Brooklyn Mining Complex and Community Ruins

At the bottom of the New River Gorge, beside a primitive campground on the park service's Southside Trail, the ruins of Brooklyn lie in plain sight and read like what they are: a company town poured back into the hillside. What looks like a retaining wall along the access road is the foundation of the coal tipple; the long brick openings fronting the campers' fire rings are the last of the beehive coke ovens.

Brooklyn was one of the last coal camps developed in the gorge. The Finlow Coal Company opened the site in 1894 — the post office kept the name Finlow — and the Brooklyn Coal Company followed, naming the town and its railroad station for itself and building out a full-service community: company store, post office, rows of houses, and roughly fifty to eighty coke ovens alongside the rail line. The mine worked the thin Sewell seam through a portal hundreds of feet up the gorge wall, and a conveyor dropped the coal down to the tipple on the river flat. At its 1920 peak maybe two hundred people lived here. New River Smokeless Coal took over in 1904; Scotia Coal & Coke ran it from 1911 until the mine closed in 1953, and the town emptied with it.