Perched at an elevation of nearly 3,850 feet on Shavers Fork of the Cheat River, Spruce was one of the highest and most isolated industrial company towns in the eastern United States.
Established around 1904 by the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company (WVP&P) and serving as the operational heart of the Greenbrier, Cheat & Elk Railroad (GC&E), Spruce was not just a logging camp—it was a bustling, self-contained alpine junction that housed hundreds of woodsmen, rail crews, and their families in extreme conditions.
Camp & Town Layout
Because of the steep topography along Shavers Fork, Spruce lacked traditional streets. The railroad tracks themselves served as the main thoroughfare, and everything was oriented along the rail line:
- The Industrial Core: A massive pulpwood rossing mill (which mechanically peeled bark from spruce logs before shipment to Covington, Virginia), a locomotive coaling tower, water tanks, a steam-heated engine roundhouse/machine shop, and an extensive network of classification rail yards.
- Worker Housing:
- Company Houses: Roughly 30 to 40 wood-framed, single-family dwellings lined the hillside terraces for permanent machinists, mill foremen, and locomotive engineers.
- Camp Cars & Bunkhouses: Unmarried timber cutters, track maintenance crews ("gandy dancers"), and seasonal laborers lived in long, two-story wooden bunkhouses or strings of converted railroad boxcars outfitted with double-deck bunks and central potbelly coal stoves.
- Civic Infrastructure: A two-story company store (commissary), a company-funded schoolhouse that doubled as a community church on Sundays, a post office, and a clubhouse/hotel for visiting railroad officials and transient workers.
Living Conditions and Climate Realities
Daily existence in Spruce was defined by isolation, mud, and severe Appalachian mountain weather:
- Sub-Zero Winters & Heavy Snow: Snow often blanketed the town from October through May, with accumulations frequently cutting off walking trails and piling up past the windows. Bunkhouses relied on coal-fired stoves that roared 24 hours a day, yet water buckets inside the quarters routinely froze solid overnight.
- No Road Access: Spruce was completely landlocked—no public roads reached the settlement. All food, medical supplies, mail, fuel, and people arrived solely via the GC&E or the Western Maryland Railway at Spruce Junction.
- Constant Noise and Soot: The town was loud and industrial at all hours. Geared Shay and Climax locomotives ground past day and night, steam whistles signaled shift changes, and the rossing mill generated a deafening roar accompanied by clouds of black coal smoke and flying spruce sawdust.
Daily Routine in the High-Country Woods
The life of a high-elevation logger ("woodchopper") followed an unforgiving schedule:
- 4:30 AM – The "Gut Hammer": The camp cook beat an iron triangle or circular saw blade to wake the men. Woodsmen consumed massive breakfasts—biscuits, gravy, fried salt pork, eggs, and black coffee—necessary to fuel 5,000-calorie workdays in the freezing cold.
- 6:00 AM – The Log Train Run: Workers boarded open flatcars or modified cabooses to ride switchback lines deep into the high spruce cuts across Cheat Mountain and Back Allegheny.
- Felling and Skidding: Crews worked in pairs using crosscut "misery whips" and double-bitted axes to drop red spruce trees. Overhead cable skidders dragged 80-foot logs up mountain hollows at breakneck speeds, snapping limbs and creating treacherous ground conditions.
- Evening Return: Returning to Spruce at dusk soaked with sweat, snow, and spruce pitch, workers dried their wool clothes around bunkhouse stoves, ate a heavy supper in the mess hall, and spent brief evenings playing cards, tuning fiddles, or sleeping from sheer exhaustion.
Decline and Abandonment
By the late 1920s and 1930s, the virgin red spruce stands around Shavers Fork were completely clear-cut. The rossing mill was dismantled in 1925, and families gradually relocated down the mountain to Cass or Durbin.
When Mower Lumber took over operations in the 1940s, Spruce was reduced to an unpopulated rail junction and maintenance siding. Today, virtually all wooden structures have decayed back into the forest, leaving only concrete machinery foundations, track alignments, and apple trees planted by former residents along the cold banks of Shavers Fork.
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