(Bruce) Ive posted this before, but Christmas is a good time to evoke the past. This is about the industrial past of Greasy Creek. When the McKinney Steel Company bought up thousands of acres of coal, its initial plans were to build two camps, one at Wolfpit and another at Greasy Creek. The site at Wolfpit was directly on an existing railroad spur, which made it easy to offload supplies. However, Greasy Creek was a different story. As far as I can tell, the Greasy Creek site was actually larger than the Wolfpit site, but access was a problem. Like the railroad spur on Marrowbone, Greasy Creek had a railroad. In fact, it had a railroad for thirty-five years before Price McKinney bought up as much of Greasy Creek as he could. The problem was that this was a narrow-gauge railroad, built by the Yellow Popular Lumber Company of Ironton, Ohio. Greasy Creek may have had the first railroad in Pike County, but it didnt go anywhere: just from Sutton to the head of main Greasy Creek. So while McKinneys construction crews began building camp houses, warehouses, stores, a power plant and even a church, he could not build anything on Greasy Creek until he had a modern track. McKinney imported a very professional crew to begin the rebuild and a train carrying supplies backed up the new railroad bed as the crew took out the old and put in the new. Unfortunately, fate had plans for McKinney, and this was not the last of his troubles. The new track went only to the forks and for decades afterward, one could still find railroad ties in the creek up main Greasy Creek from the forks to the head of the creek. McKinney was a very astute man and may have sensed the coming of war, so he stopped at the forks and began building the new camp. My great-grandfather Peter Prater was the prime contractor for McKinney, but just as the tracks were completed, the United States entered the First World War, and no building materials were available. A tent city sprang up where miners would live and be close to their jobs, but the draft started cutting down on his labor pool. It wasnt until nearly 1920 that the construction project could begin in force. The camp was actually still under construction on March 1, 1928, when the camp closed for good. If you have a copy of my last book, Hearts in Zion, or look it up on line, you will see a very unique picture. It shows beautifully poured sidewalks and orderly rows of houses, but there is practically no one in the picture. If you look closely at the picture, you will see a horse and cart in front of one of the houses. I dont know the exact date the shot was made, but this was the last resident leaving the camps. It was taken by the former paymaster on Greasy Creek, who was a teacher before he came to work for McKinney. He was transferred to Wolfpit, where he went back into the classroom. If you have a chance to visit the new library on Lee Avenue, ask Charlene to show you the collection of picture that were sent to her of the two camps. But back to the reason for the post: since there as to railroad at the mouth of the creek to offload materials, steamboats had to supply McKinneys crew as they rebuilt the tracks. Which brings us to the question of what was the purpose of a railroad? The Yellow Poplar Lumber Company assembled a small dinky engine to haul logs from the upper reaches of Greasy Creek to Sutton where the logs were unloaded and stacked until spring rains and attendant flooding was large enough to roll the logs into the river, where they were pulled out at Catlettsburg and processed. Yellow Poplar followed their plan all the way up the Russell Fork to Dickinson County, VA, where the company built splashdams to create a massive artificial lake (because there was no flood tide large enough to carry away the logs). After the dams were full of logs and water, they were dynamited to release the logs. The environmental damage from this practice is still being felt. The picture is of the dinky engine the pulled the logs down to the storage site or the splash dams all up the river. It was small enough to dismantle and move from site to site and simple enough to work on. Where it might be today is unknown. It probably was lost to a scrap drive during either World War I or World War II.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 16:28:40 +0000
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