"Coal- called by ancient Greeks "the rock that burns"- powered the modernization of America. Rich coal-bearing regions like southern West Virginia were transformed in the late nineteenth century into teeming industrial civilizations. The completion of the Chesapeake & Ohio in 1873 and the Norfolk & Western in 1883 opened up the southern West Virginia coalfields. Soon, thousands of coal miners and their families crowded into the rugged river valleys where independent coal operators boldly opened mining ventures. West Virginia's sturdy coal miners came from all over the world. Black Americans from the Deep South joined Eastern European immigrants seeking a better life and poured into the sprawling coal camps which housed the workers. More than 100,000 miners toiled underground in the industry's glory years, laboriously hand loading the "black diamonds" that transformed the United States from a rural nation into an international industrial power. Five billion tons of the world's finest industrial fuel flowed out along the smoothly grated roadbeds of the N&W and the C&O, hauled by the most powerful steam locomotives ever designed."