Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Pocahontas, VA

Pocahontas is an incorporated town in Tazewell County, Virginia, named for Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan of Jamestown-era fame.

Pocahontas was founded in 1881 by the Southwest Virginia Improvement Company as the first company mining town in Virginia.

The settlement grew out of a coal outcrop site called Powell's Bottom; its post office opened on June 30, 1882, officially giving the place the name Pocahontas, and the Virginia legislature granted the town its charter on January 31, 1884.

The railroad arrived in March 1883 and the first carload of coal shipped out on March 12, 1883, launching the Southwest Virginia coal boom; the vast two-state Pocahontas–Flat Top coalfield took its name from this town.

The town's mines worked the Pocahontas No. 3 seam, a bed of coal some 13 feet thick whose premium smokeless coal became the chosen fuel of the United States Navy.

In January 1882 some 200 Hungarian, Swedish, and German immigrant workers arrived to build the town and work the mines; Hungarian immigrants later built St. Elizabeth's Roman Catholic Church, known for its ten life-sized murals and an annual Hungarian cabbage roll dinner honoring the coalfield's European heritage.

Pocahontas boomed to a peak population of 3,775 in the 1920 census, but the 2020 census counted just 268 residents; the 2000 census had counted 441 people in 190 households.

The original Pocahontas mine produced coal for 73 continuous years before closing in 1955, shipping more than 44 million tons in its lifetime.

In 1884 a mine explosion in Pocahontas killed 144 miners, who are buried side by side in the Pocahontas Cemetery, where a memorial for them is held each April.

The town owns and operates the Pocahontas Exhibition Mine and Museum, a National Historic Landmark that opened in 1938 as the nation's first exhibition coal mine and is designated Virginia's official coal heritage zone, where visitors tour the historic workings of the 13-foot seam.