Putnam County’s coal deposits were known by at least 1800, but for most of the nineteenth century they supplied only limited amounts of coal for the Kanawha River Valley’s salt furnaces and for steamboats on the river, while the valley’s earliest export industry centered on salt manufacturing. Commercial mining in Putnam County did not take hold until the end of the nineteenth century, and by the first decade of the 1900s the county employed over 1,000 miners and exported 400,000 tons of coal in peak years. Several companies operated there, including Plymouth Coal and Mining Co., Marmet-Smith Coal and Mining Co., Black Betsy Coal Mining Co., and Alpha Mining Co. Large-scale mining ended in the 1940s as rising costs erased profits, and World War II drew labor away to the armed forces and munitions plants. The coal vein running through Putnam County contained a large amount of clay that created a cave-in hazard, and between 1900 and 1924 at least 53 fatalities were recorded in the region’s mines, most commonly from falling slate and electrocution.