McDowell County, West Virginia

McDowell County is a county in West Virginia, United States, about 30 miles southwest of Bluefield near the Virginia line. It had a population of 19,111 at the 2020 census, an estimated 16,878 by 2025, and covers 534.90 square miles (1,385.38 km2) centred near 37°23′N 81°39′W.

Welch is the county seat and the county’s largest city; its postal code is 24801. The county holds 4 cities, 6 incorporated towns and 10 census-designated places, and it runs on Eastern Time. Its FIPS code is 54047.

Towns & Villages in McDowell County

McDowell County has 20 places with formal Census recognition: 4 incorporated cities, 6 incorporated towns and 10 census-designated places (CDPs), which have no local government of their own. Dozens more names on record are historic coal camps and company towns with no separate Census tabulation; Coalwood, the community behind Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys and the film October Sky, is the best documented of these and is included below without population data of its own.

Two names on the county’s old list are not separate places today. Elbert and Filbert were independent coal camps until Gary annexed them in its 1971 incorporation, along with Thorpe and Wilcoe; all four are now neighborhoods inside Gary’s city limits, not distinct communities.

ZIP Codes

• 24801 — Welch (the county’s administrative and retail hub)
• 24836 — Gary
• 24852 — Keystone
• 24892 — War
• 24808 — Anawalt
• 24817 — Bradshaw
• 24828 — Davy
• 24844 — Iaeger
• 24853 — Kimball
• 24868 — Northfork
• 24813 — Bartley
• 24826 — Cucumber
• 24861 — Maybeury
• 24871 — Pageton
• 24879 — Raysal
• 24881 — Roderfield
• 24824 — Coalwood

Berwind, Big Sandy, Crumpler and Vivian have no ZIP code of their own; mail to each is delivered under a neighboring town’s code.

Geography

McDowell County is West Virginia’s southernmost county, set in the Cumberland Mountains within Appalachia. Of its 534.90 square miles, 533.46 are land and 1.44 are water, about 0.27 percent — the county has no natural lake of any size, and what surface water it has comes mostly from small impoundments. The highest point, on the northwest slope of Flat Top Mountain, reaches 3,399 feet. The county’s outline is roughly a semicircle, its border following the ridgelines that enclose it.

Elkhorn Creek drains the county’s central townsites, running past Keystone, Kimball and Northfork — whose own name comes from its position at the creek’s north fork — on its way toward the Tug Fork. The Norfolk & Western’s Dry Fork Branch, built in 1904, followed the Dry Fork to reach War and opened the surrounding coalfield to large-scale mining. Anawalt Lake, Berwind Lake and the Panther Wildlife Management Area are the county’s main outdoor-recreation sites.

Wyoming County lies to the north, Mingo County to the northwest, Mercer County to the east, Tazewell County, Virginia, to the south, and Buchanan County, Virginia, to the west. Wyoming County, Mingo County, Mercer County, Tazewell County and Buchanan County all border McDowell directly.

Demographics

McDowell County had a population of 19,111 at the 2020 census, continuing a long decline from its 1950 peak of nearly 98,900, and the latest Census Bureau estimate puts the county near 16,878 residents. Welch and Gary are the two largest communities, together holding roughly a fifth of the county’s population. Median household income runs $28,235 (2022 ACS), less than half West Virginia’s statewide figure of $55,948 (2023 ACS). Population density works out to about 36 people per square mile of land, thin even for rural Appalachia and a fraction of what the county carried during its coal-boom decades.

Economy & Local Life

Health care and social assistance is the county’s largest employment sector, with about 823 workers, followed by public administration at 500 and mining at 438, out of roughly 3,760 people employed countywide. Coal once dominated entirely — in 1950 McDowell led every county in the nation in coal production — but mechanization and reserve depletion emptied out company towns such as Gary, where U.S. Steel laid off about 550 miners in a single month in March 1982 and ceased all local mining by the end of that year. Mount View High School and River View High School are the county’s public high schools; Twinbranch Pentecostal Christian Academy is its private school. The county’s only Walmart Supercenter, once its largest single employer, closed in 2016, leaving county government, the school system and area clinics as the steadiest sources of work. Anawalt Lake and Berwind Lake wildlife management areas draw hunters and anglers from across southern West Virginia each fall.

History

The Virginia General Assembly created McDowell County on 20 February 1858 out of Tazewell County, naming it for James McDowell, a former Virginia governor. The county became part of the newly admitted West Virginia in 1863, during the Civil War, when the western counties broke away from Virginia.

Coal built the county from the 1890s onward. On 1 May 1895, about 15,000 union miners, most of them Black, assembled at Keystone and armed themselves to march into Virginia in support of a strike at neighboring mines; the strike collapsed by August for lack of funds. Local newspaper editor Matthew Thomas Whittico later gave the county a lasting nickname for its unusually open racial and political climate, which drew Black migrants north from the Deep South in the early twentieth century. Kimball’s war memorial, built for the county’s Black World War I veterans, is among the first such memorials erected anywhere in the country. Gary, founded in 1902 as a U.S. Steel company town and incorporated in 1971 by consolidating the camps of Elbert, Filbert, Thorpe and Wilcoe, once supplied roughly a quarter of the county’s coal output. Coalwood, north of Welch, is the setting of Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys, adapted into the 1999 film October Sky; an annual festival celebrating the book and film ran in Coalwood through 2011 before relocating to Beckley.

Welch was also the site of a landmark event in the food-assistance movement: in 1961 Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman handed the country’s first modern food stamps to a local family there, launching the federal program later known as SNAP.

Getting There

No interstate highway reaches McDowell County. US 52 is the only federal route, running the length of the county alongside WV 16, 80, 83, 103, 161 and 635 — mountain two-lane roads that follow the creek valleys between towns.

• Bluefield, West Virginia — about 30 miles southeast
• Princeton, West Virginia — about 35 miles east
• Tazewell, Virginia — about 30 miles south
• Beckley, West Virginia — about 55 miles northeast

Raleigh County Memorial Airport, near Beckley, is the nearest airport with scheduled commercial service, flown by Contour Airlines to Charlotte; Mercer County Airport at Bluefield lost its own passenger flights in 2007. Amtrak’s Cardinal stops at Prince, in neighboring Mercer County, the nearest station to McDowell County.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is McDowell County located?
It is West Virginia’s southernmost county, in the Cumberland Mountains along the Virginia line, bordered by Wyoming, Mingo, Mercer, Tazewell and Buchanan counties.

What is the population of McDowell County?
19,111 at the 2020 census, with a more recent Census Bureau estimate near 16,878.

How big is McDowell County?
534.90 square miles (1,385.38 km2), of which 533.46 square miles are land.

What is the county seat of McDowell County?
Welch, the county’s largest city and home to the McDowell County Courthouse.

How many towns and cities are in McDowell County?
Four cities — Welch, Gary, Keystone and War — six incorporated towns, and ten census-designated places, plus historic communities such as Coalwood that carry no separate Census count.

What ZIP codes does McDowell County use?
24801 for Welch, 24836 for Gary, 24852 for Keystone and 24892 for War, plus a separate code for each incorporated town and several CDPs — 17 ZIP codes cover the county’s named places in all.

What is McDowell County known for?
Its coal-mining history, the 1895 Keystone miners’ assembly, and Coalwood, the setting of Rocket Boys and the film October Sky.

More counties in this state: Towns and villages in West Virginia.