| Douglas | |
|---|---|
| Unincorporated community | |
  Douglas Location within the state of West Virginia  Douglas Douglas (the US) | |
| Coordinates: 39°7′37″N79°31′14″W / 39.12694°N 79.52056°W Coordinates: 39°7′37″N79°31′14″W / 39.12694°N 79.52056°W | |
| Country | United States |
| State | West Virginia |
| County | Tucker |
| Time zone | Eastern (EST) (UTC-5) |
| • Summer (DST) | EDT (UTC-4) |
| GNIS feature ID | 1554324 [1] |
Douglas is an unincorporated community and coal town on the North Fork Blackwater River in Tucker County, West Virginia, United States. Originally known as Albert, the community's name was changed to Douglas by an official Board on Geographic Names decision in 1965. Its post office, however, continued to use the name Albert.
In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not governed by a local municipal corporation; similarly an unincorporated community is a settlement that is not governed by its own local municipal corporation, but rather is administered as part of larger administrative divisions, such as a township, parish, borough, county, city, canton, state, province or country. Occasionally, municipalities dissolve or disincorporate, which may happen if they become fiscally insolvent, and services become the responsibility of a higher administration. Widespread unincorporated communities and areas are a distinguishing feature of the United States and Canada. In most other countries of the world, there are either no unincorporated areas at all, or these are very rare; typically remote, outlying, sparsely populated or uninhabited areas.
A coal town, also known as a coal camp or patch is typically situated in a remote place and provides residences for a population of miners to reside near a coal mine. A coal town is a type of company town or mining community established by the employer, a mining company, which imports workers to work the mineral find. The 'town founding' process is not limited to coal mining, nor mining, but is generally found where mineral wealth is located in a remote or undeveloped area, which is then opened for exploitation, normally first by having some transportation infrastructure brought into being first. Often, such minerals were the result of logging operations by pushing into a wilderness forest, which clear-cutting operations then allowed geologists and cartographers, to chart and plot the lands, allowing efficient discovery of natural resources and their exploitation.
The Blackwater River is a 34.3-mile-long (55.2 km) river in the Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia, USA. Via the Black Fork, it is a principal tributary of the Cheat River. Via the Cheat, the Monongahela and the Ohio rivers, it is part of the watershed of the Mississippi River and drains an area of 142 square miles (370 km2). It is a true blackwater stream, owing to spruce and hemlock trees in its watershed, the tannins of which impart a tea or amber color to its water.
