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An aging 1895 City Hall also held an opera house. Courtesy: Nan K. Chase
An old Virginia coal town yields new gems.
My husband says I’m a Pollyanna, someone who finds good even in bad situations. He may be right.
Take a recent example. Saul and I packed lunch one day this spring and headed over to West Virginia to explore the Coal Heritage Trail. The town of
Bramwell sounded interesting for its Gilded Age mansions built when coal was king. It was a cool, gray day, and even I found the place depressing.
An old church had burned and collapsed; once-elegant gardens were disappearing under the weeds, and wisteria vines were overtaking a footbridge across the Bluestone River; Main Street was deserted, the tourist office closed. Yet…the Honeycomb Cafe was serving fresh coffee and the old rail depot had some educational signage.
We wanted to see the mother lode of West Virginia’s anthracite coal industry, which was just a few miles down the road, back in Virginia.
The vast Pocahontas Coalfield got its start in 1882 at Pocahontas Mine No. 1. We missed the exhibition coal mine tour but poked around the glittering bits of black gold underfoot.
Then we cruised into what had been downtown Pocahontas. There was little left of what once had been a booming town of 3,700 people, with brick-
paved streets, an opera house for early Broadway shows, a lofty fire station (now just a façade framing a vacant lot) and a doctor’s office embellished with stone. We parked the car in the middle of the street and got out to take pictures.
We peered into a dusty storefront crammed with, well, junk, and someone emerged. He was a handsome gentleman with china-blue eyes. He invited us in to see his “museum.”
Friendly guy, this Danny Williams; a retired coal miner and carpenter, he seemed to be the town’s unofficial historian. He said he couldn’t bear to see anything wasted, so as old buildings in Pocahontas succumbed to the elements, he collected the pieces and stored them inside: wood paneling, plumbing fixtures, even fossils and petrified tree stumps from the mines.
“Some people think I’m a hoarder,” he said, and shrugged. He located old mining gear to show us—a hand auger for drilling blasting holes, roof bolts and hardhats with clip-on carbide lamps.
“Do you want to see the old Jewish church I’m fixing up?” he asked.
Saul and I exchanged bemused glances. We are Jewish ourselves, and of course there’s no such thing as a Jewish church.
“Sure,” we answered, and Mr. Williams walked us around the corner to a simple brick building. The cornerstone had two sets of years to mark its founding, 1912 and the Jewish equivalent, 5673. We stepped into … an abandoned Orthodox synagogue.
To pass the time, Mr. Williams was restoring Congregation Ahavath Chesed. Now, as he showed us his handiwork, history was coming alive. What a rare and marvelous experience!
Mining towns that sprang up in the late 1800s were the smelters that produced the American people. Coal mines needed labor, and it came, in a jumble of languages and customs. African-Americans from the Deep South, Italian stonemasons, Welsh miners, starving Irish farmers; Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Austrians. And Jews.
In 1910 Pocahontas was home to almost 150 Jews, and by 1912 they needed their own building. Now we were seeing the original stained-glass windows, the women’s balcony, the benches and chandelier, the ark for the Torah. Mr. Williams was restoring the ornate columns flanking the ark and the broad frieze around the ceiling. A relative had hand-painted the rich faux-marble effect with a pigeon feather and applied gilding to the capitals.
Most amazing, downstairs an old prayer book in Hebrew and what looked like Greek lay open on a table. It must have been there since the synagogue closed in 1920, its members moving on.
What accident of fate had led a Christian man to so lovingly restore a Jewish house of worship, and for Saul and me to step back in time with him?
As we drove home I sensed Saul was coming around to the Pollyanna perspective.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2022 issue.
