West Virginia's Kaymoor Coal Mine

Kaymoor was one of the largest coal mine complexes in the New River Gorge in West Virginia. Here, workers mined over 16 millions tons of coal and processed one million tons of coke between 1899 and 1962. Kaymoor was a company town, built by the Low Moor Iron Company of Virginia to produce fuel for its iron furnaces. Later sold to the New River & Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company, coal and coke from Kaymoor was sold to national and international markets.

The company controlled everything at Kaymoor... It had the mine, coal processing operations, a power station, stores, churches, schools and houses for workers and their families. Monthly rent was $5. The costs of living expenses were deducted from each worker’s pay before they received their wage (paid in company money – scrip). There were two towns, Kaymoor Top (where the haulage house at the end of the video was) and Kaymoor Bottom, which was where much of the video was focused. By 1923, 560 people lived here, 140 of whom were employees that worked in and outside the mine. A baseball team, theater and tennis courts added to life in this community.

As the nation’s fuel needs changed and underground mining became less profitable, the company closed the Kaymoor Mine in 1962.

To bring everything seen in the video together for you, this is how things worked when the mine was still operational…

1) Miners typically arrived at the adit by riding the cable car (also known as the mountain haulage).

2) Miners picked up a supply of explosives at the powder house.

3) Miners picked up a head lamp at the lamp house.

4) Miners waited in the locomotive opening until an empty car was available to carry them deep into the mine. There, they blasted, cut coal and loaded it into a coal car.

5) Full coal cars were hauled from the mine through the main adit and the miners would stay underground to continue working.

6) Coal cars were weighed and unloaded at the headhouse.

7) Cars filled with waste shale were switched to the slate track to dump at the waste rock piles on top of the mountain.

8) Coal cars that needed repair were diverted to the car repair shop.

9) Locomotives that needed repair were sent to the electrical repair shop using a different exit track from the mine.

10) Coal was sent down the side of the canyon via cable car and conveyor to Kaymoor Bottom, where it would be sorted in the tipple. It was then loaded into waiting railroad cars below.

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All of these videos are uploaded in HD, so I’d encourage you to adjust your settings to the highest quality if it is not done automatically.

You can see the gear that I use for mine exploring here: https://bit.ly/2wqcBDD

As well as a small gear update here: https://bit.ly/2p6Jip6

You can see the full TVR Exploring playlist of abandoned mines here: https://goo.gl/TEKq9L

Several kind viewers have asked about donating to help cover some of the many expenses associated with exploring these abandoned mines. Inspired by their generosity, I set up a Patreon account. So, if anyone would care to chip in, I’m under TVR Exploring on Patreon.

Thanks for watching!

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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them – nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.

These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We enjoy doing it! This is exploring history firsthand – bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind... These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.

So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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