Thurmond, WV, "Matewan" - Movie Locations on Waymarking.com

According to John Sayles, on his website, visit link "Matewan depicts the events surrounding the 1920 Matewan massacre, a precursor to the 1920-21 West Virginia Mine War. The real town of Matewan proved too remote and too modernized to serve as the actual location for the filming but Thurmond, West Virginia was the perfect location for the movie since even in its late-80's state, it closely resembled the 1919-1920 period needed for the movie."

As Sayles explains, "The cornerstone of our production design was finding a town to serve as own main set for the town of Matewan. Once a wild river town with big hotels, gambling and prostitution, the Thurmond we found in 1986 was a quiet handful of buildings along the New River in one of the state's best white-water rafting areas. The main street was really not a street but a series of railroad tracks, with a beautiful old train station and wheelhouse still standing and a huge cement coal dock straddling the track at the other end of town. The population was down to around sixty or seventy people. Hills rose up steeply just behind the single row of buildings on the main street and from the banks of the other side of the river, just as in the real Matewan. The buildings were almost all brick, most built before the First World War. It had the blend of natural beauty and industrial function we were looking for, far from the drone of airplanes and highway traffic. There was still an enormous amount for our production designer, Nora Chavooshian, to do, but there was an important number of things we wouldn't need to do - bury power lines, cover or dig up sidewalks, remove hundreds of TV antennae, reroute highway traffic, etc.

Thurmond's history is every bit as colorful as, and in many ways parallels, that of Matewan. The town was built by Thomas G. McKell when his wife left him 12,500 acres of coal fields. After a ten mile branch was built to connect the town to the railway line in the 1890's, a 100-room hotel was built in 1901 to house the constant traffic of coal operators, businessmen, gamblers, adventurers, whores and others flocking to the town for a piece of the action. Thurmond hosted a 14-year continuous poker game and featured a bar that never closed. Dead men were no novelty, in the river or elsewhere in town. One historian wrote of Thurmond: "the only difference between hell and Thurmond was that a river ran through Thurmond."

Matewan was shot in seven weeks in the summer and fall of 1986.

New logs for waymarks must include a photo of the location. The photo should try and match, to the extent possible, the original present-day photo posted for the waymark.