ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996                  TAG: 9603060009
SECTION: CURRENT                  PAGE: NRV-20 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
DATELINE: MERRIMAC
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER

PRICE MOUNTAIN'S PLACE IN HISTORY IS SIGNIFICANT

Since explorers first took note of it 300 years ago, Price Mountain has maintained a prominent local presence.

It's been home to the county's original industries, source of fuel for a famous ship, and the former location of a bustling coal town, a number of deep mines and one very dry oil well.

In recent times, however, there's been little commotion associated with this four-mile long, 2,400-ft. high wooded ridge. Many families who live around Price Mountain's base or at its eastern end in the community of Merrimac have been there for generations. The area has a backwoods atmosphere, with modest homes, small acreage farms and extensive trailer parks.

Now, after years of relative calm, new people may be coming to Price Mountain. Perhaps in a year or so they'll be living in new subdivisions or passing by when the Huckleberry Trail is built.

Many other people have come and gone. Robert Fallam's journey past Price Mountain on Sept. 9, 1671 was the first to be recorded.

Seeking a mythical ocean rumored to exist beyond the western horizon, Fallam and a small group first saw Price Mountain beyond "a lovely descending valley" as they traveled up the watershed of the Roanoke River's North Fork.

A century later, more permanent settlers recognized outcrops of coal around Price Mountain. They began to acquire land and to establish the country's first primitive industries, blacksmith forges located near the ready natural sources of combustible fuel.

The county's first coal mines were nothing more than open pits, which dotted the lower slopes of Price Mountain through the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Later, as industrial demand began to grow, coal was dug from deeper pits and transported farther away by wagon and river barge.

During the Civil War, coal from Price Mountain is said to have been used to fire the boilers of the rebel ironclad warship Merrimac during its ill-fated duel with the Union's Monitor. That's how the community of Merrimac got its name.

Yet Price Mountain's coalfields weren't developed until the 20th century began, when Northern capitalists organized the Virginia Anthracite Coal and Railway Company.

That group built a coal town at Merrimac and also constructed a rail spur from Cambria to Blacksburg, a branch line that became locally renown as the Huckleberry.

Work in the Price Mountains mines that opened drew former farm workers from near and some European immigrants from afar. They lived in company houses at Merrimac and brought supplies with script money, redeemable only at the company-owned store.

Large-scale mining occurred in a number of mines along Price Mountain for about 40 years. But the mines were never consistently profitable, due to the relatively thin and deep coal veins.

A United Mine Workers strike in 1934 closed the large Merrimac mine permanently. Other small Price Mountain mines followed suit, but not before a December 1938 underground gas explosion killed four miners.

Thereafter, the mining equipment and all the company houses were dismantled and removed, and many people moved away. Today there's little trace of the Price Mountain mines. Only memories remain.

After World War II, a California company searched for other natural resources such as oil and natural gas on Price Mountain's summit by digging a deep well. The prospect yielded nothing except a name for modern-day Oilwell Road, which runs up mountain.

In 1952, Roanoke industrialist J.B. Fishburn donated a 1,200-acre piece of land that covers most of Price Mountain's western end to Virginia Tech. At the time, said Tech forestry professor Bill Stuart, the tract was "a piece of worked-over mountain land."

Now the land is covered with woods and used regularly by the university's forestry students as an outdoor laboratory.

After the Huckleberry made its last run in the late 1950s, and the tracks were removed a few years later, Price Mountain was left to itself, a quiet yet formidable barrier that forces county byways such as U.S. 460, Peppers Ferry Road and Prices Fork Road to skirt its base.

LENGTH: Medium:   81 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  A group of coal miners and mine officials posed in front
          of the Merrimac coal mine tipple on the east end of Price Mountain 
          for this 1922 photograph. Graphic: Chart by staff: Price Mountain 
          Timeline.