Drive State Route 52 through the Elkhorn Creek valley in McDowell County and you pass through a sequence of communities so closely spaced that the gap between them is measured in hundreds of yards rather than miles. Maybeury, Wilcoe, Landgraff, Eckman — each of these names marks a coal camp that grew up along the Norfolk and Western Railway's main line in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so densely packed into the drainage that from a train window the valley appeared as one continuous industrial settlement rather than a collection of separate towns. This geography was not accidental. It was the direct result of the N&W's decision to build its main line through the Elkhorn watershed, a routing that made every seam of coal within hauling distance of the creek bottom suddenly worth developing.
Maybeury's name reflects its corporate origins plainly. According to local tradition, the town was named by combining the surnames of two individuals associated with the coal operation or the railway — "May" and "Beury" — whose specific identities and roles have been imperfectly preserved in the historical record. This naming practice was common in the coalfields: when a company or railroad opened a new operation, it named the resulting community after an owner, manager, investor, or engineer, producing a landscape whose place names read as an organizational chart of early-twentieth-century coal capitalism. Maybeury, in this respect, announces itself honestly.
The N&W main line through the Elkhorn corridor was the reason these communities existed at all. The railroad had pushed its tracks through McDowell County in the 1880s, seeking the high-quality Pocahontas seams that its engineers and geologists had identified as among the most valuable coal deposits in the eastern United States. Along the Elkhorn Creek valley, that main line ran within a few hundred feet of workable seams, which meant that mine spurs and loading facilities could be built with relatively modest investment. Coal tipples — the tall loading structures where mine cars dumped their contents into waiting railroad hoppers — were constructed at intervals along the valley, each one the functional heart of the camp that grew up around it.
At its peak in the early decades of the twentieth century, Maybeury was a substantial settlement. The coal companies that operated here, like those throughout McDowell County, provided all the infrastructure of town life: company-owned housing in rows on the hillsides, a company store, a school funded and managed by the company, and in some cases a community hall or church. Workers were typically paid partly or wholly in company scrip, a currency valid only at the company store, a system that kept cash flowing through the corporate books and limited miners' ability to spend their earnings in competing markets. This arrangement was a source of grievance documented in labor union organizing drives throughout the region, but in the remote Elkhorn valley it was also, for many residents, simply the only practical economy available.
The workforce in the Elkhorn corridor communities was as diverse as anywhere in the coalfields. McDowell County's mines drew heavily on African American workers recruited from Virginia and the Carolinas, on European immigrants from Italy, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere, and on native-born white Appalachians from the surrounding counties. In camps like Maybeury, these groups lived in the same hollow and worked in the same mines, though company housing was typically segregated by race, with Black miners' housing in designated sections of the camp. The social texture of these communities — the churches representing a dozen denominations, the fraternal organizations, the mixed-nationality baseball leagues — was more varied and cosmopolitan than the surrounding rural landscape might suggest.
The adjacent camps of Wilcoe and Landgraff shared Maybeury's essential character: rail-served coal operations with company-owned physical infrastructure, diverse labor forces, and economic lives entirely dependent on a single industry. Between Maybeury and Eckman, to the north, the historian of the region can trace a kind of coal-country stratigraphy — each name on the map a layer of settlement, each layer laid down by a specific corporate decision to exploit a specific seam in a specific year. The N&W provided the continuous thread connecting them all: one mainline down which all their coal flowed east, and from which all their supplies and workers arrived.
Mechanization of the mines in the 1950s hit the Elkhorn corridor communities hard and early. When continuous mining machines replaced hand loaders, the workforce a given mine required shrank dramatically, and smaller camps with less diversified economic bases found that the departure of mining jobs left almost nothing behind. Maybeury's population, which had swelled in the boom decades, began contracting. Company housing was sold off or abandoned as residents left for industrial cities in the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic states. The company stores closed without the captive customer base that had sustained them.
Today the Elkhorn corridor communities are much reduced from their peak, their populations a fraction of what they were at mid-century, but the physical evidence of the coal-rail era is still present for those who look. The N&W main line — now operated by Norfolk Southern — still runs through the valley, carrying freight traffic though not at the volume of the coal boom years. Road cuts and hillside terracing preserve the geometry of the old tipple and housing sites. And the sequence of names on Route 52 — Maybeury, Wilcoe, Landgraff, Eckman — still tells the story of how a railroad main line could transform a creek valley into an industrial corridor, one company town at a time.