, forlorn and historically violent places in America. Few places in America are as steeped in tragic history. On the upper, north-flowing Tug, there are no wineries or breweries, although there is one moonshinery. No bistros or delicatessens. There are no golf courses or exclusive clubs. It is one of the nation’s poorest places, with high rates of poverty and drug abuse, and a life expectancy well below the national average. It also has some of the most beautiful and technically challenging roads anywhere, that you’ll have mostly to yourself.

So my friend Nick and I decided to go.

Our plan was to ride as close as possible to the Tug from its headwaters near Jenkinjones, West Virginia — isn’t that an awesome name? It’s named after a guy named Jenkin Jones, as you’d expect — as far north as Matewan, the epicenter of the feud, looking for stories.

We departed Blacksburg on U.S. 460 west toward Bluefield on a sterling early fall day on the only four-lane road of our trip. Already on our wireless communicators, I was apologizing to Nick, as I’d planned for at least part of our route on dirt roads, not ideal for his big dresser Harley-Davidson. But he’s always a good sport, and we hoped for clear sailing.

Passing through Boissevain, Virginia, across the border into West Virginia, it was shocking how quickly four-lane gave way to two-lane to single lane and then to dirt, as we attempted to ride over Stone Ridge into Jenkinjones. A few hundred yards after the pavement stopped, we saw in front of us a mud puddle large enough to swallow a VW Beetle. So we turned around. Jenkinjones would have to wait for another trip, maybe on other motorcycles.

Instead, we diverted to U.S. 52, the main highway in these parts, which stretches from Charleston, South Carolina, all the way to the Canadian border above North Dakota. The poverty and decrepitude, abandoned stores, and crumbling homes and churches that are constant features of McDowell County were readily apparent.

From there, we diverted again, this time over a serpentine road with several tornanti — hairpin switchbacks rivaling the Stelvio — over to Gary Hollow.

We refueled in Gary, a larger community that in 1980 housed 2,233 people but now only a third of that. Named for Elbert Henry Gary, one of the founders of U.S. Steel, that corporation’s Gary Hollow town once produced as much as a quarter of the metallurgical coal used by U.S. Steel during World War II. By 1982, U.S. Steel had closed every mine there, laying off around 550 miners. The unemployment rate hit 90%, and the population plummeted. When U.S. Steel vanished, they left most of their infrastructure to the cruelties of natural decay and gravity. From the bridge over the Tug Fork, here barely wider than a creek, I could see a tree fallen atop a stressed power line.

Still, it was a charming village with the notable Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church dominating the skyline.

As you have deduced, coal has always been the dominant economic driver of this region, and coal made this area rich and when the mining employment collapsed, appallingly poor. The black rock that burns would be a constant theme for our trip and for the birth, history and decline of the Mountain State.

West Virginia was born during the Civil War. Prior to the war, trans-Allegheny Virginia’s settlements mostly clustered in the Ohio River Valley — places like Wheeling, Parkersburg, and Huntington — and were building industrial economies like other cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville, apart from the still agrarian economy of “old” Virginia to the east, centered around Richmond. When the Virginia government decided to join the Confederacy, businessmen primarily in Wheeling decided if Virginia could secede from the Union, they could form their own state and secede from Virginia.

The constitution they created for their new state made it especially easy for outside, moneyed, industrially-minded interests to dominate the state. These land, coal, and timber companies had only exploitation in mind, caring nothing for the communities they founded or the people they employed. West Virginia is working hard to build a more diverse economy, notably towards tourism, but as coal’s fortunes waned, especially following World War II, most of the state suffered, and the peak population of 2 million in 1950 has been on an unsteady decline ever since to an estimated 1.77 million now.

No county east of the Mississippi has given this nation more coal than McDowell, and no county has suffered a greater decline. It is the poorest of the poor.

On the short run between Gary and Welch, the county seat, we drove under a towering, moldering, coal conveyor bridge. Not a place we wanted to stop.

A bustling place in its heyday, Welch, “the heart of the nation’s coal bin,” has suffered with the rest of the county. Situated at the confluence of Elkhorn Creek and the Tug Fork, Welch’s colorful history includes daylight assassinations of local officials, a 1960 visit by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, the 2016 abandonment of a Walmart supercenter and multiple crippling floods.

Planning to picnic at the Martha Moore Riverfront Park in the shade of a five-story mural, Nick and I were joined by a man who pulled in to chat with us. He told us that he’d been sheriff, deputy sheriff and county clerk. He’d seen us gawk at the fantastic Romanesque Revival-style courthouse and figured we were tourists, so he wanted to welcome us personally. He said the county had around 18,000 people now, down from around 100,000 in 1950. The tax base had been shrinking also because after serious floods, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers bought their property, which now makes it no longer taxable.

“The county has a great group of employees, and everyone works well together. But the job loss has been great since (employment in) the mining industry has gone down, which has put a lot of people out of work. There’s still some coal mining. But with mechanization, there are many fewer jobs,” he said.

A noisy train rumbled by on tracks just across the Tug River, interrupting our chat.

“Coal (mining) has mostly gone away. We’ve had disastrous floods. But we’re still here. It’s a great place to be. We welcome visitors,” our new friend said.

Outside Welch, the Tug Fork enters its most perilous canyon, which hosts the former Norfolk and Western, now Norfolk Southern main-line railroad tracks but is too rugged for highway U.S. 52, which gains altitude to bypass it. We temporarily left U.S. 52 for the more twisty, more scenic West Virginia Route 7, which parallels the Tug Fork. This is a spectacular road for motorcycling, through Capels, Davy and Hensley, as the railroad employed multiple bridges and tunnels to attempt to stay as straight as possible and the road serpentined above and around it. The mainline tracks would follow the Tug for the rest of our journey into Matewan.

Unfortunately, Nick had a minor spill on his Harley, making a mistake trying to negotiate one of the many tight turns. In my rearview mirror, I saw him going down, so I found a place to turn my Honda around and help him get his monstrous bike upright again – damn that bike is heavy. I argued vainly that he’d be better served by something smaller, more maneuverable and easier to set upright after a spill, but HD brand loyalty is unshakeable. Fortunately, he was unhurt, and the Harley only needed minor tweaking to get underway again.

He told me later that he’d lost his focus and instead of looking through the curve like he should have, allowed himself to get momentarily distracted.

“I realized my mistake too late and had to brake hard which resulted in the bike laying over,” he said.

He wanted his mistake to be a cautionary tale for every rider, no matter the skill level, as they ride curvy roads.

We rejoined U.S. 52 at Roderfield and into Iaeger, where we crossed a 20-yard wide mud-puddle of standing water leading into downtown. Iaeger is an especially haunting ghost town where not a single storefront was occupied. We peered inside big picture windows at the former office of The Industrial News,” where Macintosh computers and a paste-up board sat below fallen acoustic ceiling tiles. On the side of the Montgomery WARD Catalog Sales Agency building was a painted mural advertising RC Cola. An excruciatingly loud Norfolk Southern train screeched by.

Somewhere off to our left was the junction where Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia came together, but there was no road access. Our plan from there was to divert through Wharncliffe to the banks of the Tug, but I remembered from prior trips that access to the river was by more gravel roads. Wishing to spare Nick and his Harley any more traumas, we pointed north on U.S. 52 through Gilbert toward Matewan.

Just up the mountain beyond Gilbert, we entered the strangest stretch of road on the trip, 10-miles of the King Coal Highway. Originally envisioned in 1999 to dramatically shorten the 95-mile drive from Bluefield to Williamson paralleling U.S. 52, only short segments of the King Coal are now open to traffic. In this stretch coming into Matewan, it is situated mostly atop the mountains, far above the hollows of U.S. 52 and the Tug River Valley. There was not a single house or commercial establishment up there, but strangely it hosted the Mingo Central High School, many miles from anybody who actually attends or works there.

Once in Matewan — it’s pronounced “mate-wan” and named for a former town called Matteawan in upstate New York — we decided to ride upriver, south, toward the villages of Cedar, where there was a fatal train crash in 1958, and Vulcan to see the bridge that became international news in 1977 (see sidebars). We found the one-lane Vulcan Bridge, rode across, and then again encountered a rock-strewn dirt road. So we retreated to Matewan.

We checked into the lovely Historic Matewan House, parking our motorcycles on Mate Street directly in front. We enjoyed a marvelous dinner at the Mi Pueblito Mexican Restaurant, with reasonable prices and ample servings. Outside, we walked through a gate in Matewan’s flood wall, built in 1977 to protect the tiny town from the tempestuous Tug.

Before the wall, Matewan had endured the reputation as the most frequently flooded town in the country. I’d heard that the barrier, with earthen embankments, 30-foot tall concrete and massive steel doors across the roads and railroad tracks, cost more than the assessed value of the town. But on several occasions since its commissioning, including last February, it has saved the historic town from catastrophic flooding.

Our bedroom was lovely and we might have had a restful sleep, except every hour or two, a train rumbled by just outside the inn, close enough to wobble the comfortable queen beds. The screech of 500 conical steel wheels on the curving track was bad enough, but because there was a road crossing nearby, every locomotive needed to serenade us with its horns.

Breakfast was included in the room charge, a typical but sumptuous country fare of real eggs, bacon, sausage, homemade biscuits, and gravy, all you can eat, of course.

Last time I was in Matewan, I spoke with David Hatfield, owner/operator of the Historic Matewan House. Yes, even now the area is populated with people surnamed either Hatfield or McCoy, so prolific were these original settler families. Over breakfast, I asked him about the changes during those four years.

“I purchased it in 2015. Business is growing, but slowly. There are factors that inhibit growth. I wanted to build for the future. There are lots of empty storefronts. The low point (for the town population) was around 2000 to 2014. There’s been a decline since the days the first machine was used in a coal mine. There may be less than 1,000 miners now working within a ten-mile radius. But now we’re transitioning away.

 

“The King Coal Highway should have been built 50 years ago but probably will not be completed for the next 75 years. Nobody in the government is pushing to have it completed. Their emphasis is north of Huntington, Charleston and Beckley,” Hatfield said.

He told me the football team at Mingo Central High School, up on the King Coal highway, won a West Virginia state championship in 2016, a source of pride for the community, but they’re losing their most precious asset, which is young people.

“I bet that 95% of the boys on that football team have since moved away. I hate to say it, but we’ve lost the best people first. They go to the military or college and they don’t come back. That’s continuing,” he said. “Most of our visitors come for our four-wheeling and motorcycling trails. We’re developing the Tug River as an asset.”

“It’s much cleaner and healthier now. More than 16,000 tires have been removed from just a small stretch of the river. There are more fish now. More herons, eagles, beavers and otters are coming back. People ride canoes and kayaks, but there are no commercial shuttle services.

“We’re open all year, even in mid-winter when we don’t have guests. We’ve had guests from New Zealand, from Germany, from California, and Saskatchewan. Ohio and Pennsylvania are No. 1 and 2,” he said.

“We don’t have competitors. Nobody does what we do. We fix you a nice breakfast. We give you ice for your cooler. We give you firewood for the pit. We give you homemade brownies and drinks. Our only competition is ourselves,” Hatfield said.

The next morning dawned bright and clear, with cotton candy clouds hugging the ridge tops. We retraced our prior day’s path over the King Coal Highway and then to Gilbert, and then pointed due east through Pineville, Itmann, and Matoaka to Princeton, on several especially awesome motorcycling roads that, if closer to population centers and given names of fictional reptiles, would be crawling with bikes. We had mostly unobstructed runs.

The state that filled the nation’s coal bucket and fueled the Industrial Revolution is now second in the nation in per capita consumption of federal assistance, reaping $2.91 in tax dollars for every $1 contributed. The paradox of West Virginia is that although it’s near the bottom of almost every quality-of-life index, residents are intensely proud. It’s jaw-droppingly beautiful, and thus irresistible to those of us for whom country roads are a real thing. y

Michael Abraham is a Blacksburg, Virginia-based writer and businessman. He has eight books in print, including “Chasing the Powhatan Arrow, a Travelogue in Economic Geography.”

The crippling and rebirth of the N&W 611

Just south of Matewan, outside the village of Cedar, in the middle of a brutal winter night in January 1956, a terrible calamity happened. The N&W “Pocahontas” passenger train, pulled by the magnificent J-Class 611 locomotive, jumped the tracks and fell toward the icy Tug Fork River, taking its tender and four trailing cars with her. It’s a wonder only her engineer was killed, although dozens of passengers were injured, some severely.

The 611 was one of 14 streamlined coal-burning J-Class locomotives, one of the fastest, most powerful,and beautiful steam locomotives ever produced. But by the time the Pocahontas crashed that evening, the proverbial handwriting was close to being written on the wall that steam locomotives would soon give way to the operational superiority of diesel locomotives.

The cause of the crash was never officially determined. Perhaps speed was an issue. Maybe the engineer was running late, or thought he was. Maybe there was a flaw in the track. It is also unknown whether his fatal heart attack occurred before the crash or during it, but the forensic coroner listed the cause of death on his death certificate not as scalding, as originally thought, but as coronary thrombosis.

Accounts from the day don’t give much information on the rescue efforts for the injured, although it must have been some time before emergency crews could be summoned to arrive on the scene, given the remoteness and lack of communication and access.

In any event, the 611 was lifted back on the track and towed back to the Roanoke Shops where she’d been built,to repair the damage and return her to service.

A mere two years later, N&W management decided to switch entirely to diesel, a transition that was to be made immediately rather than gradually. Its CEO ordered that all its steam locomotives be scrapped. Rail-fans of the era, recognizing the preservation importance, convinced him to donate the 611 and a couple of other locomotives from other important classes to the city of Roanoke. Of the J-class locomotives, the 611 was probably chosen for preservation because it had most recently been refurbished.

Seven decades later, 611 is still operational and stored at the Virginia Museum of Transportation there, taken out annually for excursion runs, which are wildly popular. Had 611 not gone over the embankment that cold winter night into the Tug Fork River, it, like its deceased sisters, might now exist only as scrap steel and memories.

How the USSR helped Vulcan get its bridge

Like the rest of the region, the tiny community of Vulcan hit hard times with the demise of the coal industry. The schoolchildren had to cross a suspension footbridge across the Tug into Kentucky to catch their buses, and cross live rails, sometimes crawling under parked railroad cars, to get there. Already death-defying with missing footboards, the bridge collapsed one day in 1977, and something needed to be done. The state government seemed indifferent to their plight, arguing that too few people would be served.

Feeling forsaken, a local bartender hatched a plan! He wrote to the USSR and East German embassies in Washington, requesting foreign aid. The Kremlin never replied to his plea; however, a New York-based Russian journalist heard about it and drove to Vulcan to assess the situation. Her article made international news, for all the wrong reasons.

In those days, Americans feared and hated the Communists, so a small West Virginia community receiving aid would be a major embarrassment. Quickly the state committed $1.3 million. Two years later, Vulcan had the one-lane bridge to the outside, finally, after the eyes of the world were focused on a tiny, Tug Fork River community.