Easter Mae Witcher, 92, Lifelong Algoma Resident, Dies April 2

Easter Mae Witcher spent every one of her 92 years in Algoma, a McDowell County coal camp founded three decades before she was born and now largely memory. She died April 2, surrounded by her loving family, with arrangements through Gregory-Page Funeral Home in Welch.

Algoma was established in 1891 by the Algoma Coal & Coke Company along Buzzard Branch of the North Fork of Elkhorn Creek. Miners there worked the Pocahontas No. 3 seam, producing a grade marketed under the name "The Great Algoma" and sought by steelmakers across the region. The community grew into a full company town with its own post office, its own general store, its own social world tucked into the hollow.

Witcher grew up during the height of the coal era. McDowell County's population peaked at nearly 99,000 in 1950, when she was still a teenager coming of age in the coal rows. That peak did not hold. By 2020, the population had dropped to 16,916, a loss of more than 80,000 people across the span of her life. Algoma's post office shut in 1988. The company store, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, stands vacant and deteriorating.

She outlived that entire transformation. Her death removes one of the last voices carrying firsthand memory of Algoma as a functioning community: what the company store looked like open, what the hollow felt like full, what it meant to grow up in a McDowell County that believed it would last.

Friends and family can find finalized service times and visitation details at Gregory-Page Funeral Home, 298 Court Street in Welch, by calling 304-436-6357 or visiting gregory-pagefh.com, where an online tribute wall is open for condolences. The family welcomes flowers and memorial contributions. Those who knew Witcher in Algoma or through the wider Welch community are invited to leave photographs and written memories on the tribute wall; a follow-up community remembrance is being compiled to preserve what neighbors and friends recall of her life and times.

With its post office long closed and its company store on the historic register more for what it was than what it is, Algoma today survives largely in the recollections of people like Easter Witcher. She was 92. There are not many left who remember it the way she did.