Robert Hancock remembers when Skelton, West Virginia, was a town.

A coal camp erected for serving the purposes of a long defunct mine of the same name, one of the 500 mines located between Beckley and Bluefield in southern West Virginia in the 1930s and ’40s, Skelton had its own school (to eighth grade, Hancock remembers) with six rooms and outside toilets.

Five or six years ago, Hancock, who has known Skelton and only Skelton as his address, didn’t need road signs to get to his home from Robert C. Byrd Drive, but his exterminator did.

“You mean you don’t know where Skelton is?” he asked the man over the phone. When he got to looking around himself, he realized the signs marking Skelton were missing. Excepting the old coal camp houses that remained and the memories marked by photographs — some Hancock has, others scattered hither, yon or destroyed — those green road signs were the only landmarks left to point others toward Skelton from the main road.

Hancock, posting a strong defense to Beckley officials, the city that absorbed Skelton some time after the mine there closed in the early ’50s, got his signs back. He recently handed his pictures chronicling Skelton over to historian, author and mutual childhood resident of Skelton, Fran Klaus, for printing and preservation in her book “Images of America — Beckley” from Arcadia Publishing.

Now, Skelton — a piece of it at least — is preserved indefinitely.

Hancock, retired 20 years, has no middle name. “They ran out of  ’em by the time they got to me,” he guesses.

Hancock’s father, a blacksmith who sharpened the Skelton miners’ picks and a carpenter who built their company houses, had little left over in the way of cash after collecting his two-week paycheck of $90 in 1952.

“You didn’t have to worry about anybody having anything more than you had. By the time they drew out scrip for groceries and a little beer, they didn’t take any cash.”

Scant currency of any denomination remained after the debts of living owed to the company were paid, a period when a diversified portfolio meant having a huge garden of corn and beans and a few rabbits to eat.

According to Hancock and Klaus, before it was all said and done, the Skelton property where their families resided went for $3,500 to $5,000 per parcel, payable to the coal company for which they were built.

Klaus’ family opted to relocate to Calloway Heights. Contributed photos of her own include a pony, one the daughter of Czechoslovakian immigrants is certain held nearly every coal camp kid on the mountainside in the saddle.

“The pony was from a company called Galvin Studios in Charlotte, N.C. They charged $5 a photograph, which was a lot of money back then. Kids followed that horse all over the camp.”

Nearby downtown Beckley was another story, another world, Hancock remembers. Of the restaurants populating Beckley’s hub in the ’40s and ’50s, like Eat Well Restaurant on Heber Street and The Swan on Main, he would classify the lot as fine dining.

“They were fine to me because I couldn’t afford to eat there,” he states.

But it was still the place to go on Saturday night, where people were elbow to elbow on the streets the weekend long — without a Chili Night or other crowd-drawing event. It was just that way, what Hancock recalls as corners “howling” with activity.

“The beer joints were all open and all the buses came from all over the Gulf (Sophia area). You could hardly walk on the street.”

Mines all over began shutting down in the late 1950s. Shopping trends drew customers away from downtown and toward shopping centers. And as coal and retailers went, so went the concentrated hum of downtown activity.

Russ Parsons Jr., a real estate agent with Zaferatos Realty, whose family has firm roots in Beckley, agrees. Like Hancock, Parsons contributed a large number of the 188 photographs that made the cut into Klaus’ book.

At one time, pointed out Hancock, Raleigh County had a population of 96,000. McDowell County had about 80,000, echoes Parsons, what Raleigh County has today. Much of their respective populations once converging in downtown areas for entertainment, the centers dwindled in activity by the mid ’70s, with Raleigh County’s population contracting to 70,080 in 1970.

Parsons included photographs from downtown the way it was, in addition to a photograph of his dad, Russ Parsons Sr., in full drum major regalia, boasting a coveted cup.

“He was 6’4”. I remember him teaching my sister how to twirl the baton.”

Klaus’ book notes that Parsons Sr. won first place in the American Legion Convention’s big Chicago parade in 1940. The volume also notes his dad sold and serviced Studebaker automobiles on First Avenue until the auto maker ceased business in 1960.

“A lot of the pictures, my mother and her family had saved. I’ve been on a mission of accumulating them. I find good Beckley stuff — cleaning out houses, finding them at yard sales and house sales.”

Parsons’ fondest personal memories of downtown were “rampaging” with his friends on Monday nights, when the stores stayed open later into the evening.

“I’ve pulled stuff out of dumpsters,” he adds, concerned that pieces of Beckley, like the coal camps that once surrounded it, are disappearing. Parsons, Hancock and Klaus are among those attempting to preserve the memories of days gone by. It was one reason Klaus committed to finishing the Beckley book.

A member of the Raleigh County Historical Society, Klaus also believes much of Beckley’s history has ended up at the landfill, tossed away as rubbish from descendants who didn’t see the value in an old photograph.

Consider the picture on the front cover, one indifferent soul away from being dismissed as clutter. Instead, “Mayor Emmett Pugh received it in the mail from a guy whose aunt died,” explains Klaus. “The man mailed it to City Hall from Ohio.

“I’m hoping the next generation picks up and starts recording their own history. Just like (the Jan. 2 Heber Street fire). It’s rare for lightning to strike twice, but it has struck there three times. First, the fire in 1912, then 1986 and again in 2012.” Klaus included images in her book of the 1986 fire, and there are other photos of the ever-changing landscape of Beckley, making even recent history, history nonetheless.

Parsons, who maintains his goal for photos and Beckley memorabilia is to one day pass his collection on to the Raleigh County Historical Society, is heartened the book of images including those he’s collected will help preserve the heritage of the town he recalls as, “the smokeless coal capital of the world.”

“When you are moving, relocating or going to nursing homes, the first tendency is to put these things in the trash. Maybe people will see the book and stop throwing history in the dumpster,” he says. 

— Special thanks to Scott Worley, Chairman, Raleigh County Historical Landmarks Commission and Historian, Raleigh County Historical Society, for his contributions to this article.

— E-mail: lshrewsberry@register-herald.com