In the mid-19th century the New River Gorge area in West Virginia was a sparsely populated and largely inaccessible mountainous country. In 1873 the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company laid track through the gorge to help connect the Atlantic Coast with the Midwest. Steam engines and the men who operated them played an important role in shaping the region and the nation by moving people, freight, and ideas when few other ways to do this were available. Coal mining companies, towns, and camps appeared almost overnight in order to mine the coal deposits known to exist in the gorge. One of these towns, the railroading town of Thurmond, reached its peak as the major revenue producer for the C&O Railroad during the early 1900s--a time when coal was king