Pocahontas Historic District

Pocahontas is a coal company town in the Laurel Creek Valley of Tazewell County, Virginia, ringed by hills and laid out along the creek and up the hillsides. Named in 1881, it was built by the Southwest Virginia Improvement Company, which opened the first commercial mining in what became a major coal-producing region. The district includes rows of frame company-built duplex houses, small brick coal sheds on the streets, a commercial Centre Street lined with brick former saloons, the 1895 Italianate City Hall, a Richardsonian bank, churches, and the Exhibition Mine and miners' bathhouse. More than 44,000,000 tons of coal were mined before the mines closed in 1955. The nomination finds no single building of outstanding architectural importance. Its value lies in the way the surviving town expresses the hard, rough life of a nineteenth-century mining community, and in the fact that it has remained almost intact despite industrial decline and population loss.