By Donnie Johnston

January 24, 2024 - Nobody heats with coal anymore, at least not in this area.

There are still some people in Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and parts of West Virginia who use coal as a primary means of heating their homes and businesses, but even in these areas, where coal is mined, coal stoves and furnaces are becoming a part of the past.

While not the predominant source of heat, coal was much used when I was growing up, even 200 miles away from the nearest mines. And it produced good heat.

My Aunt Dora, who was blind from birth, used coal to heat the country store she operated by herself for more than 50 years. She used kindling and coal oil to get the fire started, but it was all coal after that.

The two-room school in rural Rappahannock County where I began my education was heated with coal as was the three-story multi-room elementary school that I attended in Culpeper after we moved from the farm.

While my aunt used coal brickettes (not charcoal) to fire her pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room, the schools used lump coal, randomly shaped chunks that were loaded straight from the mine to the railroad cars and transported to towns and cities all over the state.

But while the town school used a coal furnace to heat the building, the small Rappahannock school, like my Aunt Dora, used two pot-bellied stoves, one in each room.

And we deemed it a privilege to be selected to take the galvanized bucket and go fill it up (a pile of coal was kept under the back section of the building, whose floor was elevated to about three feet in the hilly terrain).

Getting the coal was a greater honor than being chosen to wash the blackboards or dust the erasers (all child abuse these days). Often the job was used as a reward for good behavior.

We boys loved it because it allowed us to go outside and away from the classroom, if even for five minutes.

The Culpeper school put the remnants of the coal that was burned in the furnace — the slag — to a use that still makes me cringe. At our playground, about four blocks from the school, there were low spots on the basepaths of the softball field.

Someone had the great idea to fill those spots in with coal slag, which often has sharp edges. You can slide on sandy soil and get what is called a “strawberry” on your hip, but you haven’t lived until you slide on coal slag. That would rip a hip to shreds. But, being good ballplayers, we slid anyway.

For a time when I was a child, we heated our sitting roam with coal. Talk about getting hot. That old stove would literally glow and the temperature in that uninsulated room could rise to 85 degrees.

While the notion is alien in this part of the state, some families in Southwest Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia had their own coal mine somewhere out in a back hillside. In the movie “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Loretta Lynn’s father is shown bringing coal to the house on a slide pulled by a mule.

Coal was, and still is, big business in Southwest Virginia. Every mother’s son got a job in those mines at some point in his life and almost every family could claim some member who was killed in a cave-in. Countless others suffered from black lung disease, which resulted from breathing coal dust for decades.

Today much of coal mining is automated, with continuous miners, not humans, digging into the earth. As a carbon fuel, it is frowned upon by environmentalists. Still, from Roanoke south, you can see locomotives pulling 100 or more coal cars eastward toward Tidewater.

And on your way to Virginia Beach you can see mountains of coal in Norfolk shipyards ready to be loaded onto vessels and transported to other countries.

Coal for me represents warmth in our old living room, a hot fire in Aunt Dora’s store and a chance to get out of class for a few minutes at my two-room school. Then there was that slag at the playground that caused my hip to bleed.

Coal’s intense heat fired the furnaces in cities like Pittsburgh that produced the steel that built America. And it kept Americans warm for centuries.

It may be politically incorrect to burn coal today, but there was a time.....