In 1913, union organizer Mary "Mother" Jones was imprisoned in Pratt. In 1913, near Mossy, a striking miners tent colony was fired on by mine guards using a machine gun mounted on the Bull Moose special train. In 1919, seven miners were killed in an explosion at the Weirwood Coal Mine. In 1920, striking miners terrorized Willis Branch with gunfire and destroyed the mining complex with dynamite. In 1989, striking miners bombed the coal mine at Milburn, West Virginia. In the 1990s, the last company store operating in West Virginia was the Imperial Collieries Store in Burwell. Paint Creek's name goes back at least to 1774, when it was named for painted pictographs on trees along its banks. The creek was used as a travel thoroughfare between eastern settlements by numerous American Indian tribes, who used the pictographs to pass along information on war, hunting, and settlements.