“Large Shippers of Good Coal”: Elm Grove Mining Company in Its Own Words

We now start a series on the importance of coal mining in West Virginia, and specifically Wheeling. We will cover the companies and the labor that powered this vital industry. We will also cover housing and living conditions of those that worked the mines. We will uncover black communities that lived in and around these mines.

There is something especially revealing about a company describing itself.

Court cases tell us what a company fought over. Census records tell us who lived nearby. Employment surveys tell us who worked there, and sometimes what they were paid.

Advertisements tell us something else entirely. They tell us how a company wanted to be seen, and how it tried to persuade people to come within its reach.

In September 1926, The Wheeling Register published a special feature called “Know the Wheeling District Better.” It was a booster-style newspaper page designed to introduce readers to the “great industrial and commercial enterprises” of the Wheeling District. Among the featured firms was the Elm Grove Mining Company, presented under a proud headline:

“Elm Grove Mining Company - Large Shippers of Good Coal.”

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, this clipping is more than a business profile. It is a window into one of the major industrial employers tied to Black labor, company housing, and the coal economy that shaped life in and around Wheeling. Read plainly, it is a company advertisement. Read closely, it is also a map of power.

The Company’s Public Face

The article begins with confidence. Elm Grove Mining Company, with general offices at Elm Grove, Wheeling, and three large mines nearby, had “proven one of the most important industries of the community.”

That was not an empty boast.

The article stated that under normal conditions the company operated three large mines located in Elm Grove, Triadelphia, and Roneys Point, capable of employing approximately 1,700 men and producing about 8,500 tons of coal daily. It described the company as a producer of “good coal,” mining what it identified as the Pittsburgh seam, and it emphasized modern methods, shaker screens, picking tables, steel construction, loading booms, and well-equipped tipples.

In the voice of the article, Elm Grove Mining was not merely digging coal. It was helping define the industrial identity of the Wheeling District.

The piece named company leadership as well: James A. Paisley, president; Joseph Arkwright, treasurer and general manager; A. D. Murray, secretary; and Harry T. Ewig, assistant treasurer. Paisley was described as one of the leading coal men in the United States, and Arkwright was praised as a capable manager.

The tone is almost ceremonial. The article wants readers to see Elm Grove Mining as efficient, modern, well-led, and essential.

Wanted - Miners

The company did not only promote itself to readers. It recruited.

In two advertisements headed “Wanted - Miners,” Elm Grove Mining Company sold the job and the place together. The ads described Elm Grove as eight miles from Wheeling, reachable by street car and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. One ad promised that the mines were “surrounded by the suburbs of Wheeling,” offering “living in country near city,” with “city accommodations and good schools.” Another version added that Elm Grove was “a good locality for miners with automobiles” and noted brick roads.

These were not accidental details. They were sales points.

Elm Grove Mining was telling prospective miners: this is not a remote camp beyond civilization. This is near Wheeling. You can reach it by transit. Your children can attend good schools. There are houses. There are roads. There is a life here.

Both ads directed interested men to inquire with Superintendent Thomas Skillcorn at the Elm Grove Mining Company’s office in Elm Grove. The same Skillcorn name appears in other records connected to the company’s operations, making the ads not just recruitment notices, but pieces of the larger documentary trail.

The ads matter because they show the company actively constructing an image of opportunity. Work, transportation, housing, schools, and family life were bundled together into a promise.

For Black workers, that promise would have carried special weight. In a segregated economy where many employers closed doors entirely, a company advertising for miners and later documented as hiring hundreds of Black men becomes historically significant. But opportunity came with dependence. A job connected to company housing could also mean that wages, rent, neighborhood, and security were all tied to the same employer.

That is the company-town bargain hiding inside the recruitment pitch.

Three Mines, One Industrial System

The 1926 article walks readers through the company’s mining operations.

Mine No. 1, called the Arkwright Mine, was located at Elm Grove. Under normal conditions, it employed between 425 and 500 men and produced approximately 2,500 tons of coal daily.

Mine No. 2 employed 600 men or more and produced more than 3,000 tons of coal daily.

Mine No. 3, the Boyd Mine, employed about 500 men and had a daily capacity of nearly 2,500 tons.

These numbers matter. They show that Elm Grove Mining was not a small local operation tucked into the edge of the city. It was a major industrial system spread across multiple mine sites, tied to transportation, machinery, management, housing, and labor on a large scale.

When we talk about Wheeling’s Black working history, this is the kind of employer we have to take seriously. Not because the company centered Black workers in its own public story. It did not. But because later records show that Black workers were deeply present in the company’s actual workforce.

The Dam and the Wealth Beneath the Valley

A 1905 Wheeling Intelligencer article helps explain why all of this mattered so much.

Under the headline “Completion of Dam Means Much Wealth,” the paper described how the government’s river-improvement system would transform Wheeling’s coal trade. The article focused especially on Dam No. 13 at McMechen, which it said would help insure a uniform depth of water in the river pool throughout the year. With that improvement, boating operations could be maintained more consistently, and independent coal producers would gain relief from the freight disadvantages they believed they faced.

In other words, the coal under and around Wheeling was not valuable only because it existed. It became more valuable as transportation improved.

The article described Wheeling as already being in the midst of “great coal developments” on all sides and suggested that river improvements would increase the city’s importance as a coal-producing community. It also noted that coal lands in Ohio County had been purchased in large tracts, including thousands of acres tied to Pittsburgh interests. This was the world into which Elm Grove Mining would grow: a world where land, coal seams, river navigation, railroads, and capital were locking together.

That matters for our story because company housing and Black labor did not emerge in a vacuum. Before the 1926 booster article praised Elm Grove Mining as a community asset, and before the 1931 survey documented 300 Black men working for the company, investors and operators were already looking at the Wheeling District as a place where coal could become wealth.

The dam improved the river. The river improved the coal trade. The coal trade increased the value of land and mines. And eventually, hundreds of workers - including hundreds of Black men - supplied the labor that turned that underground wealth into daily production.

This is the deeper machinery of the story: public infrastructure, private capital, company housing, and Black labor all meeting in the same valley.

The Houses Behind the Headline

One of the most important lines in the article concerns housing.

The Register wrote that the Elm Grove Mining Company owned 18,785 acres of good grade coal, plus 334 acres of surface land. It also noted that the company owned about 215 modern houses, rented chiefly to employees at “very low rentals.”

That sentence deserves to be slowed down. We will be writing a future blog with an interview with perhaps one of the last remaining residents of "Security Settlement".

To the company, these houses were evidence of good management and community benefit. To workers and families, they were home. To historians, they point toward a company-town reality. The user’s research connects this housing to the Security Settlement, a community tied to Elm Grove Mining and its workforce.

The recruitment ads make this housing story even clearer. When the company advertised “new houses,” “good schools,” country living near the city, and easy access by streetcar and railroad, it was not merely hiring labor. It was inviting families into a company-shaped world.

A company town was never just a collection of houses. It was a structure of dependence.

Work, rent, neighborhood, transportation, family life, and company authority could all become tied together. For Black workers in particular, the company town could represent both opportunity and constraint: a job when many employers refused to hire, a place to live when housing discrimination narrowed choices, and yet also a world shaped by the employer’s power.

That is the double meaning of the article and the ads. The company saw houses as proof of benevolence. The families who lived there knew them as daily life.

“Fair and Liberal Treatment”

The article makes another revealing claim. It says the Elm Grove Mining Company gave employment to a large number of people and had gained a favorable reputation for “fair and liberal treatment” of employees.

That phrase is worth preserving, but not swallowing whole.

“Fair and liberal treatment” was the company’s self-description. It belonged to a promotional page. The note printed on the page itself admitted that the information was presented favorably, even while insisting that the facts had been carefully gathered. That is exactly why the article is so useful. It does not simply tell us what Elm Grove Mining did. It tells us what Elm Grove Mining wanted the public to believe about what it did.

To a reader in 1926, the message was clear: this company was large, modern, valuable, generous, and necessary.

To us, nearly a century later, the question becomes: who built that value?

The Survey Speaks Back

Five years later, a 1931 survey of African American employment in the Wheeling area gives us a different kind of record.

In that survey, Elm Grove Mining Company appears with 700 total employees. Of those, 300 were Black men. No Black women were listed. The work was classified as unskilled, the daily wage was listed as $3.00, and the company answered “Yes” when asked whether it would hire Black workers in the future.

That single row is extraordinary.

It means that Black men made up nearly 43 percent of Elm Grove Mining’s listed workforce in the survey. In a city and region where many employers hired few Black workers or none at all, Elm Grove Mining stood out as one of the largest documented employers of Black men in the Wheeling District.

The contrast is powerful. In 1926, the company publicly celebrated its coal, its mines, its machinery, its houses, its transportation access, its “good schools,” and its leadership. In 1931, the employment survey reveals something the booster article and recruitment ads did not center: hundreds of Black men were part of the labor force that made the company possible.

The company’s public story was “good coal.”

The hidden story was Black labor.

Opportunity in a Segregated Economy

It would be too simple to describe Elm Grove Mining only as exploitative, and it would be equally wrong to describe it only as benevolent.

For many Black workers, mining could provide wages and employment in a region where opportunity was sharply constrained by racism. A job at Elm Grove Mining may have meant food on the table, rent paid, children clothed, and some measure of stability. The survey’s answer that the company would hire Black workers in the future mattered in a world where many employers openly refused.

But the survey also tells us something about hierarchy. The Black employees were listed as men only. The work was classified as unskilled. The wage was $3.00 per day. The company may have been willing to hire Black labor, but the available evidence suggests that Black workers were concentrated in the harder, lower-status categories of work.

That is the careful balance we have to hold.

Elm Grove Mining offered opportunity. It also operated within a segregated labor world.

A Company Town, A Black Workforce, A Wheeling Story

The Security Settlement gives this story its human shape.

A mining company is easy to imagine as an industrial abstraction: shafts, coal cars, payrolls, tons, shipments, machinery. But a company settlement turns industry into a neighborhood. Men left homes for the mines. Families waited for shifts to end. Children grew up in the shadow of coal work. Women held households together in communities shaped by company wages, company housing, and the uncertainties of the coal economy.

The ads help us imagine how families may have first heard the invitation: Elm Grove, West Virginia. Eight miles from Wheeling. Streetcar and railroad access. Country near city. Good schools. New houses.

Those lines were designed to attract miners. But for us, they open a deeper question: what did that promise feel like to the Black families who built lives there?

If Elm Grove Mining employed hundreds of Black men by 1931, then the story of the company is also a story of Black family life in the Wheeling area. It is a story of migration, work, danger, housing, and community formation. It is a story of how Black residents helped power one of the region’s major industries, even when the region’s public memory did not always preserve their names.

The 1926 article wanted readers to “know the Wheeling District better.” Ironically, it still helps us do that. But not only in the way its writers intended.

We now know the Wheeling District better by reading what the company said about itself, then placing that beside the records of who worked there.

Reading Against the Booster Page

The “Know the Wheeling District Better” series was meant to celebrate industry. It presented Wheeling as busy, productive, modern, and nationally significant. In that frame, Elm Grove Mining was a success story.

And it was.

But the Foundation’s work asks a deeper question: success for whom, and built by whom?

When Elm Grove Mining described itself as a public benefactor and one of the community’s chief industrial assets, it was speaking from the perspective of ownership and management. When the company advertised for miners, it was speaking as a recruiter. When the 1931 employment survey listed 300 Black men at the company, it quietly shifted the perspective toward labor.

All three records matter.

The profile gives us the company’s public identity.

The ads give us the company’s recruitment pitch.

The survey gives us the outline of the Black workforce.

Together, they let us see a fuller truth: Elm Grove Mining was not only a coal company. It was a major employer of Black men, a landlord through company housing, a force in the formation of the Security Settlement, and a key institution in the industrial and racial history of the Wheeling District.

Why This Matters to the Foundation

This is exactly the kind of story the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation exists to preserve.

Not just the headline. Not just the company officers. Not just the tons of coal.

The whole story.

The workers. The houses. The families. The wages. The settlement. The advertisements.

The public image. The private reality. The way Black labor could be both essential and under-acknowledged.

Elm Grove Mining Company wanted the public to know it as a shipper of good coal. Its ads wanted miners to see Elm Grove as a place of work, housing, schools, roads, and access to the city. Our work is to remember something more complete: that the coal moved because people moved it, and among those people were hundreds of Black men whose labor helped build the wealth, heat, transportation, and industrial identity of the Upper Ohio Valley.

The article called Elm Grove Mining one of the assets of the Wheeling District.

The workers were the asset.

And now, finally, their story is beginning to come back into view.

-T

Sources and Notes

• The Wheeling Register, “Know the Wheeling District Better,” Friday, September 24, 1926, featuring “Elm Grove Mining Company - Large Shippers of Good Coal.”

• Elm Grove Mining Company recruitment advertisements, “Wanted - Miners,” advertising Elm Grove as eight miles from Wheeling, reachable by streetcar and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, with city accommodations, good schools, new houses, and in one version, brick roads and a good locality for miners with automobiles.

• 1931 City of Wheeling Survey of African American Employees, listing Elm Grove Mining Company with 700 total employees, 300 Black men, $3.00 daily wage, unskilled classification, and future willingness to hire Black workers.

• Wheeling Intelligencer, “Completion of Dam Means Much Wealth,” Thursday, June 8, 1905, discussing Dam No. 13 at McMechen, year-round river depth, expanded coal transportation, and coal development in the Wheeling District.

• Foundation note: This post is part of the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation’s continuing research into Black labor, company housing, coal mining, and the overlooked industrial history of Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley.