During many summers as a child and teen the family would make a trip to visit my paternal grandparents who were living in Gallipolis, Ohio. While there we would visit aunts and uncles in Crown City, Chesapeake and Rome along Route 7. We would visit various family properties where my grandpa had rented out a house or trailer or had contracted some tobacco sharecropping.
I haven't tracked which properties were his paternal verses his maternal family's properties and which ones he may have purchased along the way. I also am no longer certain where all the properties were. It wasn't anything important to me as a child and my father sold most of the properties when he moved my grandmother down to live with him in the 1990s.
After grandpa's sister died and he had retired my grandparents moved to Chesapeake into her smaller house. His house in Gallipolis had sat across 1st Ave from the Ohio River, but the house in Chesapeake sat on the Ohio just a short walk from the bridge connecting to Huntington, West Virginia. From the back yard we could watch and hear the coal being loaded onto barges.
At the time I did not know my grandfather's direct connection to coal. He was an employee of the Corp of Engineers working on the Locks and Dams along the Ohio in the region. I simply thought it was the riverboats he was interested in. My grandmother would talk of showboats like the River Queen, the Majestic, and even the Cotton Blossom that would bring musical entertainment along the river. So it wasn't the coal I was focused on -- but I think he was.
He had worked for a short time in the coal industry. It was a family business. He went to work in the mid-1920s with his cousin, Edward G. Blume at the Number 2 Coal Mine at Kaymoor, WV which now sits within the New River Gorge National Park. My grandpa's grandmother, Elizabeth Jane Blume Wyle, had lent Edward's father, George Morgan Blume, money as part of his capital for executing the Fayette Coal and Coke Company around 1900.
George Blume was in the coal business because of a chance encounter his brother, Jacob, had with John Nuttall. Jacob was operating a family hotel near Keeneys creek when John Nuttall entered and asked about the source of the coal Jacob was using for his hotel. That conversation led to a partnership. Jacob's mother (my third great-grandmother), in a letter to her daughter and son-in-law described Jacob's newfound success as having "received the wine of life." Among other things, Jacob operated the Nuttalburg Company Store. (Only the foundation remains as pictured above.)
John Nuttall brought industrial coalmining to the New River Gorge - establishing the community of Nuttallburg, now a ghost town residing within and managed by the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. He also married Jacob's sister, Martha, making the entire operation a Blume family enterprise.
When I heard the coal pouring into the riverboat barges, I heard a noise and saw an operation. When my grandpa was sharing those moments with me, he saw a part of our family's connection to the region and an industry that played an important role in family he personally knew. Through a bit of research, I can now appreciate what he saw in the moment.
