Thomas, WV Shirts

Thomas went up in a hurry in the 1880s, a coal and rail boomtown stacking a row of brick and false-front storefronts along the North Fork of the Blackwater River, and the coal left almost as abruptly by the middle of the next century. The buildings stayed. For decades they stood mostly empty, a rail-era main street with nobody left to sell to. Then artists started noticing what miners' wages had built: good bones, cheap rent, mountains in every direction. Today that same row holds galleries, studios, and music rooms where touring songwriters play to packed crowds a few feet from the old rail grade, and Thomas now claims an outsized share of West Virginia's working artists. It is still a coal town in its posture, just singing a different song. Our Thomas design faces the storefront row head on, windows glowing, a few stray notes drifting from a doorway into the mountain dark. Keep an eye out for Thomas businesses here: as they join ShirtMap, this page fills in like a gallery wall.