By William “Skip” Deegans
At the 1907 Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the present United States, the state of West Virginia had one of the most prominent and publicized exhibits. It erected a 123 1/2- foot high coal column that was constructed out of 835,000 pounds of coal and 38,000 feet of lumber. The column was designed by Neil Robinson, a Charleston engineer, and built by the Withrow & Company, also of Charleston. The 16-foot base and anchorage system was designed by Russ Warne, a prominent Charleston architect. Coal from the state’s 19 commercially mineable seams was donated by coal operators. The coal was stacked in geographical order with the oldest at the base. The impressive column could be seen in Newport News, 15 miles away. It cost $15,000 (about $500,000 in today’s dollars) to erect and was underwritten by former West Virginia governor William A. MacCorkle and Charleston banker Frederick Staunton.
At the dedication of the column, Secretary of The Treasury, Bruce Cortel, said, “The men of the west were hard frontiersmen, a majority of them soldiers of the revolution and their immediate descendants without estates, with little but an honorable record of patriotic service and their strong army for their fortunes. They had their land patents, which won certificates of patriotic service in the revolutionary war, and they depended upon their own labor for the new home in the wilderness.”
At the conclusion of the exhibition, the column was dismantled and the coal was sold locally: $2.50 per ton or $4.50 a ton delivered.
Sources: The Raleigh Herald, Fairmont West Virginia, The Advocate, The Baltimore Sun.
