Frederick J. Kimball
Frederick J. Kimball (1844-1903) was a civil engineer. He is credited as the head of the Norfolk and Western Railway during its early development years and for the development of Pocahontas coalfields in Virginia and West Virginia.
At a 1881 foreclosure auction, the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad (AM&O) was purchased by E.W. Clark and Co., a private banking firm in Philadelphia which controlled the Shenandoah Valley Railroad then under construction.
Kimball was a partner in the Clark firm, headed the new line and consolidated it with the Shenandoah Valley Railroad. For the junction for the Shenandoah and the Norfolk & Western, Kimball and his board of directors selected a small Virginia village called Big Lick, on the Roanoke River. The small town was later renamed Roanoke, Virginia.
Under the Kimball era, the company became famous for manufacturing steam locomotive in-house at its' Roanoke, Virginia shops. Kimball, whose interest in geology was responsible for the opening of the Pocahontas coalfields in western Virginia and West Virginia, pushed NW lines through the wilds of West Virginia, north to Columbus, Ohio and Cincinnati, Ohio, and south to Durham, North Carolina and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This gave the railroad the route structure it was to use for more than 60 years.
In 1885, several small mining companies representing about 400,000 acres of bituminous coal reserves grouped together to form the coalfields' largest landowner, the Philadelphia-based Flat-Top Coal Land Association. Norfolk and Western Railway bought the Association and reorganized it as the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Co., which it later renamed Pocahontas Land Corp, now a subsidiary of Norfolk Southern.
Transported by the N&W and neighboring Virginian Railway (VGN), Pocahontas coal fueled half the world's navies during the 20th century and today stokes steel mills and power plants all over the globe.