Keystone’s Black mayor and McDowell Times shaped county history

Keystone was never just another coal town. On Elkhorn Creek and the Norfolk & Western Railway main line, it grew into a commercial center that gave Black merchants, journalists and officeholders unusual leverage in McDowell County, and it elected the state’s first Black mayor. The town’s influence came from more than nostalgia, because Keystone’s paper, its business district and its political network all shaped how power worked in the coalfields.

A commercial hub with county-level reach

Keystone was incorporated in 1909, but its importance had already taken shape around the rail line and the creek. The town served surrounding coal company settlements as a place to buy goods, gather news and conduct business, which made it function like a county-level marketplace rather than a narrow camp town. Wholesale grocers, retail stores, saloons and entertainment venues all helped build that role, and the result was a town with a broader civic life than many of its neighbors.

That commercial density mattered because it created room for local institutions to grow. Keystone’s racial diversity was part of that mix, and the town became a center of McDowell County’s “Free State” community of color. In a county where coal operators and outside capital dominated many daily decisions, Keystone offered a different model: local ownership, local newspapers and local officeholding.

How Black political power took root

Keystone’s most important political fact is also its clearest answer to the question of representation. The town boasted the state’s first Black mayor, a milestone that placed Black leadership directly inside municipal government. That was not symbolic in a place like Keystone, where city government, business and community institutions overlapped in everyday life.

M. T. Whittico, also known as Matthew Thomas Whittico, helped build that structure. He moved to Keystone around 1900, joined a thriving interracial business community in the booming coal town, bought a local newspaper and renamed it The McDowell Times in 1904. He also served on Keystone’s city council and on the Republican Party’s state executive committee, showing how a newspaper editor could move between the press, party politics and public office.

A front page of The McDowell Times from June 27, 1913, captured that organizing power plainly. It boasted that “90 percent [of black voters] will support men and measured indorsed [sic] by their leaders and supported by the McDowell Times.” The line reads less like newspaper puffery than a declaration of political discipline, with the paper acting as a tool for turnout, endorsement and influence.

The McDowell Times and the Black press tradition

The McDowell Times was not an isolated experiment. West Virginia’s Black press began in 1881 with the West Virginia Freeman in Parkersburg, and Black newspaper editors across the state often served as ministers, attorneys, educators and politicians. They used their papers to confront racism, Jim Crow laws, mine labor practices, civil rights and military discrimination, which made the Black press an instrument of civic life as well as journalism.

In that larger tradition, The McDowell Times stood out. The Library of Congress catalog identifies it as a weekly “Colored” newspaper published by Whittico & Hill and traces its run from 1904 to 1941, with the McDowell Herald as its predecessor. e-WV describes it as for many years West Virginia’s preeminent African American newspaper and the state’s leading minority paper. It covered church affairs, civic organizations, political issues and labor concerns in the coalfields, which meant it reached far beyond Keystone while remaining rooted in the town’s Black political community.

That reach is what made the paper so consequential. In McDowell County, a newspaper that covered church events and labor disputes could also tell residents who had influence, which candidates mattered and how Black institutions could respond to the county’s shifting power structure. The paper gave Keystone a voice that extended well beyond its population.

Women’s history and the county’s political line

Keystone’s civic importance also shows up in the life of Minnie Buckingham Harper. Born on May 15, 1886, Harper later lived in Keystone, where her husband, E. Howard Harper, practiced law and had served in the legislature. In 1928, after her husband’s death, she was appointed to the West Virginia House of Delegates and became the first Black woman to serve in a U.S. state legislature.

Her story places Keystone inside a broader political lineage that reached into Charleston. McDowell County later produced other Black lawmakers as well, including Keystone attorney Harry J. Capehart, who was among three Black men elected to the West Virginia legislature in 1918. Taken together, those names show that Keystone was not only a business center but also a training ground for Black public leadership at a time when such power remained rare in the state.

From boomtown to decline

Keystone’s population tells the story of the town’s rise and contraction. By 1950, it had 2,500 residents, but mine closures and mechanization later reduced that number sharply. The 2020 census counted 176 residents, and a community profile describes the town as 57 percent Black, making it one of the few West Virginia municipalities with an African-American majority.

The town’s later history underscores what was lost as coal employment faded. The 1999 collapse of the National Bank of Keystone drew national attention and made the town a symbol of post-coal fragility. That episode came after the economic base that had supported Keystone’s business district and civic institutions had already been weakened, leaving a smaller town with an outsized historical memory.

Why Keystone still matters

Keystone’s place in McDowell County history is not just that it was prosperous once. It mattered because Black residents built institutions there that translated commerce into representation, and journalism into political power. The “Free State of McDowell” label, popularized by Whittico, still points to that legacy: a county identity shaped not only by coal extraction but by Black ownership, Black officeholding and a newspaper that helped knit those forces together.

That history remains visible in the names attached to the town, from Minnie Buckingham Harper and Harry J. Capehart to The McDowell Times and the National Bank collapse. Denise Giardina later drew on Keystone for the fictional Annadel in Storming Heaven, another sign that the town’s story still anchors how the coalfields are remembered. Keystone’s lesson for McDowell County is straightforward: power in the coal era was never only underground, because in Keystone it also lived in the newsroom, the council chamber and the storefronts along the rail line.