William N. Page

William Nelson Page (January 6, 1854–March 7, 1932), was a United States civil engineer, entrepreneur, capitalist, businessman, and industrialist.

Born into an old Virginia family near present-day Lynchburg, Virginia about seven years before the American Civil War, William Page was educated and became one of the leading developers of West Virginia's rich bituminous coal fields in the late 19th and early 20th century, as well as being deeply involved in building the infrastructure to process and transport the mined coal.

Educated by the University of Virginia as a civil engineer, he first came to the area as a surveyor to help complete the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway to reach the Ohio River from Richmond in the 1870s and soon became involved in many iron, coal and related enterprises in the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, often working as a manager for absentee owners as such British geological expert Dr. David T. Ansted, who helped identify and map much of the coal regions of southern West Virginia, and New York City mayor Abram S. Hewitt, whose father-in law, Peter Cooper, had been a key man in earlier development of the anthracite coal regions centered in eastern Pennsylvania, which were playing out by the end of the 19th century.

Notable among William Page's many projects, beginning in 1902, was a partnership with absentee investors to plan and construct the Deepwater Railway, a modest short line railroad to tap new coal reserves in a rugged portion of southern West Virginia. Blocked from negotiating acceptable rates to interchange coal traffic by collusion of two of the country's larger railroads, whose leaders were apparently unaware Page backers included silent partner, financier and industrialist Henry Huttleston "Hell Hound" Rogers, the project grew as it was secretly planned to provide a new, third railroad, all the way to new coal pier facilities at Sewell's Point on the harbor of Hampton Roads, fully 440 miles away from the railhead on the Kanawha River. Largely financed from Rogers' personal fortune, and completed in 1909, the well-engineered and highly efficient Virginian Railway (VGN) operated very profitably and came to be known as the "Richest Little Railroad in the World," eventually becoming a valuable part of the modern-day Norfolk Southern Railway system.

William Page married Emma Hayden Gilham, daughter of Confederate Colonel William Gilham, and they raised their family in the town of Ansted, West Virginia in Fayette County, where he was also a civic leader, serving as mayor, a leader in the local militia during the Spanish American War and later the West Virginia National Guard, and helped found a hospital in 1889.

In southern West Virginia, the coal and railroad towns of Page and Pageton were named for him. After his retirement in 1917, a ship which served the US Navy and the merchant marine during both world wars, the S.S. William N. Page, was named in his honor. William and Emma's Victorian-era mansion still stands in Ansted on a high knoll overlooking the town and the New River Valley, as does a Page Coal and Coke company store in Pageton, both National Historic Landmarks and reminders of a bygone era in the Mountain State.