Near the Grove Shaft, 54 free blacks, slaves, and six white males at the Mid-Lothian Coal Mining Company founded the Mid-Lothian African Church on February 8, 1846. Assisted by the company, the 60-member congregation built a log meetinghouse at the pits. Many slaves were rented yearly by the company. The Reverend Jordan Martin, pastor of nearby Tomahawk Baptist Church, became the church’s first pastor. The Mid-Lothian Coal Mining Company contributed one percent of the money received from the sale of hard coal toward church expenses. Later the congregation moved to its Winterfield tract and became today’s First Baptist Church of Midlothian. In the 1920s, a final effort by the Murphy Coal Corporation to pump out and reopen the Grove Shaft proved unprofitable and led to its closure. The stone structure, once the company’s main building, housed ventilating fans, steam boilers, pumps, and hoisting equipment. Today the two-story granite ruins of the Grove Shaft are the sole architectural remnant of a once-dominant local enterprise in the Richmond Coal Basin, recalling the Mid-Lothian Coal Mining Company and other area collieries that supported a flourishing local industry, North America’s first commercial coal mining venture.