Most of West Virginia's ghost towns were coal towns. Wikipedia's list of the state's ghost towns ties many of them to the boom and bust of the coal industry, and most of its entries are in Fayette County, along the New River Gorge. Companies built mines, coke ovens and housing on the gorge walls and shipped coal out on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway: Kaymoor shipped its first coal in 1900 and closed in 1962, Nuttallburg stopped producing in 1958, and Sewell's coke ovens burned until 1956. Others were timber and pulp towns, like Spruce in Pocahontas County, whose mill closed in 1925, and a few are older, like the mill village on Virginius Island at Harpers Ferry, emptied by the 1936 flood.
Our index has 112 sites, 103 of them on our map; 47 are in Fayette County. Many of the best-preserved remains are now inside New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, which keeps the tipple and coke ovens at Nuttallburg, the mine buildings at Kaymoor and the railroad town of Thurmond, still home to five people in 2020. Elsewhere, expect foundations in the woods, and some sites, such as Gad and Stiltner, are under reservoirs.
Abandoned 
