Derrick Evans highlights Mount View High School's mountaintop football field

Former West Virginia House member Derrick Evans drew fresh attention to Mount View High School’s mountaintop football field, posting a video that has been viewed more than 24,000 times and collected hundreds of likes. The reaction pushed the Welch school’s perch on an old strip mine into a broader conversation about how McDowell County rose on coal and then steadily lost people, jobs and public revenue.

Mount View High School sits in Welch, where coal once built the town and the county around it. The school serves grades 6 through 12 and calls itself home of the Golden Knights. One recent local profile put enrollment at roughly 553 students, underscoring how central the campus remains in a county where major institutions have been forced to do more with less.

McDowell County was transformed by coal development after the arrival of the Norfolk & Western Railway, which helped mining towns spread across the county and turned an agrarian area into an industrial center. By 1950, the county had become the nation’s top coal-producing county and had about 100,000 residents. Welch grew with that boom as well, rising from an estimated population of 300 in 1895 to 3,232 in 1920 and 5,376 by 1930.

The long slide that followed is visible in the numbers as clearly as it is in the landscape. McDowell County’s population was 19,111 in the 2020 census and was estimated at 16,878 in 2025. U.S. News has described the county’s tax base and population as having fallen sharply since 1950, when coal money still powered local schools, roads and public services.

Evans’ post pulled that history into the comments, where replies quickly turned into a debate over coal policy and economic decline. The field itself, carved into the mountains above Welch, remains a local landmark and one of the clearest reminders of how McDowell County’s past still shapes the places residents use today.