CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (WV News) – The Harrison County Commission will seek to create a destination for visitors seeking a glimpse into the history of the state’s coal and coke industries.

Last month, the Harrison County Commission unanimously approved the lease of land that, despite overgrowth and decades of neglect, still features about two dozen long-abandoned coke ovens.

The 25 or so coke ovens to be leased by the district are part of a larger coke production facility with almost 40 ovens in which coke was previously made from coal.

The lease allows the county to nominate the ovens for the National Registry of Historic Places. The designation would then enable the district to apply for funding for the restoration of the ovens.

According to Harrison County Commissioner David Hinkle, old coke ovens were used to lure tourists to old coal towns in the New River area and other areas of the state.

“I think we have an option here not to copy it in full, but try to make it a stop people would see, especially if at some point we get permission to rebuild and maybe even close the old store trying to do something. ” Finding some kind of old tip or a tip to take with you, ”said Hinkle.

“I think this would be a good community program that many different historical groups can participate in,” he added.

Restoring the stoves will be a long-term project. The submission of an application for the inclusion of furnaces in the historical register is in itself a laborious process that requires an enormous amount of research and documentation. An 18-page application must be completed for each oven, according to District Planning Director Charlotte Shaffer.

There is still a lot to learn about the stoves. The lease is a new development, and research into the history of these ovens in the county is just beginning, according to Shaffer.

The county has yet to determine who owns the coke ovens that are along the railway line near Glen Falls and Farnum, or when they were built. An old map from 1918 shows that the ovens had already been abandoned by that time, she said.

In general, coke ovens have been used to burn undesirable substances such as tar, oils and gas from the material, leaving a purer carbon in a process that took about three days.

“They are directly linked to the iron and steel manufacturing process, which historically is obviously another major industry in the northern Appalachian Mountains,” said William Hal Gorby, a West Virginia and Appalachian historian and teaching assistant at WVU Eberly College of History Professor and head of the student advisory service.

“The process would produce the purest form of carbon – carbon that does not contain tar, gases or oils. This by-product would then be used by steel mills in their blast furnaces. They would use that in steel making and because the coke is so pure it helps make the steel much stronger, obviously much more robust than iron in the previous generation, ”he said.

The availability of cheap coke enabled the country’s iron and steel industry to thrive and eventually become the largest in the world, according to documents on the National Register of Historic Places.

According to Gorby, coke production took place throughout the Appalachian Mountains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the production center in western Pennsylvania. The first coke ovens are believed to have appeared in West Virginia along the Cheat River in Monongalia County sometime in the 1840s.

“From that time until the 1870s, they were scattered in a number of areas, mainly in the northern part of the state,” he said.

In the 1880s, the use of coke ovens in the state expanded. Operations were ongoing in approximately 15 counties of West Virginia, with the largest operations in the New River and Kanawha River valley areas and McDowell Counties. In the 1910s, McDowell County was both the largest coal producer and the largest coke producer in the state.

However, Harrison County was also a manufacturing powerhouse. West Virginia Department of Coal records show that in 1900, Harrison County was number seven in counties for coal production and number nine in coke production, according to Gorby.

Of the nearly 19 million tons of coal and 2.5 million tons of coke produced in the state in 1910, Harrison County contributed 647,000 tons of coal and 10,000 tons of coke, he said.

“It appears that the Harrison County’s coke industry had only started a few years earlier, so I’d guess the coke ovens probably date back to the 1890s,” he said. “There wasn’t much coke production in the county before 1897 or so.”

An article in the Clarksburg Telegram dated November 29, 1901 indicates that the Fairmont Coal Company’s mines at Enterprise were the county’s largest coal producer and Farnum coke production was 7,000 tons of the county’s total of 10,000 tons, according to Gorby.

Based on that information, “I think it’s fair to say that the coke ovens there are probably the center of coke production for the entire county,” he said.

Still, the article states that there were four large coking plants in the county with a total of 128 coke ovens in the county, he said.

Coke production peaked in the state in 1910 at over 4.2 million tons. At that time, larger, more efficient by-product ovens were beginning to replace the old beehive ovens, and companies in West Virginia chose not to switch to the new technologies for a number of reasons.

Instead, coal companies invested in technological upgrades for the increasingly mechanized underground coal operation.

“When a company looks at a coal company, they probably think that getting more mining technology underground is a better investment than trying to tear down the beehive coke ovens and put in a new type of technology. That would have been a much more capital intensive effort, ”said Gorby.

“As a result, (coke) production practically fell off a cliff in the late 19’s and early 20’s. … In the late teens and 20s, when the by-product process becomes much more common, you see coke production well below a million tons (in West Virginia). “

Despite the decline, coke production was curtailed until the 1970s or 1980s, he said.

Web sites like the one in Harrison County give people interested in West Virginia and industrial history a visual representation of an earlier time, Gorby said.

“They are one of the relics of the entire coking industry that you can see visually. You can’t always see where an underground mine was, you can’t always see this type of coal operation infrastructure from around the turn of the 20th century when the industry really started to boom. … But you can see the remains of the coke industry wherever you have these coke ovens, ”he said.

“Where there were coke ovens, there would of course have been a lot of mining. In some ways, this offers those who want a visual representation for this earlier period … the opportunity to see this more clearly. “

The employee JoAnn Snoderly can be reached at 304-626-1445, by email at jsnoderly@theet.com or on Twitter at @JoAnnSnoderly.

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