Welch advances coal-miner heritage park on Stewart Street to boost recovery

Mayor Harold McBride said Welch is pushing ahead with a coal miner heritage park on Stewart Street, describing the project as part of the city’s CoalTown USA theme and a step toward local recovery. “We’ve adopted the CoalTown USA (theme). That’s our heritage and that is where we are going to go with it,” McBride said, placing the site “up on Stewart Street up past the elementary school.”

The park will feature a replica coal company store, which McBride identified as “CoalTown Company Store No. 1,” along with a replica mining house, a planned statue and mining equipment on display. McBride reported that the replica of the old company store “is now under roof,” and officials hope to assemble equipment and other historic items for public display as part of the site’s interpretation.

Work on the site is underway, McBride said, and city leaders are targeting completion “possibly by this summer.” “Hopefully we will finish them up this summer,” he said, while adding an optimistic assessment of the project’s look: “It’s going to turn out pretty neat.” McBride also noted a desire for a commemorative piece: “We are hoping to put a little statue of a coal miner up there.”

City officials frame the park as both an economic placemaking project and a cultural anchor intended to attract local residents and out-of-town visitors. Officials specifically cited hopes the park will draw people who travel to McDowell County to ride the Hatfield-McCoy Trails and to visit other local attractions, tying tourism traffic to downtown Welch activity and heritage interpretation.

Project materials and reporting on the park place it in the county’s long coal-mining history. As stated in the project background, “Many immigrants traveled to the United States to work in the coal mining industry early in the 20th century and many of those families ended up in McDowell County.” The materials also note that “the coal industry began to experience sharp declines and job losses in the 1970s and early 1980s,” a decline the city says the park will help commemorate and contextualize.

Several operational and financing details remain unspecified in published project descriptions. No project budget, named funding sources, contract awards or firm calendar opening date are included in current materials, and the city has not released contractor names or long-term operations plans for the park. Those elements will determine how the replica structures, statue and displays are completed and maintained.

A contributed photograph of the city of Welch accompanied reporting on the project; separate supplied material referencing redevelopment in St. Petersburg, Florida, pertains to a different jurisdiction and is not related to the Welch, West Virginia, heritage park. Mayor McBride and Welch city leaders say the CoalTown USA park will anchor local recovery by preserving mining history and encouraging heritage tourism in McDowell County.