The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia

William Tams lived coal. He spent the first half of the twentieth century engaged in the business, rising from a young coal engineer to a coal baron. The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History first appeared in 1963; after forty-plus years, Tams's work is still an essential sourcebook for every study of coalfield history. Tams writes clearly about the coal industry, describing the quotidian work of mining, laying track, undercutting, blasting, and loading coal and revealing the work conditions and the lives of coal miners. Tams, West Virginia, a small coal mining village, grew out of W. P. Tams's labor of love.