Home for a Separatist Community

Home for a Separatist Community. Greenbrier River Trail. If you look closely, you can see the ruins of the vault of an old general store. This is the last large landmark remaining from the town of "Watoga.” In 1922, 51 African American coal miners and their families moved from Mercer County into an abandoned timber camp that sat here., The growth of the violence and power of the Ku Klux Klan in southern West Virginia along with Jim Crow laws spurred this group to create their own self-sustaining community in Pocahontas County. They learned to farm the land, attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church that they founded, and worked to provide for their needs. This Black separatist community offered an opportunity to own land and to succeed together free of segregation and racial strife., (caption) , Image of the Watoga Timber Town that was settled by African American miners and their families and transformed into the Watoga Land Association. Photo Courtesy of Pocahontas County Historical Society "Preserving Pocahontas"