This article is the first in a multi-part series about the West Virginia Mine Wars. Much of this research and writing was part of some academic work, though many of my favorite details had to be cut to meet those pesky word-counts. Nevertheless, I wanted the opportunity to tell as much of the story of the Mine Wars as I could, an event that has somehow been scrubbed from American history. It is a tale of tragedies and triumphs, shocking cruelty and vicious exploitation, stamped-out revolution and deep solidarity in the American working class. I hope you enjoy it.
All sources are listed at the end of the article.
I. “Creeks Full of Coal”
The coal fields of West Virginia, comprising an area greater than Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Delaware combined, were known to American colonists as early as the eighteenth century.[1] Explorers who traveled beyond the Blue Ridge wrote home of “creeks full of coal,” and George Washington, surveying modern-day Mason County in 1770, described hills perpetually on fire.[2]
But the land of West Virginia is unkind to industrial enterprise. Razor-back mountains and narrow valleys thick with towering timber cause the sun to rise late and set early, and access to the state’s innumerable “hollers” was seldom better than dirt roads. As late as 1840, coal mining was limited to chipping chunks away from outcroppings, and the remote West Virginians could be found making shoes from their own tanned leather, weaving cloth from flax and wool, and carving dishes and bowls from the cucumber wood and yellow poplar that overhung their mountain abodes.
During the 1870s, “battalions of steel-drivin’ men” brought enormous sums of capital to the region no West-Virginian had yet-raised himself, and used it to slowly build the railroads coal-mining required.[3] Where their engineers found coal, they bought, sending high-powered lawyers to wrangle unwilling homesteaders in federal court. Other residents signed cookie-cutter leases granting coal, timber, and oil companies the right to use their land in any way “convenient and necessary,” insulating lessees from taxes and liability for damages caused by the coming industrial enterprise.
By 1900, 81% of mining operations in southern West Virginia were owned by outsiders: consortiums of investors from New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and London, or American mega-corporations like United States Steel and Consolidation Coal Company.[4] And the men they sent to run their collieries were foreigners too, 80% hailing from outside Appalachia.[5] When the railroads arrived, beginning with the Chesapeake and Ohio in 1877, the owners began to build their mineworks: thousands of coke ovens, miles of track, dozens of tipples, hauling carts, offices, supply depots, and the like, quickly dwarfing the small collieries that proliferated in the 1890s.[6] With development came a population explosion: in McDowell County, which contained the Pocahontas coal field, the population increased by more than 155% between 1900 and 1910.[7]
II. Company-Owned Americans
The new mines of West Virginia were in wilderness locations, and so the operators were forced to provide housing and basic amenities to attract and retain the labor they needed. 80% of West Virginia coal miners over the coming decades lived in company housing, rented from the same operators who owned hundreds of thousands of surrounding acres, save the creeks and the railroad’s right of way.[1] The miners were not normal tenants, as the state courts had ruled that the mine owner was not his landlord but his master, and the miner legally akin to a servant.[2] They could be evicted at any time “either for cause or without cause,” and the form leases reserved to operators the right to eject any non-employees from miners’ dwellings.[3]
The miners’ homes were meagre: two-room cottages for couples and six-room, two story houses for families, built entirely of wood and roofed with composition paper.[4] The houses had electric lighting but lacked running water and were heated by an open coal-burning grate. Even-cheaper constructions in the holler adjacent were reserved for Black and Slavic or Italian miners. A detailed study of company housing in West Virginia found only eight “morphologically similar” home designs, with each company utilizing only one or two.[5] The mining camps were often located at the bottom of valleys to avoid the expense of building on sloped ground; company officials enjoyed elaborate stone houses on the hillsides, allowing them to surveil their employees at all hours of the day.[6] Because the outdoor privies drained to the nearest streams, the camps were breeding grounds for smallpox and dysentery. Smoke from locomotive engines, burning trash heaps, and coke ovens filled the air at all hours, while cinders from engine boilers and coal dust crept under doorsills, into dinner plates, and fell on the miners’ houses like never-ending snow.[7]
Non-residential structures came also from company draftsmen—churches, schoolhouses, clinics, saloons, and the occasional cinema—and the operators paid the salaries of the preachers, teachers, and physicians who worked within.[8]There were no public officials, sheriffs, or judges because the company was the law. Mine operators settled all disputes and levied all penalties—often a beating known as “company discipline” for minor offenses or termination, eviction, and blacklisting for the more serious.[9] Finally, at the center of each town, was the company store, the camp’s only mercantile enterprise because the operators allowed no others.
The families who moved to southern West Virginia for coal-mining work were a diverse group. At one U.S. Coal and Coke Company worksite, the payroll recorded nationalities 28.6% Black American, 17.8% white American, 22.2% Hungarian, 13.8% Italian, 5.8% “Slavs”, 5.5% Romanian, 4.5% Polish, 3.0% Russian, 0.5% German, .06% Greek, .02% Swedish, .01% Spanish, and .01% French.[10] The operators worked hard to preserve divisions among the miners through residential segregation, publication of racialized crime stories in company newspapers, and reserving dangerous positions for disfavored minorities, but a common kinship among miners often prevailed.[11] “African Americans, Italians, and Hungarians never lived more than a few hundred yards ‘up the hollow’ from native-born whites, with whom they worked every day in close proximity and mutual dependency. Miners of different races and nationalities all occupied roughly the same type of company house, paid the same rent, and experienced the same type of hardships of coal town life.”[12]
III. Slavery by Another Name
Testifying on industrial unrest in West Virginia before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1921, a coal miner named Charles Echols said the following:
The Chairman: And what is the trouble down [there] anyway?
Mr. Echols: […] They promised to pay us by the ton but they don’t do it. […] We want them to put it on the scales. All they do is to say that’s so and so much, and we have to take it. […]We pay them for the lights and the fuel and then the supplies, and whatever they say at the office they give us the balance. […] I have loaded coal when I got $1.25 a car, and if we had the scales there I would get as much as $4 a car.
The Chairman: Well, what seems to have been the trouble with you?
Mr. Echols: Well, I think it is because I signed up with the union. […] There are some things that we cannot stand for. I was raised a slave. My master and my mistress called me and I answered, and I know the time when I was a slave and I felt just like we feel now.”
Testimony before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor. Williamson, West Virginia: September 18th, 1921. “West Virginia Coal Field Hearings,” Volume I: pg. 469-470.
Miners in West Virginia were under financial pressure from the moment they signed an employment contract. Pay was delivered on a monthly or semi-monthly basis, yet rent ($6-$10), electricity ($1-$1.50), heating fuel ($1-$2), medical fees ($1-$2), and hospital service fees ($1-$2) had to be paid upfront, along with the travel fees to relocate to worksites.[1] All miners paid the same amount for physician and hospital service whether they used it or not, and were subject to further charges for procedures like childbirth or minor surgery. Miners were also charged for a burial fund to ensure coffins would be available in the event of an accident, required to purchase their tools from the company store—pickaxes, headlamps and fuel, blasting powder, fuses, work clothing, live canaries—and paid for access to sanitary facilities to clean up after a day’s work.[2] Mine operators issued a private currency called “scrip,” redeemable only at the company store, to allow miners to begin working without cash on hand, deducting the miner’s debts from his pay each month no matter if work was available.[3]
A miner’s family also utilized the company store to purchase the goods required for daily life: meat and canned goods, dishes, glassware, pots and pans, clothing and shoes, school books, etc. A congressional investigation found that company store prices were 5-12% higher than independent merchants, but no independent merchants did business for miles.[4] The payment of wages in scrip, usually a stamped metal token or a paper coupon, was illegal in West Virginia unless backed by and redeemable for U.S. dollars, but few companies complied with the mandate.[5] Most refused to repurchase scrip at face value and independent merchants paid 70-75 cents on the dollar.[6] Aside from creating a state of dependency, the scrip system provided mine operators with a hedge against labor agitation. If forced to increase wages, prices increased at the company store in equal measure.[7]
West Virginia miners worked twelve-hour days at furious paces, and were the only group of pick and shovel miners more productive than machine miners anywhere in the country.[8] But hard work was rarely enough to get ahead. West Virginia miners were paid $0.385-$0.49 per ton of clean coal brought to the surface, compared to $0.76-$1.27 in the unionized mines of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.[9] All other work necessary for mining—building new rooms, widening narrow passages, repairing equipment, and laying track—was unpaid, and a full week’s work was sometimes hard to come by. The railroad might fail to supply enough coal cars, and mines closed frequently for unstable conditions or buildups of methane gas. Operators worked to foster a culture of competition among their workforce, but veteran miners—wary of the greed, hostility, and recklessness bred by competitive individualism—enforced an iron-clad egalitarian code.[10] Well-respected men occupied the position of “coal loader” at the face of the mine, and sought to control output and equalize earning opportunities by attributing the same number of cars to each miner during a workday.[11]
Still, the company tried to shortchange miners. A “check-weight” man on (a higher scale of) the company payroll inspected the miners’ hauling carts for slate and other impurities and weighed the quantity of coal. Miners were unable to weigh or inspect the coal themselves: “The boss man’s pencil did all the figuring.”[12] In the first decade of the twentieth century, mine operators introduced the “long-ton,” and announced they would pay their employees the same wage for the new measure, 2,240 pounds, as they did for the traditional 2,000-pound ton. Other operators did away with the check-weight system altogether, telling miners their hauling carts held 2,000 pounds while actually increasing capacity to 2,500.[13] In the year 1920, 1,059 West Virginia mining firms reported profits of 50% or more, while 498 firms reported profits greater than 100%, but the operators often failed to reinvest the capital: West Virginia mines had the highest fatality rates in the country.[14] One historian suggests that an American soldier had a better chance of surviving a World War I battlefield than a career in the coal mines of West Virginia.[15]
**Warning: the following paragraphs detail a systemic practice of rape and sexual assault.**
Perhaps the greatest danger to a miner’s family was his illness, injury or death. Husbands and wives said ritual goodbyes every morning, recognizing the extraordinary danger of mining and the operators’ callous disregard for their workers’ lives.[16] In the immediate aftermath of the Monongah mine disaster, a massive explosion that killed 361 boys and men, miners overhead a foreman asking to count the number of dead mules “because it cost more to replace a mule than it did a man.”[17] A miner who was injured or killed could expect no insurance from his employer, and his family rapidly accrued debts in the company store. A family in this circumstance had two options: send a son into the mines provided he was at least eight years old or face eviction.[18] Some mining companies, such as Justus Collins’ Greenbrier Coal and Coke company, gave miners wives a third option.
Collins’ company stores, one of which still stands in Whipple, West Virginia, offered a special line of credit called “Esau Scrip” to the mothers of hungry children whose fathers were injured or unable to work.[19] Esau Scrip credit was good for only thirty days, after which the miner was forced to return to work or the loan came due. If a family was unable to pay, mine guards visited their home to collect collateral. “For a miner’s wife, forfeiting on the Esau agreement meant submitting to the sexual depredations of the company men, compromising her own integrity and birthright, all for a poke of beans to feed her children, or a week’s rent to keep a roof over their heads. She perceived herself without options, totally victimized by a well-established, bureaucratic system conducted through the company store at a time when corporate profits were mushrooming[.]”[20] Company stores frequently carried glamorous items like designer shoes as well, offering private fitting rooms on the third floor to unwitting shoppers. According to Joy Lynn, the caretaker of the Whipple Company Store museum, “over the past several years, we’ve had eight or ten women refer to this as the rape room. After they got their lovely shoes, they would have to pay for them in this room. They then would be escorted back downstairs to resume their shopping, or pick up their children…”[21]
Few women ever made their husbands aware of the sacrifices made to keep the family’s finances above water, but the miners had their own reasons to hate the mine guards. Because the West Virginia operators owned the land on which their employees lived and worked, nearly all hired private ‘guards’ from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency for the stated purpose of protecting company property.[22] The operators cloaked the ‘detectives’ in legal legitimacy by securing deputizations from the local sheriff or appointments as railroad detectives, but they were principally responsible for evicting terminated or indebted miners, arresting union organizers, and doling out “company discipline.”[23] As far as the operators were concerned, the guards had free reign on their property “to prevent the union from getting hold of us”: despite indictments ranging from simple assault to murder, bail was always ready for mine guards who attacked unionizing miners, and few were ever brought to trial.[24]
End of Part I.
Sources/Works-Cited
Creeks Full of Coal
[1] Green, James. The Devil Is Here In These Hills: West Virginia Coal Miners and Their Battle For Freedom. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2015. Pg. 13-14.
[2] Lane, Winthrop D. “Black Avalanche.” Survey. March 25, 1922.
[3] Green, ibid., 17.
[4] Green, ibid., 18. Garay, Ronald G. U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011.
[5] Green, ibid., 26.
[6] Green, ibid., 20. Garay, ibid., 36-37.
[7] Green, Id.
Company-Owned Americans (title from Gleason, infra.)
[1] “A Study of Coal Mining and Related Resources in Southern West Virginia.” Coal Heritage Studies. Philadelphia: US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1992. Pg.18.
[2] Green, ibid., 21.
[3] Gleason, Arthur. “Company-Owned Americans.” The Nation. June 12, 1920.
[4] Department of the Interior, id.
[5] Gillenwater, Mack H. “Cultural and Historical Geography of Mining Settlements in the Pocahontas Coal Field.” Ph.D., University of Tennessee, 1972.
[6] Garay, ibid., 40.
[7] Green, ibid., 24-25.
[8] Garay, id.; Gleason, ibid.
[9] West, Harold E. “Civil War in the West Virginia Coal Mines: The Mine Guards.” Survey. April 5, 1913.
[10] Gearay, ibid., 45.
[11] Green, ibid., 26; Gourley, Lela Dawn. “‘Mixed-up in the Coal Camp’: Interethnic, Family, and Community Exchanges in Matewan during the West Virginia Mine Wars, 1900-1922.” MA, Old Dominion University, 2019. Pg. 38, 90; Sullivan, Charles K. Coal Men and Coal Towns: Development of the Smokeless Coalfields of Southern West Virginia, 1873-1923. New York: Garland, 1989. Pg. 20, 187.
[12] Green, id.
Slavery by Another Name
[1] Lane, ibid.
[2] Id; Kline, Michael. “Esau in the Coal Fields: Owing Our Souls to the Company Store.” Appalachian Heritage 39, no. 3 (January 2011): 69–84. Pg. 76.
[3] Green, ibid., 22.
[4] Id.
[5] Lane, ibid.
[6] Green, id.
[7] West Virginia Archives and History. “West Virginia’s Mine Wars.” Archive. Accessed August 14, 2022. http://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/minewars.html.
[8] Green, ibid., 28, 83.
[9] Ibid., 60.
[10] Ibid., 28, 62.
[11] Ibid., 63.
[12] Ibid., 70.
[13] West Virginia Archives, id.
[14] Wheeler, Hoyt N. “Mountaineer Mine Wars: An Analysis of the West Virginia Mine Wars of 1912-1913 and 1920-1921.” The Business History Review 50, no. 1 (1976): 69–91. Pg. 83.
[15] West Virginia Archives, id.
[16] Green, ibid., 75.
[17] Ibid., 76.
[18] Kline, ibid., 75.
[19] Ibid., 81; See also: Harris, Wess. Truth Be Told: Perspectives on the Great West Virginia Mine War, 1890 to Present. Dexter, Michigan: Thomson-Shore, 2015. See: Genesis, 25, for the story of Jacob and Esau.
[20] Kline, ibid., 81; Hand, Mark. “‘Rape Rooms’: How West Virginia Women Paid Off Coal Company Debts.” News. CounterPunch, October 2, 2015. https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/rape-rooms-how-w-va-women-paid-off-coal-company-debts/.
[21] Kline, ibid., 79-80.
[22] Green, ibid., 154.
[23] West, ibid.
[24] Green, ibid., 75. West, ibid.