Appalachian History

Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), better known as Mother Jones, was an American labor organizer and one of the founders of the Social Democratic party (1898) and the Industrial Workers of the World (1905). Her August 1912 speech to striking coal miners in Charleston, WV was one in a series of organized activities which were blamed for violence in the state's coal fields, and led to her conviction of conspiracy to commit murder, which was later commuted. This excerpt is from the last portion of the speech.

Oh, men [speaking of mine owners], have you any hearts? Oh, men, do you feel? Oh, men, do you see the judgment day on the throne above, when you will be asked, "where did you get your gold?"

You stole it from these wretches. You murdered, you assassinated, you starved, you burned them to death, that you and your wives might have palaces, and that your wives might go to the seashore. Oh God, men, when I see the horrible picture, when I see the children with their hands off, when I took an army of babies and walked a hundred and thirty miles with a petition to the President of the United States, to pass a bill in Congress to keep these children from being murdered for profit. He had a secret service then all the way to the palace. And now they want to [re-elect] that man! What is the American Nation coming to?

Manhood, womanhood, can you stand for it? They put reforms in their platforms, but [we] get no reform. [Roosevelt] promised everything to labor. When we had the strike in Colorado he sent 200 guns to blow our brains out. I don't forget. You do, but I don't. And our women were kicked out like dogs at the point of the bayonet. That is America. They don't do it in Russia. Some women get up with $5 worth of paint on their cheeks and have tooth brushes for their dogs and say, "oh, them horrible miners. Oh, that horrible old Mother Jones, that horrible old woman."

I am horrible! I admit, and I want to be to you blood-sucking pirates!

I want you, my boys, to buckle on your armor. This is a fighting age; this is not the age for cowards; put them out of the way. Take your medicine [Governor], because we are going to get after you, no doubt about it.

I want you to be good. Give the Governor time until to-morrow night, and, if he don't act then it is up to you. We have all-day Saturday, all-day Sunday, all-day Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday if we need it.

Mother Jones brings shoes for children in union camps during West Virginia miners strike.

We are used to living on little; we can take a crust of bread in our hands and go.

Boys, stay quiet until tomorrow night. I think it would be a good thing to work tomorrow, because the mine owners will need it. The mine commissioner will get a pain in his skull to-night and his wife will give him some "dope." The mine owner's wife is away at the seashore. When she finds no more money coming she will say, "Is there any more money coming?" He will say, "Most of the miners are not working." She will say, "Take the guards and shoot them back into the mines, those horrible fellows."

The Governor says, if you don't go to work, said he, in the mines or on the railroads, I am going to call the militia, and I will shoot you...I said we can get ready too.

What militia can you get to fight us? Those boys on Paint Creek wouldn't fight us if all the governors in the country wanted you to. I was going yesterday to take dinner with them, but I had something else to do. I am going some day to take dinner with them, and I will convert the whole bunch to my philosophy. I will get them all my way.

Now, be good, boys.

Pass the hat around, some of these poor devils want a glass of beer. Get the hat. The mine owner robs them. Get a hat you fellows of the band...

Another thing I want you to do: I want you to go in regular parade, three or four together. The moving-picture man wants to get your picture to send over the country.

The hat is for miners who came up here broke, and they want to get a glass of beer. And to pay their way back — and to get a glass of beer. I will give you $5. Get a move on, and get something in it...

The National Government will get a record of this meeting. They will say, my friends, this was a peaceful, law-abiding meeting. They will see men of intelligence, that they are not out to destroy but to build. And instead of the horrible homes you have got we will build on their ruins homes for you and your children to live in, and we will build them on the ruins of the dog kennels which they wouldn't keep their mules in. That will bring forth better ideas than the world has had. The day of oppression will be gone. I will be with you whether true or false. I will be with you at midnight or when the battle rages, when the last bullet ceases, but I will be in my joy, as an old saint said:

O, God, of the mighty clan, God grant that the woman who suffered for you, Suffered not for a coward, but oh, for a man. God grant that the woman who suffered for you, Suffered not for a coward, but oh, for a fighting man.


Source: www.infoplease.com/t/hist/jones-coal-miner

"Everyone we knew worked in the mine or in the machine shop. Dad met Inez Thompson and at the encouragement of [his stepmother] Della, married. Then came us four children and later a divorce after a long separation (between 3rd and 4th year of school) from Inez. Later, Dad married Rose Mae Jackson at one of the Lively homes. Dad and Rose went to visit the Lively relatives on many occasions, but us children never went.

Della, Homer and Inez Thompson (background).

"My father is to be honored for his stick-to-itiveness. Everyday he went into the dark pits of the mines to earn what it took to care for us children. In the early days of coal mining the coal barons (who lived in other states) opened coal mines, built houses for the workers, built the company stores and entertainment centers for movies (bare rooms with wood benches and no back on them).

"They paid the men in scrip, with which the men bought clothes, food, and all they needed at the company store. Often the Post Office was in the company store; this leads to how my dad got into trouble. He went with a friend to get food for the family, the store was closed, and they broke into it - took nothing but milk. He was charged with a federal crime and sent to the "pen."

"This is when Dovie was left with her great-grandma Janie Miller who lived in Kentucky. My mother was pregnant with me, destitute (1930's). Mom went to the poor house in Stollings, West Virginia and that's where I was born. I didn't know this 'til I was in 10th grade. Della revealed it all. I don't know what she was trying to do. We got on a bus to go home the very next day. I was not about to stay with her any longer!

"Dovie grew up believing Janie Miller was her mother until the fourth grade, which is when Janie became ill and Dovie was sent to live with us. My father tried to get Dovie back after he was out of the pen but Janie was too attached and wouldn't let her go. It was a difficult adjustment for her to this new family she had only seen a couple of times.

"West Virginia was a beautiful place to grow up. Thank God for the beauty around us. My father went to work even when it was almost impossible to get through the snow. Ashes from burnt coal were often put in front and back of the tires to help get traction to get to the road.

"One early morning I recall vividly when dad left for work, it was still very dark. It had snowed and Rose woke us up to look out the window. The snow was deep, and so white, with no tracks at all. The moon was bright, shining onto the snow. It looked as though diamonds had been spread over the entire area, and the whole field was sparkling. I know dad enjoyed the view on the way from Mabscott to Mac Alpine Coal Mine that morning.

"The coal miners rarely saw the sun. They went into the shaft early and came out late, went to the bathhouse, then home. Carbide lamps were their source of light. I remember helping to fill the lamp with the dry carbide, and that smell when it was moistened and lit.

"Many miners ended up with poor vision and black lung disease, and until John L. Lewis fought for the miners to get better pay and health benefits, many men died with nothing for their families.

"After I graduated high school the folks bought a combination grocery store/restaurant in Piney View. We lived there for a short time. I joined the Navy and was to be gone except a short visit after Corps school. I did not see my dad until he came to California in 1957 when Glenda was a baby. That's when he went to visit his father John Lively and Uncle Edgar.

Homer Leo Tate and daughter Bobbie (Barbara).

"My brother, Homer Gene, was killed in a truck accident. He had ridden his bike up the road on Piney View to visit some friends. He got into the middle of the seat (three persons). Somewhere they hit a bridge abutment.

"He didn't get permission to go with these young boys. He was thrown through the windshield and was hospitalized. Folks did not find out for 2 days or more. Finally the boy up the road came and told Dad. He and Rose went to the hospital, but with the head injury and other injuries as well, my brother was hardly recognizable, too much swelling.

"He died I think, two weeks after Vanessa was born. I was alone, my husband, Don, was overseas, so the folks didn't inform me of this. They sent a notice to Don; he in turn sent it to me. What a shock, I thought at first it must be my dad! It wouldn't be 'til after the folks moved to Florida, 30 years later, that I could go home. West Virginia was not home without my brother!"


Excerpt from a letter from Barbara Lee Tate to her cousin Gerald Lively, July 2001. Online at www.livelyroots.com/things/homer.htm

You hear young folk singers today sing happy work songs about mule drivers and mule-skinners. I sometimes wonder if any of them know what driving a mule is really like, and if they'd still sing so merrily if they knew.


My first job was carrying water on the Interstate Railroad grade at Josephine, about a half-mile from our old home near Norton. That was my introduction to mule driving. It wasn't nearly as glamorous as it sounds in the songs.


Underground coal cars, at that time, were pulled by mules. The driver who carried the largest whip and who used it the most forcefully was regarded as the best driver. Drivers generally were jealous of each other and the ones I knew considered themselves a cut above the miners who dug for coal. 


The animals worked every day, usually about twelve hours. They had a terrible, repulsive odor about them. Their necks and shoulders seemed always to be raw around their collars, and their hind quarters bore great welts and scars from blows administered with the whip or the "butt stick."

Mules are noted for their stubbornness, but few were as stubborn (and none as cruel) as the men who drove them. If a man wasn't brutal when he started the job, he soon learned to be. There may have been exceptions, but I can't recall any. 

The whip wielded by a mule driver was about ten feet in over-all length. It was made of plaited leather, tapered from a maximum diameter of two-and-a-half to three inches in the middle down to about one inch on the ends. On the "cracker" end of the whip was a piece of rawhide about three-quarters of an inch wide and fourteen inches long; and on the end of that, a piece of twisted seagrass about the thickness of a lead pencil and twelve inches in length. 


Mule drivers prided themselves on their skill and power with their whips. They could tear a man (or a mule) to pieces with one. The one distinguishing characteristic common to all mule drivers was a "red-eyed" appearance. This was not from drinking (though it might have very well been in most cases), but from the effects of having mud slung into their eyes by their mule's hooves. 


I came to learn quite a bit about mules, and how to care for them and work them. In 1911, at the age of thirteen, I became a mule driver.

My career as a mule driver lasted just a few months. It was hard, cruel, dangerous work. In those days, we used the drift mouth method of mining coal. It was also called deep mining. A network of tunnels followed veins of coal deep into a mountainside, sometimes for several miles. 


The mule I drove was called Old Red. He was a fine, strong animal. I thought of Old Red as my partner in the mining business, rather than a beast of burden. And I think he appreciated it. In fact, I'm sure he did. He rarely, if ever balked on me. I frequently led Old Red down into the shallow water of Powell's River beneath the Josephine Bridge and scrubbed him down with strong lye soap-- a practice which the veteran drivers viewed with scorn. But they couldn't deny that Old Red was the best-looking, best-smelling mule in the community. 


The hours I worked were roughly 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. I had to spend an hour each morning feeding, currying, and harnessing my mule, and two hours in the evening unharnessing, rubbing down, and feeding him. 


One morning I was hauling "Bowser" Farmer and three other miners into the mine on my car. As we approached their work area, I began to slue the car over the parting to the left, off the main line. In less time than it takes to tell it, a sudden rock fall buried Old Red and narrowly missed killing us all. The poor mule, my pet and my proud companion, never knew what hit him. It was probably the "closest call" I ever had in a coal mine--and a terrifying experience for a thirteen-year-old.


Only about eight feet separated a mule from his car, and I was sitting out on the bumper when that hundred tons of rock crushed Old Red. One second he was there, responding to my commands--and then suddenly, he was buried and gone forever, in less time than it takes to scream. 


There was nothing to do but cut the traces, drop back a few feet, and cut a new entry. Another mule was hitched to my car. Everything was back to normal. We had to get that coal. 


If I wasn't already a man, I became one that day.


The Life and Times of a Mountaineer Game Warden, by Dave O'Neill
(1898-1974, b. Norton VA), online at http://vagenweb.org/wise/MountaineerGameWarden.html

At 10:20 a.m., December 6, 1907, explosions occurred at the No. 6 and No. 8 mines at Monongah, West Virginia. The explosions ripped through the mines at 10:28 a.m., causing the earth to shake as far as eight miles away, shattering buildings and pavement, hurling people and horses violently to the ground, and knocking streetcars off their rails. Three-hundred and sixty-two men and boys died. It remains the worst mine disaster in the history of the United States.

The Monongah Mines Nos. 6 and 8 were located on the West Fork of the Monongahela River, about six miles south of the town of Fairmont, West Virginia. The mines were connected underground and were considered model mines, the most up-to-date in the mining industry. Electricity was used for coal cutting machinery, locomotives were used to haul coal, and the largest areas of each mine were ventilated by mechanical fans.

For a time pandemonium reigned. Every local mine official was missing. It was impossible to fathom the nature and extent of the catastrophe, or to tell whether either mine was on fire or full of gas.

Soon after the explosion, four miners emerged through an outcrop opening, dazed and bleeding but otherwise unharmed. The stunned survivors could tell nothing of the fate of the others still underground.

With the hundreds of shrieking, half-crazed women and crying children came every man left in the town. Volunteers were willing and anxious to help with the rescue work.

Frantically, they cleared away the wreckage at the entrance and tried to force their way into the mine. They soon began to succumb to the toxic mine air and had to be rescued themselves.

The explosion filled the mine with "black damp", an atmosphere in which no human being could live. It blocked the main heading with wrecked cars and timbers, and demolished one of the fans, which greatly restricted ventilation.

Choking coal dust, rubble, and wrecked equipment impeded the progress of volunteer rescue teams. The No. 8 mine's huge ventilation fan had been destroyed, and a smaller fan was used to ventilate both mines. Brick stoppings, the partitions used to direct air through the mines, had been blown out. As rescue parties slowly advanced, they used canvas curtains to restore ventilation, dilute gas, and disperse dust.

At the bottom of No. 6 slope, debris from a wrecked trip was found scattered for 250 feet along the headings. Cars were smashed and piled on top of each other nearly blocking the entry. The trip had been pulled up the slope and stopped at the knuckle a short time before the explosion causing the coupling pin on the first car to break. The entire trip consisting of eighteen loaded two-ton cars went down the incline. The explosion occurred before the cars had gone into the pit mouth and before the trip had reached the bottom of the slope.

At 4:00 p.m., moaning was heard near a crop hole, and a rescuer was lowered through the hole on a rope. About 100 feet below, he found miner Peter Urban sitting on the shattered body of his brother, Stanislaus, staring glassy-eyed into space as he sobbed uncontrollably. He was the last survivor of the Monongah disaster.

Exhausted volunteers found conditions in the mines almost unbearable, heat was intense, and afterdamp caused headaches and nausea. In some headings, ventilation materials and bodies had to be hauled 3,000 feet over massive roof falls and wrecked machinery, mine cars, timbers, and electrical wiring. The stench of death was barely tolerable, and became overpowering as the search dragged on.

Searchers never lost sight of the fact that there might possibly be some men in the mine alive. They continued to explore all parts of the workings with all possible speed, leaving unnecessary work for another time.

Embalmers worked around the clock in shifts. Caskets lined both sides of the main street. The bank served as a morgue. Churches conducted funeral services several times a day as dozens of men dug long rows of graves on nearby hillsides. Disputes flared over identification of victims, and more than once, a body was claimed by two families.

By December 10, the number of people killed was over 175. It was obvious to most rescue workers, but not to relatives of missing men, that Peter Urban would be the last man to be brought out alive. By Thursday, December 12, all workings had been ventilated and searched and 337 bodies recovered. Twenty-five more victims were found during cleanup operations.

A special graveyard, soon filled, was laid out on a bleak hillside. Company houses flanked the burial ground. Rows of open graves were dug in the sodden, half-frozen, rain-drenched and snow-flecked West Virginia soil.

The 362 casualties of Monongah's coal mine disaster left more than 1,000 widows and children.

The Marion County Coroner's Jury, after hearing from numerous witnesses, concluded the victims of the disaster died from an explosion caused by either a blown-out shot or by ignition and explosion of blasting powder in Mine No. 8.


"Mining Disasters - An Exhibition," Mine Safety and Health Administration; online at www.msha.gov/DISASTER/MONONGAH/MONON3B.asp

Moore Hollow boomed during 30's and 40's

By Lois Kleffman
Jackson County Sun [KY]
Date Unknown

What was it like in Moore Hollow after the mines got started?

Luther Powell of Sand Gap says, “It was booming. New York didn’t have any more business than Moore Hollow. You could sell any piece of coal you could get out. There was plenty of coal, there was plenty of work.”

Luther started working in 1933 first for the Penningtons, then the Sand Gap Coal Company, then the Jackson County Coal Company whose owner M.K. Marlow bought out Scrivener and Moore. At the peak of production in Moore Hollow, Marlow ran three shifts averaging about 3,000 tons per day, and trucks would be lined up from the hollow clear to Sand Gap waiting to be loaded.

Powell walked every day from Kerry Knob to earn $1.50 per day as a weigh man. He says, “Everyone came to the Gap and Moore Hollow to loaf on weekends and evenings.”

Odis Isaacs of Sand Gap recollects, “You could get anything there from whiskey to a woman."

The Little Brothers and “Boss” Marcum had licenses to sell alcohol in the Gap and there was a bootlegger in the hollow.
Odis remembers the pool hall and restaurant run by John Johnston. He remembers that little Johnny Johnston would “spit your eye full of tobacco juice and he smoked cigars when he was five or six years old.”

The larger mines paid their employees with scrip good for buying at their company store. Odis still has a copper scrip coin issued by the Jackson County Coal Company in 1939 that was “payable in merchandise only “ at the company commissary.

Odis started working for the mines when he was 12 and worked in Moore Hollow until Howard Smith got killed in Marlow’s mine in 1946. Smith ran a motor in the mine when the accident happened and Odis was coupling at the end of the cars that Smith was pulling.

This 1935 pie chart from ‘Geology of Kentucky’ indicates leading Kentucky coal producing counties. Harlan, Pike, and Letcher Counties lead the pack. At the other extreme counties Boyd, Breathitt and Magoffin each produced about 1/2% of the state total that year. Jackson County, for all the hustle bustle of this article, is not even on the chart!

It was the last trip of the day and Smith wanted to get out as much as he could so he was pulling 22 cars, which was way too many. Coming down a hill, apparently the hot sand that was used to slow down the motor couldn’t do the job and Smith hit a snag with so much speed that the motor and seven cars jumped the track.

Odis remembers Smith as a “fine man.” That day Smith had given Odis a ham sandwich for his lunch. After Smith’s death, Odis left Moore Hollow and went to Travis Creek.

Where did the miners live when they came to Jackson County from Manchester, Hazard, Beattyville and other places?

Outside of Moore Hollow toward the Gap, there was a group of two and three room, flat roofed plank houses called “Slack Town” because the slack coal, too fine to sell, was dumped there. In Sand Gap there was another shantytown near the sand bank.

And right in Moore Hollow, in 1934 Caroline Isaacs kept boarders in a big boarding house built by her brother Charley Pennington on his property, which was like a bunk house. Mostly Caroline cooked for the truck drivers and miners for two years there.

Then N.U. Bond built a modern motel in the hollow in 1939 and Caroline ran it for him. The motel had a lobby downstairs and a big long dining room and it had hot and cold running water. The motel averaged 11 boarders full time and kept five reserved bedrooms for truckers from out of town who would spend just one night there waiting to get their trucks loaded.

It is rumored that women visited the men in their trucks at night, but Caroline maintains that no women were allowed with the men in the motel.

“I never saw any fights,” she says. “The miners were very good people. There never was a truck driver that came here that was out of the way.” Sheriff Joe Pence searched the drivers to see if they were bringing whiskey in or out of the hollow.

And according to Caroline, “The men were just as clean as they could be, they never went to bed without taking a shower. One man tried to sleep with his clothes on and I had to get rid of him.”

Caroline remembers that “the roads were awful. We had to cover the plates to keep the coal dust off. We had the front and back porches screened but the dust still came in.”

The saddest remembrance of her experiences in the hollow was an accident on Big Hill in which Johnny Brockman, a truck driver, was killed. Earlier in the day, Johnny had ordered eggs, bacon and country biscuits from Caroline and told her “Lady, I haven’t got any money to pay for this.” Caroline said, “Well you eat this, you looked tired.” Caroline feels that his death taught her “to be good to people.”


sources: www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kycoalmi/coalTOWNstory.html
‘Geology of Kentucky,’ by Arthur C. McFarlan, University of Ky, 1943



coal+mining Jackson+County+KY scrip company+store appalachia +appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

I Hate the Company Bosses

A Song by Sarah Ogan Gunning

I hate the company bosses
I'll tell you the reason why
They cause me so much suffering
And my dearest friends to die

Oh yes, I guess you wonder
What they have done to me
I'm going to tell you, mister
My husband had T.B.

Brought on by hard work and low wages
And not enough to eat
Going naked and hungry
No shoes on his feet

I guess you'll say he's lazy
And did not want to work
But I must say you're crazy
For work he did not shirk

My husband was a coal miner
He worked and risked his life
To try to support three children
Himself, his mother, and wife

I had a blue-eyed baby
The darling of my heart
But from my little darling
Her mother had to part

These mighty company bosses
They dress in jewels and silk
But my darling blue-eyed baby
She starved to death for milk

I had a darling mother
For her I often cry
But with them rotten conditions
My mother had to die

Well, what killed your mother
I heard these bosses say
Dead of hard work and starvation
My mother had to pay

Well, what killed your mother
Oh tell us, if you please
Excuse me, it was pellagra
That starvation disease

They call this the land of plenty
To them I guess it's true
But that's to the company bosses
Not workers like me and you

Well, what can I do about it
To these men of power and might
I tell you, company bosses
I'm going to fight, fight, fight

What can we do about it
To right this dreadful wrong
We're all going to join the union
For the union makes us strong

"About 1939, Moe Asch-later the proprietor of Folkways Records-first heard Sarah sing this piece. He complimented her by commenting that it was the most radical composition he had ever heard in his life. It is sometimes sung and called "I Hate the Company Bosses," but the original title was "I Hate the Capitalist System;" the song was recorded as such for the Library of Congress.

"Sarah thought of it as autobiographical-a response to the death of her loved ones-and not polemical. Although she stated to me that the music was made up out of her mind, it is clearly related to at least two tunes known in mountain tradition: a Carter Family melody for a broadside usually called The Sailor Boy (Laws K 12); a haunting air printed by Josiah Combs from his mother's singing on Troublesome Creek, Knott County, Kentucky, about 1889 (On the Banks of that Lonely River in Folk-Songs from the Kentucky Highlands)."

---from notes written by Archie Green for the booklet that accompanies the recording "Sarah Ogan Gunning: 'Girl of Constant Sorrow,'" Folk-Legacy 26, published in 1965 and still obtainable from Folk-Legacy Records.



appalachia appalachian+history coal+mining history+of+appalachia Sarah+Ogan+Gunning union+songs

By January 1, 1941, Harlan and Bell Counties were 95 per cent organized. The only nasty non-union outpost was the Fork Ridge mine just across the Kentucky line in Tennessee, a short distance from Middlesboro. The mine was operated by C. W. (Dusty) Rhodes, president and general manager. Searchlights were placed on the tipple and plug-uglies guarded the mine property with tommy guns. Every time a union organizer attempted to talk with a Ford Ridge employee, he took his life in his hands.

Rhodes was a large, reckless young man who arrogantly told union men that if miners attempted to picket his mine, he would slaughter them. For months, he and Bob Robinson, a former Tennessee highway patrolman, had been parading around with their Tommy guns and challenging the miners to a fight. More than half of the employees had been signed up by the UMWA, but Rhodes ignored their demands and hired more thugs.

On April 15, 1941, the union decided to post a picket line in the safest place they could find. The pickets chose stations where they could take cover in case they were attacked by company guards, and then moved to a strategic place near the mine. When the caravan of cars came to a stop at the state line and started to unload, the fifty pickets were greeted with a broadside from fifteen or eighteen armed guards who had word they were coming and had preceded the pickets to the state line. On the first volley, one picket was killed and more than a dozen were wounded, nine seriously enough to be hospitalized.

When James Ridings, A. T. Pace and George Gilbert, union representatives, were getting out of their car, Gilbert was shot in the leg, and Ridings, in addition to having his necktie shot off, also had his clothes perforated by bullets. The pickets took cover behind trees, rocks and cars and returned the fire, killing Rhodes, the company president, E. W. Silvers, company vice president, and Robinson, the company guard.

Sam Evans, a union member, was killed. The nine men in the hospital who were jointly charged, along with Turnblazer, Ridings and Pace in the Tennessee murder warrant were: R. W. Lawson, Bell County deputy sheriff; Alford Smith; Walter Pilly; Earl Alley; John Holland; Clayton Webb; Millard Forester and A. J. Napier. Some of these men were from Kentucky and some from Tennessee.

The battle raged across the state line and more than a thousand shots were fired.

This was the last gun battle in southeastern Kentucky and/or Tennessee over the UMWA's right to organize. The feudal coal barons learned a valuable lesson from this encounter, namely that times were changing. They could no longer murder miners like dogs with impunity and with the protection of state governments. They had been taught that workingmen, for the first time in American history, were thought of as first-class citizens.

Thinking back, I realize that the Harlan County gun thugs in reality got nothing for their efforts to drive out the union. Most of them died violent deaths.

The ones who survived or died natural deaths had their consciences to live with. How they did it, I do not know.


source: "Hell In Harlan," by George J. Titler, pp 213-15, BJW Printers, 1972



UMWA Fork+Ridge+Coal+Mine+War coal+mining appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Louis Bryant and Justus Stearns needed each other, and it’s surely no accident that their worlds finally intersected. Bryant, a bright young mining engineer, had moved into what is today McCreary County, KY at the beginning of the 1890s to consolidate mineral and land holdings acquired there by his father.

But while the Bryant family had mining expertise and raw land, they lacked the financial depth to develop the surrounding regional infrastructure they needed to grow their business. And so Louis hit the road to do a little selling. In 1893, he took a one-ton, thirty-six-cubic-foot block of bituminous coal from his family’s Worley mine to the Chicago World’s Fair.

Justus Stearns by this time had made a fortune in the lumber business from his base in Ludington, MI. But virgin timber resources in that region were becoming depleted as the upper Midwest grew in population. And so Stearns hired field agents scattered around the country looking for business opportunities. He had expanded the already extensive holdings of Stearns Salt & Lumber Co. in the Midwest to include properties in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, New Orleans and Florida.

Kentucky was experiencing a lumber boom in the late 1890s, and Justus Stearns heard reports of vast tracts of virgin timber in the southern Kentucky counties of Pulaski, Wayne, and Whitley and Scott County just over the border in Tennessee.

In 1900, Stearns sent Michigan surveyor William Alfred Kinne to Kentucky to secure tracts to add to his timber holdings. Al Kinne traveled extensively through Kentucky and Tennessee, meeting up finally with Louis Bryant.

The two became friends, and Bryant later became a valuable associate of the Stearns Company, teaching them a great deal about coal mining.

Photo caption reads: "Stearns; the Sheriff's Daughter, 1900 – 1915"

By 1901, Kinne had negotiated a twenty-five-year lease with Bryant that called for the construction of a railroad and the opening up of mines in the area, and gave Stearns the right to harvest the timber in the area. Kinne secured 50,000 acres in what became known as “The Big Survey,” an area that included lands from the Kentucky & Tennessee counties mentioned earlier.

On May 22, 1902, Kinne and Nashville attorney E. E. Barthell rode horses three miles north from Pine Knot to a Cincinnati Southern siding known to the railroad crews as the Gum Tree Tie Yard. Acting as agents for the Stearns Salt & Lumber Company, the two men, using a briefcase as a desk under the big black gum's boughs, signed documents which incorporated the Stearns Lumber Co., the Stearns Coal Co., and the Kentucky & Tennessee Railroad.

The old gum tree stood next to the site where the first company store in the brand new town of Stearns, KY would soon be constructed. The Stearns Company was the sole proprietor of its headquarters town, and would govern all aspects of daily life for the residents there.

The town site, one square mile purchased from the Bryant family, was uninhabited at the time but a fairly well known place in the region. Riley Sellars had owned a farm there, where General Ambrose Burnside's troops had camped in September 1863 on their backcountry march to take Knoxville from the Confederates.

Stearns sat on the location of the old town of Hemlock, at the crossroads of the Somerset-Jacksboro Road and the east-west road from Williamsburg to Monticello.

Today’s McCreary County Museum is located in the 1907 Stearns Coal & Lumber Company office building.

In 1903, Justus Stearns sent his only son, Robert L. Stearns, to reside in the small company town that bore his name so that he might oversee all the operations in the community.

Al Kinne lived in Stearns the rest of his life and was later a Kentucky state senator. Barthell moved his practice to Chicago, but remained the company's general counsel until his death. An in-law of Rob Stearns, he was honored by having the first company mine camp named after him.


Sources: Lore & Legend, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 3, published by J. P. Thomas, Box 248, Stearns, KY 42657
http://freepages.folklore.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~smokymtnman/stories/stearns.htm
www.ket.org/kentuckylife/900s/kylife920.html
www.sailingshipsandspitfires.com/pdfs/chapter3.pdf
Appalachian Folkways, by John B. Rehder, JHU Press, 2004



Justus+Stearns Stearns+KY coal+mining appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Sometimes the official stories that make it into museum collections just don’t shed enough light on the complete context of an event. Take this photo, titled “Picnic in a Coal Mine, Mount Savage, 1889, 
Photographed by Edgar S. Thompson.” The caption provided by the Maryland Historical Society gives scant background on this picture, and in fact may be misleading the viewer altogether.

It reads: “It must have been a very hot August afternoon when F.S. Deekins (under the table) and friends took refuge in a coal mine for a meal of peaches, plums, grapes and wine. The picture was taken by flash lighting. Several of the men are wearing caps with lamps. Are they miners, or cave explorers?”

How about “neither”? Why on earth would a miner, who’s already spent 6 days a week, 10-12 hours each day underground, take time on his one precious day off to spend yet MORE time in a coal mine? And take a look at these fresh scrubbed faces and clean pressed suits. They might be mine OWNERS, but they’re certainly not miners.

The Maryland Historical Society owns a collection of photographs known as the “Cover-Long-Deekens Collection,” donated by Margaret Lamar Deekens Cover and Loring Andrews Cover, Jr. Our “F.S. Deekins” appears once more in comments on the provenance of this collection: “Margaret’s father, Francis S. Deekens, was born in Australia, and came to the U.S. as a young man in 1881 via England, Canada, and France.

“A Cumberland business leader in real estate and insurance, he oversaw major real estate transactions and development in the region, and was a founder and president of the Real Estate and Securities Company (1903-ca. 1918). Earlier he worked in the mining industry, as chief clerk for the Consolidation Coal Co. at Frostburg (1885-1891), and as assistant vice president of the Union Mining Co. at Mount Savage (1891-1902).”

So now we know that the coal mine in the photo’s caption is owned by Union Mining Co, and it makes sense that as an assistant vice president, Deekens/Deekins would have had access off-hours to throw a party for his buddies. The photo caption states this event occurred in 1889. The provenance blurb, though, tells us Deekens worked for Union Mining starting in 1891. So maybe one of the OTHER people in the photo actually granted access.

An F.S. Deakins turns up in two Cumberland Times news reports from 1888, and is most likely the same person (the Frostburg location helps cement it):

CAVERN IN AREA
05 Jun 1888 A cavern was discovered on the Ridgeley farm and was explored by Walter Ridgeley and Mr Willard Everstine. The opening is at a place where a pond had disappeared and after a year became overgrown with brush. Two weeks ago when the brush was cleared, the entrance to the cave became apparent. The passageways are from 3 feet to 30 feet in height.

12 Jun 1888 Mr Ridgeley's cave is dubbed "Potomac Caverns" is explored and named by a party of 6 men; PJ Smith; Dory Smith; WC Devecomon; JT Taylor; JW Avirett; and FS Deakins of Frostburg.

It’s a fair guess that at least some of those same 5 companions from the Potomac Caverns trek appear the following summer in our sample photo.

The Cumberland Times articles spell our main subject’s last name as ‘Deakins.’ Deakins is an old family name in western MD, dating from Colonial times.

In 1787 Colonel Francis Deakins was appointed to “lay out the manors, and such parts of the reserves and vacant lands belonging to this state, lying to the westward of Fort Cumberland, as he might think fit and capable of being settled and improved, in lots of fifty acres each” (Laws of Maryland 1785-1791, page 351).

Now it’s possible that in 1888 in the same Maryland county there were in fact an ‘F.S. Deakins’ and an “F.S. Deekens,” and both were interested in exploring caves. But it’s a stretch. So did the F.S. Deekens mentioned in the “Cover-Long-Deekens Collection” provenance really come from Australia?

Note two shared facts about both the Potomac Caverns ‘exploration’ and the Mt. Savage photo: there are large groups, and both took place in the summer. To say that these people are cave explorers in any but the most casual, weekend amateur fashion is specious. In the photo no one is dressed for strenuous crawling or outfitted with ropes and petons, the way a serious cave explorer would be. No, these were private parties thrown in an unusual location.

Oh, and a secretive location as well. Why are there only 3 women to the 11 men in the picnic (12 counting the photographer)? This after all was late Victorian era, a time when proper women could be expected to socialize in a 'balanced' 50/50 gender environment or be frowned upon. Clearly the women aren’t the least bit uncomfortable about this---are they prostitutes?

And finally, our photographer, Edgar S. Thompson, is most likely the owner of the Edgar S. Thompson Steel Mill in Braddock, PA, 86 miles away from the Mt. Savage coal mine, and nice day trip away for a picnic in a coal mine.


sources: http://www.mdhs.org/library/MDF3.html
www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mdallegh/c-times/1888.htm
www.whilbr.org/garrettlots/index.aspx



Edgar+S.+Thompson F.S.+Deakins Mt+Savage+MD coal+mining appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

"My father walked six miles carrying a bucket and a pick. The bucket was made of tin and in the bottom of the bucket was tea for lunch, and the top of the upper section of the bucket was a compartment for a couple of sandwiches or some fruit and then the lid. Inside the coal mines the temperature never varied, so the temperature that the food was as it was brought to the mines stayed the same temperature. After a short time every coal miner's bucket smelled of the coal mines. You could scrub and scrub and scrub but when you pulled that sandwich out, it smelled of coal.

"Each ethnic group had its own cuisine. The Germans used a lot of pork, and they would have a piece of pork between big slices of rogenbrote, as they called it — rye bread — or schwarzbrote — black bread. They didn't go in for white bread like the Welsh or the Scots or the Irish.

"I can still see my grandmother with one of those big loaves of bread that — when she sliced it she put it in the crook of her arm and held it with her right hand, and she sliced it off while holding it. The bread loaf was so big you didn't put it on the table, but you held it in your arm and sliced it this way. I never figured out why but that's the way she always did it.

"So that each group developed its own food styles. A very popular one was ham because it was easier to slice and to put into sandwiches, but almost everybody drank tea. I don't know why, but I can still see the coal miners going into the grocery store and buying tea by the pound. It was kept in large canisters on the counter where it would be handy because the store owner knew that would be one of the commodities they would be looking for—it was kept handy for the customers.

"I used to enjoy watching the coal miners around the church picnics, around the church activities, for instance, after a dinner at the church, there would be a lot of cake and cookies left over. Everybody would withdraw discretely and let the coal miners go 'round and pick up the cookies or the cake for the bucket. And we knew o'course that was their treat."


Howard Rees
b. Frostburg MD, 1911
1991 interview with daughter Elizabeth Rees Gilbert
Western Maryland Regional Library collection
Source: www.whilbr.org/itemdetail.aspx?idEntry=2895&dtPointer=5


appalachia appalachian+foods appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history coal+mining Garrett+County+MD Howard+Rees

We caught up recently with Dr. Deborah Weiner, author of "Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History." Central Appalachia's coalfields were home to thousands of Jews between the 1880s and 1950s. Dr. Weiner, research historian and family history coordinator at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, tells their story meticulously and movingly. Her book has been awarded the Southern Jewish Historical Society’s Book Prize; it was selected for the top prize from among 11 books published during 2003-06 throughout the nation.


APP HIST: The proportion of Eastern European Jews in your study area of Appalachia is dramatically high compared to, say, the German Jewish population. Baltimore wholesaler Jacob Epstein is a key linchpin in why that is. Can you discuss his role briefly?

Jacob Epstein came from Lithuania as a teenager and started out as a peddler. Before he was 20, he had earned enough to open a dry goods store in Baltimore, the Baltimore Bargain House. He decided to focus on wholesaling instead of retailing, because he saw great potential in selling to peddlers and small shopkeepers rather than selling directly to consumers.

Epstein was a commercial genius -- he advised peddlers to go out to areas that were attracting new industries, because he knew that that these areas would have a growing population and a growing need for consumer goods. So he sent many of his fellow Jewish immigrants out on the new rail lines that had just been completed into the coalfields. They began to arrive just as the first shipments of coal were going out, so they were really there at the dawn of the coal boom.

Many of the peddlers Epstein sent out decided to settle in the coalfields and open stores. They became the founding members of the Jewish communities that developed in southern West Virginia. So when people ask, how did Jewish immigrants manage to find their way into the mountains? I point to people like Jacob Epstein as my first answer. Once the "pioneer" peddlers settled down, they sent for their relatives, and Jewish communities grew from there.

APP HIST: 'Coalfield Jews' offers a very precise focus on the life and times of 3 generations of small town Jews in 11 counties in central Appalachia. You mention only in passing the existence of the region's larger Jewish communities in Charleston, Knoxville and Chattanooga, and leave the thriving Jewish community centered around Asheville out of the discussion altogether. Why did you choose the narrower emphasis?

WEINER: Appalachia is a diverse place and needs to be examined as such. Jewish life in a town like Logan, West Virginia, was not the same as Jewish life in Charleston or Asheville—both of which were (and are) quite different from each other. So you can’t really generalize about "Jews in Appalachia." Well you can, but you would probably end up over-simplifying things.

I suppose I could have compared the Jewish experience in Appalachian cities to their experience in smaller Appalachian towns, and pointed out the differences, but that would have been another sort of book entirely. I wanted to explore one particular sub-region in depth, because it enabled me to investigate a variety of issues in detail, rather than paint broad brush strokes.

I chose to focus on the southern coalfields because I find this particular part of Appalachia fascinating: the diverse mix of people that gathered in mining towns in the early 20th century, the boomtown environment, the domination of a single industry. By delving into how Jewish immigrants navigated this environment, I was able to look at a bunch of issues in depth. For example, how did Jews—who were merchants and had little to do with coal mining—interact with the coal economy? This led me to a discussion of how independent merchants competed with company stores.

I also was able to take a close look at how Jews fit into the social scene, which tended to have a rigid class structure imposed by the coal industry, combined with a multicultural atmosphere that tolerated diversity to a pretty amazing degree.

Limiting my study to the coalfields allowed me to draw connections outside the Appalachian region—to boomtowns around the world, to mining regions around the world. These kinds of places have been important to Jews in the diaspora, so the book sheds light on a particular kind of Jewish experience. At the same time, it provides a bit of an international perspective on Appalachia, even while dealing with the nitty-gritty details of life in these small towns.

That was an excellent question--it sort of gets to the heart of what I was
trying to do.

APP HIST: Thanks so much for joining us today!

John Holt (1870-1918), a coal miner in Murray City, OH, kept a journal of his daily life.

John Holt and the coal miners he worked with outside of the mine in Murray City.

April 1907- "The miners here geting 57 cts per ton for screened coal and two dollars and fifty six cents per day for day work inside of mine 236 for outside work 8 hours to be one days work. I went to work day work in mine no 2 but onely work a short time when I got contract of picking up coal at mines no 1, 2, and 3 had to furnish my own horse bought one from the coal company Paid $60 dollars for him and he was well worth it as he is a vary good horse but old.

“Also bought a cow a young one first calf for $30 dollars. She is vary good. Later in September I think, I bought a two seated surray for one horse or I paid $50 dollars for it later I bought a one horse wagon and buggy or runabout of John ???? for $25 dollars 2 get 90 cts per ton that being Pick price for picking up coal and cleaning tracks. I made $70 dollars the last half of July.

“That being my first start and the month of August we made $203 dollar s with my son Clifford working with me till school started in September. Then he went to school. There is 8 months school. Since then I have not made less than 120 dollars per month till month of March we had hardly any work and of course that throwed me out too. I onely Made about $45 for the whole month and I don' t think I will get vary mutch this month either as work is poor we all have had fair health the past year. "

The Flood

April 14, 1907- "the flood commenced about 7 o'clock on the 13th of March and thundered and lightnening'd like summer time and the rain fell fast until the streams and rivers were running wild. Several houses and part of the trestle washed away at the mine. Some mines were filled up with water and towns along the Hocking River were flooded bad. Buildings washed away and people drowned.

Athens, OH home destroyed by flood.

"Towns that suffered the most were Nelsonville, Athens and Logan. It took peoples furniture and caused lots of suffering and would have been worse except for the warm weather. The railroad was damaged something like $100,000 dollars. Mail was unable to be delivered for a week."

source: www.ohgen.net/ohathens/johnholtjournal.htm [diary & Holt photo]


Murray+City+OH coal+mining Ohio+River appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Black Mountain, near the town of Lynch in Harlan County, is Kentucky's highest point, rising 4125 feet above sea level. It runs along the border of Harlan and Letcher counties, and also along the Kentucky -Virginia border.

Thousands of families, most of them Eastern European immigrants, streamed into the shadows of Black Mountain between the World Wars to mine coal.

"I come to this country in 1938. I started workin' the mine when I was 19 years old. And United States Steel, they got a d.v. job in the mine before even I come to this country, and I work for United States Steel for 30-some years. We come over here and my Dad was workin' in Lynch, my brother, my cousins—my Daddy, even his grandfather was working Tom’s Creek back in the 1800s.

"Back in the days it was a different company. They’d recruit. They’d recruit the Italian fellas because most of them was rock masons. They was rock masons, see, and all these big companies like Lynch [The Benham and Lynch Company], they had 'bout five or six hundred Italians. They all a cuttin' rocks and buildin' these hotels and motels all off the bathhouse. They all would work on that part, and they's real Italians, that's how it was done, except a few that went in the mines. But the big majority, they was rock masons. Lynch Company told my Daddy and th'other people 'We need a certain class o' people workin' in the mine or workin' as rock masons, whatever: ok?'

"One part of the camp they separated from one another. There was Italians, there was Hungarians, there was Polish --- everybody had their own bunch. You could walk from one street to another, and they’d be a different language. See, when you go in that district where the Italians is, and when you go t'another place, they's all Hungarians come together. And then the Polish come together.

"This part of the country reminded me that where I come from – was born – because north Italy now they have all factories, and after World War II all the people moved north. They just like the southern people were here. They left the south and went to north because the south is just ‘bout like the slavery. And that’s what it is over there where a lot of people come from because the government don’t put no factory down there. And that’s what’s happening in the Appalachia mountains."

Joseph Scopa,
Lynch KY miner
b. 1919

At its peak 10,000 people called Lynch home. All coal mined in Lynch by U.S. Coal and Coke (a subsidiary of U.S. Steel) was shipped to U.S. Steel's coke ovens in Gary, Indiana. Though the preparation of U.S. Steel's coal was transferred to a newer plant at Corbin in 1955, the Lynch plant continued to serve as a loadout until 1991.

Nearby Benham, KY was a coal company town built by Wisconsin Steel Company, a subsidiary of International Harvester, between 1911 and 1919. The Benham mines were still owned and operated by International Harvester in the 1970s, but by the time the mines closed in the 1980s, they were run by Arch of Kentucky. Today the mines in Benham and Lynch no longer produce coal. Benham’s coal camp commissary is today the Kentucky Coal Museum.


sources: www.harlancounty.com/history.htm
www.kingdomcome.org
www.coalcampusa.com/eastky/harlan/harlan.htm


Black+Mountain Lynch+KY Benham+and+Lynch+Company coal+mining Italian+immigrants