Drawn by the rich forest timberlands of Garrett County, John W. McCullough arrived in the Friendsville area in the 1890’s and figured prominently in the expansion of the town. He constructed several sawmills in the area and in 1894 built a 36 inch narrow gauge line, called the Clark & McCullough Railroad that traveled along Bear Creek.
This line extended eastward and climbed Negro and Meadow Mountains and eventually to Swanton with spurs including 25 miles of track in very rugged terrain making it the longest narrow gauge line in the county.
The large sawmill in Friendsville was sawing up to 50,000 feet a day in 1900, by 1912, the logging industry collapsed as this resource became decimated. J.W. then purchased the Fike Mine upstream of town along the river and mining continued until the railroad closed in 1942.
J.W. served as a State Senator and a County Commissioner. In 1931, J.W. suffered a heart attack and died in the Garrett County Courthouse right after addressing the County Commissioners on the critical need for a hard-surfaced road to connect Friendsville to Pennsylvania.
A portion of a map showing a portion of the McCullough coal mine complex a few miles south of Friendsville, MD. The tipple was a distance from the mine, and is not shown here. This mine, originally a much smaller mine operated by David Fike, was also called the Fike coal mine. In its original conception the mine was a small operation with 2 or 3 employees mining coal into 12 bushel coal cars and delivering it by wagon to Friendsville. Later it was operated by the larger McCullough Coal Corporation, who averaged 27,211 tons annual production between 1921 and 1933, and who closed the mine in 1942 when the B&O subsidiary Confluence and Oakland Railway Company abandoned the railroad that shipped the mine’s coal to market. This caused McCullough Coal to sue the Confluence and Oakland Railroad and the United States government. At another time the mine was operated by the Penn-Garrett Coal Co. (Image courtesy of Maryland Coal Mine Mapping/Frostburg State University)
From Coal Camp USA
