Slab Fork, established in 1907, was located on the Virginian Railway. Mines here were the first to ship coal on that line. Slab Fork was a Caperton family enterprise, and although the Caperton house, a two-story frame American Foursquare, is gone, a small group of one-story, early-twentieth-century miners' cottages remain. These appealing vernacular houses, clustered around a later post office, continue to be well tended. As Jim Wood related in his 1994 county history, the mine structures have not been so fortunate: “Once mighty Slab Fork … looks like a war zone.… Its formerly busy mine buildings are in shambles,… windows knocked out, cinder block walls cracked and broken,… rusting metal strewn about everywhere,… piles of rotting lumber, a stream full of trash and worn out bits of crumbling metal.”