Kay Moor

A town at the bottom, the mine 560 feet up the gorge wall, conveyors between

Kaymoor, first spelled Kay Moor, is an abandoned coal mine, processing plant and company town in the New River Gorge near Fayetteville, West Virginia, built up the side of the gorge in three levels. The town lay at Kaymoor Bottom beside the Chesapeake and Ohio main line, the only way in or out; the mine portal sat 560 feet above on Sewell Bench, in the gorge wall; and Kaymoor Top on the rim was the end of the haulage. The mine worked the Sewell Seam of the New River Coalfield, a smokeless low-volatile bituminous coal.

It was built for iron. The Low Moor Iron Company of Low Moor, Virginia, bought several thousand acres in 1873 under its managing director, Abiel Abbot Low, and kept the West Virginia land in reserve until 1899, when it opened the mine to feed coal and coke to its own blast furnaces. The first coal went out in 1900, 28,074 long tons that year. The town was named for James Kay, the company man in charge of building it, and the houses went up from 1901, wired for electricity from the start: 50 that year, 45 in 1902 and 17 in 1905. The town had no churches, saloons, bank or town hall, only segregated schools at top and bottom, company stores, a pool hall and a ball field.

Moving men and coal up and down the gorge took two inclines. A single-track incline lifted workers and equipment up a 1,000-foot slope at 30 degrees, while a double-track one lowered coal to the processing plant, the loaded and empty cars partly counterbalancing each other. There were 120 beehive coke ovens, raised to 202 in the First World War and closed as obsolete in the 1930s. A second mine, Kaymoor Two, stayed an old-fashioned pick mine and closed in 1926; it was later filled with concrete to carry a pylon of the New River Gorge Bridge. In 1925 Low Moor sold out to the New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company, part of Berwind-White of Philadelphia.

Kaymoor Bottom was abandoned by 1952 and most of it burned in 1960, and the inclines stopped in 1962. The site, now in New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, is overgrown but keeps a great deal of machinery, one of the most complete integrated coal mine and company town sites in the state. The Kaymoor Miners Trail drops from Kaymoor Top by stairs and switchbacks to the mine level and on to the bottom.