Mollett family successfully returns to family gravesite at Edwight coal camp

The Mollett family returned to West Virginia over Memorial Day weekend, this time successfully gaining access to their family’s cemetery on coal mine land in Raleigh County.

Last year, the Mollett family was left standing in front of a locked gate after working diligently beforehand with Sundial Mining Company to be permitted onto mine land to decorate their family’s cemetery. Four years earlier, the same incident occurred, which has led to growing frustration.

But this time, a security guard was on shift to lead them past the gate and allow them to drive up the hill to the gravesite. The brush had grown immensely over the cemetery and the path down since it had been two years since they’d last cut it, said Doretha Mollett. A six-foot tree had grown right in the middle of the path, she said, and the sign marking the cemetery site had nearly faded completely away.

She expressed gratitude to the company for ensuring they made it to the gravesite this year – a family tradition that has spanned decades, but has become increasingly burdensome in recent years.

“All in all, we were glad, happy to get access to the cemetery,” said Mollett. “We’re not angry or anything at anybody. We just want to keep the tradition going,”

There was a smaller crew this Memorial Day, with about a dozen family members making the trip to Edwight – a small former mining town right along the Raleigh-Boone County border. Some years, around 30 family members from all over the United States have been able to make the trip to their ancestors’ home in West Virginia.

A three-car caravan from Doretha Mollett’s home in East Orange, New Jersey, made the annual 10-hour trek to Charleston, she said, with other family members coming up from the south.

“Everything was good,” Mollett said of this year’s trip. Their annual family gathering also includes stops in Madison and Logan to decorate the graves of other family members.

Aside from the nearly 20-hour round-trip car ride, the new environment typically triggers her allergies and asthma, Mollett said. She also lives with multiple sclerosis, which can make getting around difficult.

At Edwight, where the former coal camp’s cemetery for Black families is scattered down the side of a hill, the trip can be troublesome for the family’s older members. Doretha and her four siblings – Cleo Vernell Mollett, Sr., David Lee Mollett, Tanners Lee Mollett, and Christina Mollett – are all aging into their 70s. The “WV 5” promised they would return every Memorial Day to decorate their family’s headstones and clean the gravesite. They also try to clean as many other gravesites as they can find, which are placed all along the hillside.

“My brother was asking ‘How long are you going to be able to make it with that MS?’ I said ‘Well, until I can’t make it no more – I don’t know,” said Doretha Mollett. “We were the ones who promised our grandmother that as long as we were living and able, we would decorate the graves at Edwight.”

All five siblings were born in the Edwight coal mine camp, which closed in 1959 when they were young children. After that, the Mollett family moved to Logan.

Keeping this tradition going remains critical to Mollett, who said she was excited that her son, niece, and nephew all renewed their commitment to this tradition whenever the torch is eventually passed.

“We try to rally the young people in our family to see who is going to keep the tradition going,” Mollett said.

The family will return again next year, marking more than 90 years that the Mollett family has been maintaining this cemetery. She estimated the family has been caring for the site since 1935.

A Black By God article published in January recounted the Mollett’s family trip to Edwight in 2024, and the family’s growing irritation with the current mine operator. Prominent environmental attorney Kevin Thompson spoke about some of the ugly history of mining companies and their desecration of Black gravesites.

This long, violent history is why Mollett said this tradition will always continue, so that the past is not forgotten.