The towns along seventeen-mile Buffalo Creek--

From Geological Survey Circular 667, West Virginia's Buffalo Creek Flood, 2

-- Saunders, Pardee, Lorado, Craneco, Lundale, Stowe, Crites, Latrobe, Robinette, Amherstdale, Becco, Fanco, Braeholm, Accoville, Crown, Kistler -- were built after the completion of a Chesapeake and Ohio Railway spur line in 1914.

They were coal towns, built by coal companies for the support of their mines. The towns' original inhabitants were primarily European immigrants recruited to work the mines. Population decreased throughout the 1950s and 1960s as mechanized mining replaced many of the men required to mine coal with hand tools and many miners were forced out of work.