Ashland lay along the North Fork of Elkhorn Creek in one of the most heavily developed coal regions of the Pocahontas field, where at its height the valley held an estimated ten thousand people, some employed by the Ashland Coal & Coke Company. After the company mine’s tipple was demolished in the 1980s, the company store and a few company houses remained from nearly one hundred years of operation. In 1904 the original store, the Ashland Commissary, was praised as a fine three-story building with a basement, steam heat throughout, marble-topped counters, and a large cold-storage room that could hold more than a carload of ice and an enormous supply of perishable goods, all built at a cost of between twelve and thirteen thousand dollars. The store stood within a broader world of nearly five hundred company towns built between 1890 and 1930 in the southern West Virginia coalfield, about one hundred of them in the Pocahontas field, where isolation from commercial centers made company stores essential. Usually placed centrally in town along the railroad tracks and accessible from both mine and homes, these stores supplied groceries, dry goods, furniture, cook stoves, clothing, mining equipment, and even cradles and coffins. They also served as the community’s business and public center, often housing company offices, records, cash, scrip, a payroll window, boarding rooms, a doctor’s office, and sometimes the post office. Daily life gathered there as women shopped in the morning, men arrived after work, children came and went, and people assembled on the broad porch to await the mail train or celebrate holidays. The importance of the company store and company town declined in the 1930s as hard roads and automobiles let miners travel to incorporated towns, though some southern West Virginia stores remained open through the 1950s and 1960s.