Biography of Edward J. Flanigan

EDWARD J. FLANIGAN. The record of the business men of
Wyoming County demonstrates that many of them have
risen to places of responsibility because they have possessed
more than average ability and have applied to their work
a conscientious thoroughness which in the end justified the
trouble and time expended. Competition has always been
strenuous tor people who have invaded the coal fields of
West Virginia, but there have always been men who have
risen to the occasion when demands have been made upon
them, and one of these is Edward J. Flanigan, general man-
ager of the Sabine Smokeless Collieries Corporation, with
mines at Otsego on the Virginian Railroad in Wyoming
County.

Mr. Flanigan was born January 10, 1874, in Schuylkill
County, Pennsylvania. His father, Michael Flanigan, a
miner, was born in Scotland, to which country his parents
had removed from Ireland. As a young man he immigrated
to the United States and settled in Schuylkill County, Penn-
sylvania, where he rose steadily from ordinary coal miner
to general manager of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company. In 1906 he came from Pennsylvania to West
Virginia and became superintendent of the King Coal Com-
pany and the Tidewater Coal and Coke Company in Mc-
Dowell County, at Kimball, on the Norfolk & Western
Railroad.

Edward J. Flanigan entered the mines at the youthful
age of nine years, and therefore his educational training was
somewhat circumscribed, but he made the most of his
opportunities and gained a practical knowledge of the essen-
tials of an education, which has since been supplemented
by reading and self-teaching, so that he now has a broad
knowledge of matters in general and possesses information
on many useful subjects. When he began his career it was
in the capacity of picking slate, and from then he has
worked in every possible capacity up to the office of general
manager, all of his promotions having been gained through
real merit and industry. In 1896 Mr. Flanigan came to
Glenalum, Mingo County, West Virginia, in the position of
mine foreman and superintendent under his uncle, P. P.
Flanigan. He remained in the Mingo field for about eight
years, and was then appointed state mine inspector, with
headquarters at Kimball. Later he opened the Lynwin
Coal Company mines in the Winding Gulf District, as a
stockholder and superintendent of the company, of which
he later became manager. In 1919 Mr. Flanigan became
associated with the Beckley Coal Mining Company in
Fayette County, but in May, 1920, transferred his services
to the Sabine Smokeless Coal Corporation. This concern's
mines are at Otsego, Wyoming County, on the Virginian
Railroad, but Mr. Flanigan makes his home at Beckley.

Mr. Flanigan is a member of the Benevolent and Protec-
tive Order of Elks. While a good Irishman, he hold his
American citizenship high. Throughout his career he has
had the happy faculty of making friends, and especially so
among the so-called common people, for his sympathies are
frankly with the masses, whom he understands and with
whom he can work in harmony. Of him it may be said
that during his career he has never shrank from a duty or
betrayed a trust, and that at all times he has been a
respecter of the law. In his political tendencies he is in-
clined toward republicanism and supports the candidates
and principles of that party in national and state elections,
but in purely local affairs generally prefers to use his own
judgment in the choice of candidates and votes rather for
the man than the party.

Source:  The History of West Virginia, Old and New
Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc., 
Chicago and New York, Volume III pg. 140


Submitted by Valerie F. Crook <vfcrook@trellis.net>

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