Mate, Logan County: From 77,000 to 32,000 — What Coal Decline Looks Like at Road Level

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Hey, Brian here. Glad you're riding along. Hopefully, we learn something together or at least kill some time.

[00:00:05]Mate, Logan County. We are over the ridge from Calico now on the east side of the Guyandotte. Here's the thing you need to know [music] to read this country honestly.

[00:00:15]In 1950, the Logan County census counted [music] 77 391 people. In 2020, it counted 32,778.

[00:00:25]The county lost [music] more than half its population in 70 years. That is not a slow drift. That is an evacuation. And you can [music] see it on roads like this one if you know what you're looking at. This is the part of southern West Virginia where the names stack up faster than the population. Mate, Lundale, Verdun, Sharondale, Holden. All within a few miles of each other, all unincorporated. All sitting on what used to [music] be coal camps with their own school and their own commissary and their own number on the company books.

[00:00:56]Now, they are roads with names on them.

[00:00:57]The post offices are mostly gone. The maps still keep the names because [music] the road still goes there and people still live along it. Not as many as there were, not by half. What is interesting about driving through this part of Logan is how the geography [music] never change. The hollers are exactly where they were 100 years ago. The ridges are exactly the [music] same. The creeks run the same direction. What changed is the economy. The land does not get a vote in the economy. The land just keeps being the land and the names hang on to the road and the people who stay and keep living the geography even after the reason for the camp is gone.

[00:01:34]Mate itself is one of those small layered places. sits on the road, used to be a camp. Now, it is what it is.

[00:01:41]There is no commercial strip, no tourism, no story being sold to anybody, just a name on a sign, a road that goes through it, and the hills above doing what hills do. We are working our way south, brother, through the country that does not announce itself, finding the countrymen one holler at a time. If you are riding along, thanks for being here.

[00:02:01]Subscribe and we will keep going. There is a lot more to see and the land does not run out of stories. Thank you for riding with me. We are in this together.

[00:02:08][music] Keep going.