Racism in Cass

During the ownership and operation of Cass by the Mower Lumber Company (June 1942 to July 1960), racial equality did not exist. Instead, Cass operated under the rigid structural segregation, residential exclusion, and unequal labor hierarchies that had been established early in the century under the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company (WVP&P) and maintained under Jim Crow.

Residential Segregation and "East Cass"

The company-built town on the west bank of the Greenbrier River—featuring 52 neat, whitewashed company houses, boardwalks, and manicured streets—was reserved exclusively for white employees and their families. Company housing was strictly stratified by job rank (Class 1 for managers, Class 2 for clerks and foremen, and Class 3 for white laborers), but Black workers were excluded from this system altogether.

African American workers and their families were relegated to East Cass (historically called "Brooklyn"), located across the Greenbrier River. East Cass sat outside the core civic upkeep of the company town and was characterized by:

• Substandard, unpainted wood shanties and small cabins, often lacking basic indoor plumbing or insulation.
  
  
• Exposure to river flooding, rough terrain, and neglect in municipal services.
  
  
• Proximity to the town's isolation ward ("pest house") and unpaved, muddy lanes.
  
  

Labor Division and Workplace Stratification

Under Mower Lumber, which harvested second-growth hardwoods and remaining spruce stands on Cheat Mountain and Shavers Fork, employment was heavily divided along racial lines:

• Job ceilings: Skilled trades, machine shop positions, Shay locomotive engineers, firemen, and mill sawyers were almost universally white.
  
  
• Manual labor: Black men were concentrated in the most physically demanding, dangerous, and lower-paid roles. This included railroad track maintenance (laying and pulling spur lines up steep mountain switchbacks with hand tools and jacks), boiler tending, slab wood clearing, and green-chain lumber stacking in the drying yards.
  
  
• Seniority and advancement: Black laborers faced significant barriers to supervisory or salaried roles, meaning wage ceilings were firmly tied to race.
  
  

Civic and Social Life

Institutional and social life in Cass mirrored the wider Jim Crow practices of West Virginia prior to the mid-1950s:

• Schools: Under West Virginia’s constitutional mandate for segregated education, Black children in Pocahontas County could not attend the Cass town school. They were either taught in separate, under-resourced local colored schools or had to travel down to Marlinton for secondary schooling. Even after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, desegregation across rural county school systems was gradual.
  
  
• Churches and Fraternal Halls: Cass’s community church and local fraternal buildings (such as the Masonic Lodge) served the white community. Black residents formed their own community ties, informal social networks, and religious gatherings across the river in East Cass.
  
  
• Commerce and Public Space: While Black residents shopped at the large Cass company store, social interaction was circumscribed by unwritten rules of deference and segregation. White neighborhoods like "Big Bug Hill" (management row) had explicit social taboos against non-white or non-management presence without official business.
  
  

Demographic Contraction and Economic Impact

By the time Mower took over in 1942, Cass had already shrunk from its 1910–1920 peak of 2,000 residents down to several hundred. As timber reserves dwindled in the 1940s and 1950s and the mill dropped to a single shift, African American workers—holding the lowest seniority and least-protected manual roles—were disproportionately vulnerable to cutbacks and layoffs. This economic pressure accelerated outmigration toward larger rail and industrial hubs or southern West Virginia coalfields where unionized mine work offered comparatively better wages, leaving only a small, aging Black population in East Cass by the time Mower ceased operations in 1960.

When the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company (Westvaco) founded Cass in 1900–1901, it designed a company town with infrastructure that was progressive for its era in some respects, yet strictly stratified and primitive in waste disposal.

Water Infrastructure & Domestic Supply

• Gravity-Fed Mountain Water: Unlike many logging camps and rural Appalachian communities that relied on shallow dug wells or hand pumps, Westvaco piped gravity-fed running water directly into nearly all company-owned residential units from protected mountain springs.
  
  
• Industrial & Domestic Separation: Running water was primarily brought into kitchens for cooking and washing. The mill and locomotive shops relied heavily on Leatherbark Creek and the Greenbrier River for boilers and operations, leaving the piped upland supply dedicated to domestic use.
  
  

Human Waste & The "Honey Wagon" System

• Standard Outhouses: Cass did not have a municipal sanitary sewer system for residential areas during its early decades. Backyards throughout the town’s orderly residential terraces were uniformly equipped with two-hole wood outhouses paired with domestic coal/wood sheds.
  
  
• Company Scavenger Service: Outhouses were maintained through a routine municipal collection managed by the company. Once a month, the company-operated "honey wagon" passed through the back alleys to clean out the vaults, temporarily drowning out the mill's fresh-cut sawdust aroma with heavy disinfectant and sewage odors.
  
  
• Management Transition to Indoor Plumbing: Indoor flush toilets were not introduced until roughly 1919, and even then, they were initially restricted to upper-tier management and supervisory homes in the northern, managerial enclave. Most mill-worker families continued using outhouses well into the mid-20th century.
  
  

Public Health & Environmental Runoff

• Unpaved Mud & Livestock: Cass allowed dairy cows to roam freely between milkings for many years. Residents built white picket fences to keep livestock out of family gardens, and extensive elevated wooden plank walkways were installed so workers and children could traverse town above the mud, manure, and runoff.
  
  
• River Disposal: As was standard practice for industrial logging operations along the Greenbrier River in the early-to-mid 1900s, industrial effluents from the bark extract plant (built in 1914) and general surface drainage flushed straight into local waterways.
  
  
• Company Medical Care: Westvaco mitigated sanitation-related waterborne diseases (such as typhoid) through regular deductions from mill workers' pay envelopes to support a company-retained physician, small clinic, and company-run public health checks.
  
  

Comprehensive modern sanitary sewer connections and fully updated indoor plumbing across all preserved company houses only became standard after the state of West Virginia acquired the town and railroad in the 1960s and 1970s to develop Cass Scenic Railroad State Park.

 

Sanitary facilities in Cass were strictly stratified according to company hierarchy, race, and geographic district. Rather than a uniform system, the town operated under three distinct tiers of sanitation infrastructure during its industrial operating era.

Management Hill (Class 1 & Class 2 Housing)

• Early Modernization: Located north of the commercial core and away from the industrial noise and soot, the homes of mill superintendents, foremen, and high-level clerical staff received the town’s first major plumbing upgrades.
  
  
• Indoor Bathrooms (Circa 1919): Indoor flush toilets and full bathrooms began appearing in these managerial dwellings around 1919. Waste lines drained into private cesspools, septic systems, or direct gravity discharge toward the Greenbrier River.
  
  
• Integrated Domestic Water: These houses had hot-water capability and indoor sinks connected directly to the gravity-fed mountain spring supply.
  
  

The Main Townsite (Class 3 Worker Housing)

• Standardized Outhouses: The rows of two-story, wood-framed worker houses on Main Street and the hillside terraces were not built with indoor bathrooms. Backyards uniformly featured detached, two-hole wooden privies paired directly beside domestic coal/firewood sheds.
  
  
• Municipal "Honey Wagon" Service: Because these were company-owned properties, Westvaco managed outhouse upkeep. Once a month, the company scavenger team operated the "honey wagon," passing through back alleys to pump and haul waste away from the privy pits.
  
  
• Limited Kitchen-Only Water: Worker homes were equipped with cold running water in the kitchen sink from the upland spring main, but bathing was done manually with washbasins or metal tubs heated on cast-iron kitchen stoves. This arrangement remained largely unchanged for mill laborers well into the mid-20th century.
  
  

East Cass (Segregated Quarter)

• Primitive & Unmaintained Privies: Located across the Greenbrier River and outside the core company-planned grid, East Cass housed African American laborers, transient woods crews, and lower-wage manual workers. Sanitation here was the most rudimentary in town.
  
  
• Lack of Company Services: Unlike the tidy rows on the main hillside, privies in East Cass were frequently built closer to living quarters or property boundaries, received little to no scheduled company maintenance or honey-wagon pumping, and often relied on basic pit dugouts.
  
  
• Runoff & Surface Drainage: Because East Cass was situated on the low-lying riverbank across from the mill, high-water events and heavy rain routinely caused wastewater, outhouse leakage, and surface runoff to back up, creating chronic public health risks that the company largely ignored compared to the west side of the river.
   
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  In early-to-mid 20th-century vernacular and logging camp parlance—including in Cass—the term "hopper" had two distinct meanings depending on whether the conversation was about domestic life and sanitation or the lumber mill and railroad operations.

  
  

  The Sanitary "Hopper" (Privy / Water Closet)

  
  

  • The Outhouse Seat & Chute: In the context of sanitation and outhouses, a "hopper" referred to the funnel-shaped chute, receptacle, or bench fixture inside a privy or water closet. In early plumbing terminology (such as the "long hopper" or "short hopper" toilets developed before modern siphon-jet bowls), a hopper was an unvented funnel bowl designed to catch waste and drop it straight down into a vault, cesspool, or drain pipe.
    
    
  • Railroad Car Toilets: Because Westvaco operated passenger, supervisory, and crew cars on the Greenbrier, Cheat & Elk Railroad, the term also applied directly to the train toilets. Railroad toilets of that era were commonly called "gravity hoppers" or "drop hoppers"—essentially a hopper funnel that dumped directly through a trapdoor onto the railbed when flushed or foot-pedaled.
    
    
  • General Slang: Among Appalachian workers and timber crews, "the hopper" became common colloquial slang for the toilet, privy bench, or slop receptacle itself (e.g., "going to the hopper").
    
    

  The Industrial & Rail "Hopper"

  Because Cass was a timber boomtown dominated by heavy machinery, "hopper" was also widely used across the mill yards and rail lines in purely mechanical contexts:

  
  

  • Hopper Railcars: Self-clearing railroad cars with sloped bottom chutes (hopper doors) used to haul bulk coal for the mill boilers, Shay locomotives, and domestic coal sheds.
    
    
  • Boiler & Bark Fuel Hoppers: The mechanical funnels and chutes in the powerhouse and bark-mill processing buildings that fed coal, pulverized hemlock bark, or hogged wood waste and sawdust directly into the boiler furnaces.
     
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    Located roughly a half-mile south of the main Cass depot near the confluence of Deer Creek and the Greenbrier River, Slabtown was an outlying, semi-independent settlement that contrasted sharply with the neat, company-planned townsite on the hillside above the mill.

    
    

    While core Cass operated under strict company oversight and standardized architecture, Slabtown developed as an uncurated, makeshift community driven by rapid industrial expansion and private landholding.

    
    

    Housing & Construction

    
    

    • Sawmill "Slabs": The community took its name from its building materials—rough-cut exterior "slabs" (the rounded, bark-covered outer waste cuts sheared off logs during primary headrig milling) sold cheaply or discarded by the mill.
      
      
    • Shanty Architecture: Dwellings ranged from basic box-car style shanties to uninsulated wood-frame cabins. Unlike the two-story company houses on the terraces of Cass, Slabtown homes were largely self-built by transient woodsmen, mill hands, and families who were either shut out of company housing or wanted to avoid Westvaco’s strict tenancy rules.
      
      
    • Drafty and Fire-Prone: The rough-slab siding shrank and warped through Appalachian freeze-thaw cycles, leaving cabins drafty, difficult to heat with rudimentary wood stoves, and intensely vulnerable to chimney fires.
      
      

    Sanitation & Water Access

    
    

    • Absence of Piped Mountain Water: While Westvaco ran gravity-fed mountain spring water to kitchen taps in the main town, Slabtown sat outside this municipal loop. Residents relied on shallow hand-dug wells, local creek draws, or carrying water from nearby springs.
      
      
    • Primitive Dugout Privies: There was no company "honey wagon" maintenance. Privies were hand-dug, unlined earth pits situated directly behind shanties, often in close proximity to family gardens and surface water.
      
      
    • Drainage and Flooding: Positioned on low ground near the river and Deer Creek bottoms, Slabtown suffered from chronic mud, standing water, and privy overflow during seasonal spring freshets and heavy rains.
      
      

    Social & Daily Life

    
    

    • Autonomy from the "Company Town": Because Slabtown lay slightly beyond Westvaco’s formal boundary, it sat outside the direct policing of the company town watchman. It hosted private boarding houses, moonshining, and social gatherings away from company surveillance.
      
      
    • Mixed and Transient Workforce: The settlement sheltered seasonal loggers, railroad gandy dancers, extract plant laborers, and low-seniority mill hands who drifted in and out of Pocahontas County as logging camps shifted up Cheat Mountain.
      
      
    • Economic Fragility: Lacking company-backed home maintenance, Slabtown deteriorated quickly whenever the timber economy slumped. As timber cutbacks took hold in the 1940s and the mill closed in 1960, the rough shacks were gradually abandoned, rotted away, or were torn down, leaving little structural trace today beyond the regional name and the southern trailhead along the Greenbrier River.
       
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    •  
      There is no direct historical connection between British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and the historic timber town of Cass, West Virginia. Churchill never visited Cass or Pocahontas County, nor did he hold any personal, commercial, or property interests in the town or its operations under the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company (Westvaco) or the Mower Lumber Company.

      
      

      The perceived link typically arises from one of several conflations or indirect associations:

      
      

      • The American Novelist Winston Churchill: During the early 1900s—the exact era Cass was established as a booming Westvaco mill town—an unrelated American best-selling novelist named Winston Churchill (1871–1947) was widely published and well known in the United States. His books were heavily circulated in American company towns, lending libraries, and general stores, occasionally causing modern confusion with the British statesman.
        
        
      • The Name of Cass: The town was named in honor of Joseph Kerr Cass, co-founder and chairman of the board of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. He is not related to Winston Churchill’s ancestral lineage (which connects to the Spencer-Churchill family of Blenheim Palace on his paternal side and the American Jerome family on his maternal side).
        
        
      • World War I Red Spruce & British Munitions: During the First World War (when Churchill served in key British cabinet posts, including First Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of Munitions), high-elevation Appalachian red spruce harvested in Pocahontas County and milled at regional sites like Cass was heavily requisitioned for Allied aircraft airframes due to its exceptional strength-to-weight ratio. While Churchill oversaw Allied war materiel procurement broadly, Cass was simply one of many timber sources feeding the broader war effort rather than a site of direct personal engagement.
        
        
      • Churchill’s Travels in the Region: Churchill made several well-documented visits to the United States and Virginia (such as his 1946 address to the Virginia General Assembly in Richmond and trips through Washington, D.C., and Alexandria), but these itineraries never extended into the rugged Allegheny high country of Pocahontas County.

       

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  There is no direct historical connection between British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and the historic timber town of Cass, West Virginia. Churchill never visited Cass or Pocahontas County, nor did he hold any personal, commercial, or property interests in the town or its operations under the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company (Westvaco) or the Mower Lumber Company.

  
  

  The perceived link typically arises from one of several conflations or indirect associations:

  
  

  • The American Novelist Winston Churchill: During the early 1900s—the exact era Cass was established as a booming Westvaco mill town—an unrelated American best-selling novelist named Winston Churchill (1871–1947) was widely published and well known in the United States. His books were heavily circulated in American company towns, lending libraries, and general stores, occasionally causing modern confusion with the British statesman.
    
    
  • The Name of Cass: The town was named in honor of Joseph Kerr Cass, co-founder and chairman of the board of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. He is not related to Winston Churchill’s ancestral lineage (which connects to the Spencer-Churchill family of Blenheim Palace on his paternal side and the American Jerome family on his maternal side).
    
    
  • World War I Red Spruce & British Munitions: During the First World War (when Churchill served in key British cabinet posts, including First Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of Munitions), high-elevation Appalachian red spruce harvested in Pocahontas County and milled at regional sites like Cass was heavily requisitioned for Allied aircraft airframes due to its exceptional strength-to-weight ratio. While Churchill oversaw Allied war materiel procurement broadly, Cass was simply one of many timber sources feeding the broader war effort rather than a site of direct personal engagement.
    
    
  • Churchill’s Travels in the Region: Churchill made several well-documented visits to the United States and Virginia (such as his 1946 address to the Virginia General Assembly in Richmond and trips through Washington, D.C., and Alexandria), but these itineraries never extended into the rugged Allegheny high country of Pocahontas County.

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Because Cass was an isolated industrial timber town rather than a high-society resort like The Greenbrier in neighboring Greenbrier County, its roster of famous visitors is primarily composed of actors and filmmakers working on location, high-profile railroad preservation figures, and prominent political dignitaries.

Actors & Filmmakers

• Joyce Van Patten: The veteran stage, film, and television actress stayed and filmed in Cass to co-star as Polly in the 2013 independent feature film Angel’s Perch, which was shot entirely on location throughout the historic townsite.
  
  
• Ellen Crawford: Widely known for her long-running role as Nurse Lydia Wright on NBC’s ER, Crawford lived and filmed on-site in Cass while playing Betsy in Angel’s Perch.
  
  
• J.T. Arbogast: The Los Angeles-based actor, writer, and filmmaker—whose family roots run deep in Pocahontas County—spent extended periods in town producing and starring in Angel’s Perch and later co-founded the Friends of Cass preservation group.
  
  
• Elisabeth Hower: The television and film actress (Suits, Louie) filmed on location in Cass alongside Van Patten and Crawford.
  
  

Political Dignitaries & Public Figures

• William Wallace "Wally" Barron: As the 26th Governor of West Virginia, Barron made milestone official visits to Cass in the early 1960s, having authorized the state’s acquisition of the Mower logging line and officiating at the 1963 opening ceremonies of Cass Scenic Railroad State Park.
  
  
• Arch A. Moore Jr.: The three-term West Virginia Governor made multiple promotional and ribbon-cutting visits to Cass during the 1970s and 1980s as the state completed the acquisition and restoration of the entire townsite, company store, and shop complex.
  
  
• Jennings Randolph & Robert C. Byrd: Both longstanding U.S. Senators visited Cass during key infrastructure expansions and regional tourism dedications that tied the railroad to federal conservation and heritage corridor funding.
  
  

Railroad & Industrial Luminaries

• Russell Baum: The Pennsylvania photographer, rail historian, and conservation crusader whose visits in the late 1950s and early 1960s directly halted the line's scrapping and catalyzed the creation of the state park.
  
  
• Jim Boyd & Jim Wrinn: Renowned railroad authors and successive long-time editors of Railfan & Railroad and Trains magazines made repeated, well-documented pilgrimages to Cass to document and headline preservation conventions centered on the Shay and Heisler steam fleet.

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No, Carrie (Carry) Nation never visited Cass, West Virginia.

While she traveled extensively on national lecture tours throughout the early 1900s—including well-documented appearances in northern West Virginia (such as Wheeling in 1901) and neighboring Virginia and North Carolina—she never conducted an excursion or temperance raid in Cass before her death in June 1911.

The association or rumor occasionally stems from a few regional and historical overlaps:

• Strict Corporate Temperance in Cass: As a planned company town, Cass did not permit commercial saloons within town limits under the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. Independent drinking spots, bootlegging, and rougher fringe establishments were pushed out to peripheral areas like Slabtown and East Cass across the Greenbrier River, but these never drew an intervention from Nation.
  
  
• The "Carrie Nation of West Virginia": Local press and temperance groups across West Virginia frequently nicknamed formidable regional prohibition activists after Nation (for instance, the prominent activist Fannie Fisher Ellison, who operated in southern West Virginia and died in 1926, was widely memorialized in state newspapers as the "Carrie Nation of West Virginia").
  
  
• Pocahontas County Opera House Lore: Traveling temperance orators frequently booked speaking engagements at the Pocahontas County Opera House downriver in Marlinton after it opened in 1910, but Carrie Nation’s final tour concluded that same year in failing health, collapsing on stage in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, shortly before her death.