Coalwood Embraces Rocket Boys Legacy with Sites Honoring Homer Hickam

Coalwood’s identity is anchored in the Rocket Boys story and the life of Homer Hickam, and that legacy is now marked on the ground by a welcome sign, a monument and the house where Hickam grew up. For McDowell County residents, those sites are both a reminder of a vanished coal economy and an economic and cultural asset that draws visitors along Route 16.

Coalwood is an unincorporated community long associated with the Olga Coal Company and the town’s mine operations. Olga Coal Company was incorporated on December 22, 1947, and the local mining economy shifted through a series of operators in the 1960s and 1970s before LTV Corporation bought Olga in 1980. LTV closed the Coalwood mine in 1986 and sold company houses that same year; company records were transferred to the Eastern Regional Coal Archives in Bluefield in 1991. The town’s rail link was removed beginning in 1959 as mine operations consolidated, and in 1959 Olga tore down the Olga #1 tipple and began bringing Coalwood coal to the surface at the Caretta mine.

The Rocket Boys narrative begins with Sputnik on October 4, 1957, which Homer Hickam later described as a turning point: “Hickam remembers his youth as two distinct time periods: before October 4, 1957, and after.” After Sputnik, Hickam and five classmates - Roy Lee Cooke, Willie Rose, Jim O’Dell Carroll, Quentin Wilson and Sherman Siers - began building and testing rockets at an abandoned coal dump they named Cape Coalwood. With encouragement from Big Creek High School chemistry teacher Freida Joy Riley, the group won the county science fair with “A Study of Amateur Rocketry Techniques” and took top prize at the 1960 National Science Fair.

Homer Hickam’s biography ties those local events to a wider career. Hickam was born February 19, 1943, in Coalwood, where his father was the mine superintendent. Hickam graduated from Virginia Tech, served in Vietnam, worked for the U.S. Army Missile Command in Huntsville, and worked at NASA from 1981 until retirement in 1998. Hickam published Rocket Boys in 1998; the memoir later appeared under the title October Sky in tie-in editions after the 1999 film adaptation. Rocket Boys won the W.D. Weatherford Award in 1998. Hickam’s other writings include Torpedo Junction, Back to the Moon, The Coalwood Way, Sky of Stone, and a 1995 Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine piece titled “Big Creek Missile Agency.”

Visitor landmarks are straightforward and visible from public roads. A traveler approaching Coalwood along Route 16 will find a “welcome to coalwood home of the rocket boys” sign, a monument described as “A monument to the Rocket Boys along the wonderfully named Frog Level Road,” and the house noted in photographs where “Homer Hickam’s house still stands.” A recent visitor account observed the town’s physical decline, writing, “Sadly, what remains of what I’d read as a bustling anthill of activity surrounding the mine is merely shadows and ash.” The same account calls Hickam and his classmates “local heroes” and recommends the Route 16 approach as a scenic ride.

For McDowell County, the Rocket Boys sites connect local heritage to school curricula, community reading programs and outside visitors. The Coalwood story is recorded in company archives in Bluefield and in published memoirs and articles; researchers and residents seeking deeper records can start with those holdings. Preserving access to the monument, Hickam’s house and company archives will shape whether Coalwood’s Rocket Boys legacy serves as a commemorative anchor, a modest tourism draw, or both.