People have been living in West Virginia’s hills and hollers for centuries. In fact, the layers of human history here go back thousands of years. But let’s just go back one century, to the early part of the 1900s. What was life like for those who lived in West Virginia in those days?

Farmers continued to farm fertile West Virginia river valleys.
Unknown Author / Wikipedia
This is a photo of the slave quarters (no longer in use) at the William Johnson Farm in Tyler County around 1900.
Miners, both adults and children, spent long days underground harvesting coal - black gold - from the bowels of West Virginia's rugged mountains.
Lewis Wickes Hine / Wikipedia
This photo is of a West Virginia drift mine in 1908.
Various factories and mills thrived, including the Worsted Woolen Mill in Keyser, West Virginia.
Unknown Author / Wikipedia
This photo is from 1908.

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Because of all the industry, working-class communities boomed.
Unknown Author / Wikipedia
This picture shows the mill town of Exchange, West Virginia (now a ghost town) when it was young and alive in 1909.
The early 1900s were turbulent times. Even in the prosperous time of the so-called "Roaring Twenties," there was strife.
Library of Congress / Wikimedia
This photo from 1922 shows a tent colony of striking union miners at Lick Creek, West Virginia.
This photo from 1937 shows a mine mechanic's family eating supper. The mechanic had worked for five different mines, all of which went bankrupt. Each time, he never received his last pay period's wages.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration / Wikimedia
Note the wallpaper - repurposed newspapers!
Yet despite the upheaval, mining and milling continued to dominate the landscape.
Marion Post Wolcott, Library of Congress / Wikipedia
This is a booming sawmill with its mill pond in Erwin, West Virginia in 1938.

Did your parents or grandparents or great grandparents live in West Virginia in the early 1900s? Where did they call home, and what did life look like for them? It’s a fascinating but sobering thing to remember what life was like just one hundred years ago. So much has changed! And yet so much is still just the same. If you love seeing photos of West Virginia’s past generations, you can find some of the oldest ever taken here.

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