The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom
448
The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802124654 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2016 |
| Edition description: | First Trade Paper Edition |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Sales rank: | 491,943 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The Great West Virginia Coal Rush
1877–1890
After his visit to the "fight front" in Mingo County, James M. Cain returned to Baltimore and attempted to explain to his readers why southern West Virginia had become a war zone "where murder, dynamiting, arson, and insurrection [were the] usual order of the day." It was coal, he concluded; coal had "brought about this state of affairs." For in this part of America, he wrote, coal was the staff of life. "It is coal on which a third of the population depends directly for its living ... It is coal that has converted the State into one great pock-mark of mines." And it was the cost of mining coal that had turned the rolling hills of southern West Virginia into an industrial battleground.
Virginians had known about the mineral wealth buried beyond the Blue Ridge since the mid-eighteenth century, but it took another century and a half for industrialists to exploit the rich deposits of "black gold" laced through the mountains of the Allegheny Plateau. The wealthy men of the Tidewater first learned of this buried treasure in 1750 from Christopher Gist, a famous explorer and trader, whom they had hired to inventory the most valuable real estate in the territory west of the Alleghenies. Upon his return from the highlands, Gist offered his clients lavish descriptions of the dense forests and fertile valleys he had surveyed, and he presented them with two impressive objects: a tooth from one of the woolly mammoths that roamed the region in the Pleistocene epoch and a lump of coal that had been hardening since the Pennsylvanian subperiod a million years before. Gist's survey put a gleam in the eye of well-endowed investors back east, the kind of men whose capital would one day transform the Appalachian wilderness into a vast industrial domain for the extraction of West Virginia's bounteous natural resources.
The first coal deposits in the region formed during the Late Devonian period, more than 350 million years ago, when forests first covered the mountains of what became the Cumberland Plateau. The woody tissues of dead trees produced accumulations of peat, and the area that later would compose West Virginia became a subsiding basin filled with sediment. As these deposits were buried deeper and deeper, temperature and pressure increased, and over the centuries, the peat deposits became seams of high-quality, relatively low-volatility bituminous coal.
Few regions in the world were as well endowed with such vast carbon deposits, a commonly known fact by 1765. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that the whole tract of land beyond Laurel Mountain in western Virginia would yield abundant quantities of the fuel. Three years later, in the Treaty of Hard Labour, the Cherokees relinquished their claim to land south of the Great Kanawha River, where the first coal deposits in western Virginia would eventually be mined by slaves and used as fuel for the salt furnaces south of Charleston.
When the French and Indian War ended in 1763, hundreds of colonial soldiers who fought for the British poured into the lush valleys beyond the Blue Ridge, taking land that the vanquished Cherokee people had occupied for centuries. Along with them came hunters and traders, Pennsylvania farmers, Virginia slave owners, German immigrants, and Scots-Irish refugees from the rack-rented counties of Northern Ireland. These Ulstermen would create a new kind of religious movement in the mountains, one led by Presbyterian preachers who emphasized the personal quality of conversion and created a tradition of outdoor festivals, or "holy fairs," that persisted in intensely communal forms of worship characteristic of mountain religion.
Along with these pioneer settlers came the agents from the east who acquired land in great swaths, about three-quarters of Appalachia by 1800. As a result, nearly half of the white settlers worked the land as tenants and day laborers — the ancestors of Appalachia's enduring population of poor whites. But other homesteaders thrived in the lush forests and fertile valleys of Virginia's western counties, notably the Scots-Irish immigrants who brought Ulster's agrarian ways with them to America. They combined livestock herding in "outfields" with raising crops along the creek and river bottoms. Besides growing food for their own consumption, crafty producers also sold various goods out of the region, including livestock, salt, grain, ginseng, hand-crafted wares, and pig iron — commodities that could be shipped via turnpikes and down rivers like the Kanawha that flowed into the Ohio.
Within these western mountain communities, a rough-and-tumble form of frontier democracy flourished, one that would shape the nation's politics during the Age of Andrew Jackson. When the man they called "Old Hickory" threw open the White House to the masses after his inauguration in 1829, the region's highlanders had already earned a reputation as cunning hunters, deadly sharpshooters, and fearless dissenters.
At the start of Jackson's second term as president in 1833, a Virginia farmer named Moses Keeney left the gorgeous hills of Greenbrier County and drove his wagon over the James River and the Kanawha Turnpike until he reached Charleston, a thriving river town with its own little aristocracy of families enriched by selling the salt produced by slaves. When he turned his team up the Kanawha River, Keeney saw salt furnaces belching smoke, mountainsides denuded of trees, long rows of drying sheds, and gangs of black men wheeling barrels and tending furnaces.
A few miles upriver, Keeney entered a largely uninhabited region where thick forests sheltered an endless array of birds and animals — sixty-three species of mammals in all, ranging in size from the rare and tiny flying squirrel to the five-hundred-pound black bear. Wild fruit trees grew aplenty: the crab apple with its sweetly perfumed blossoms, the plum, the mulberry, and the pawpaw with its dark burgundy, bell-shaped blossoms and its sweet, nutritious fruit so highly valued by the Native Americans. Higher on the hillsides grape vines grew so thick they covered parts of the woods in darkness, and farther up the mountainsides were dense stands of eastern white pine, succeeded at higher elevations by black walnut, white oak, chestnut, and red spruce. Some sycamores, red oaks, yellow poplars, and buckeyes reached more than a hundred feet in height with trunks that measured two hundred inches in circumference.
Moses Keeney settled on land in this country, and when he died in 1849, his sons continued to farm, hunt, and cut lumber along Cabin Creek in a place where a little mountain community called Eskdale would emerge. In the mid-nineteenth century, none of the Keeneys could foresee the changes that would come to their valley or to the whole region in the decades ahead, when a wondrously diverse ecosystem would be destroyed by railroads that blackened the air, timber companies that clear-cut the forests, and coalmining operations that laid waste to the valleys and streams.
Keeney's sons avoided taking sides when the Civil War erupted, even though most residents of Virginia's western counties voted against secession. On June 11, 1861, leading Unionists called a convention in Wheeling, where they formed a provisional government for a new "free state." A month later, federal troops under the command of General W. S. Rosecrans — who had been a pioneer mine operator in the Coal River Valley — triumphed over Confederate forces at the Battle of Rich Mountain. Yankee units then entered the Kanawha Valley, raided the Keeneys' farm, and moved up the New River, where General Rosecrans's soldiers defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Gauley Bridge that fall. A few months later, the state of West Virginia entered the Union with the motto Montani Semper Liberi, "Mountaineers Are Always Free," emblazoned on its state flag. Upon the state's great seal, the Founding Fathers placed the image of a coal miner with a pick on his shoulder.
At the end of the Civil War, even the wealthiest landowners and merchants in the new state lacked the access to capital, railroad connections, and land titles they needed to exploit the fabulous wealth of coal reserves that lay beneath their mountains. These men yielded to entrepreneurs from the north and east who would furnish the capital and credit required to build the railroads that would link West Virginia to national markets and open its natural resources to exploitation by industrialists.
During the 1870s, battalions of "steel-drivin' men" like the legendary John Henry tunneled through the mountains and laid down track for the westward extension of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway from Richmond, Virginia, to its new terminus on the Ohio River at Huntington. The town was named for the great railroad builder Collis P. Huntington, who needed West Virginia's high-quality coal to fire his fleet of locomotives. He also knew that this fuel could be shipped around the world from the enormous coal pier he constructed in Newport News on the Atlantic Ocean, and that it could be taken to Cincinnati, where shippers could float the fuel on boats down the Ohio River or send it on trains to the Great Lakes and Chicago. In 1877, the C&O railroad extension up the Kanawha and New Rivers south of Charleston allowed seven new mine companies to beginning shipping coal to national markets. The great West Virginia coal rush was on.
For the next decade, engineers and surveyors penetrated the Mountain State's remotest valleys searching for coal seams. After the tracts were surveyed, agents followed to buy leases on the land occupied by pioneers, including military veterans who were given wasteland on the western frontier. The state of West Virginia took possession of many old homesteads during the 1880s because the original settlers had not registered their deeds or paid taxes. When outsiders purchased the original deeds and claimed legal ownership, a protracted legal drama unfolded in the federal courts. At first, some judges sided with the pioneers, but when other judges began to rule for the speculators, the original owners started to sell out to agents, representing investors from New York City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Cincinnati who coveted the state's bountiful natural resources. Other mountain families signed broad form leases that granted a coal, oil, or timber company the right to use the surface of their land in any way "convenient and necessary" to extract minerals, drill for petroleum, or cut lumber. These leases exempted the holders from taxes and from any liabilities for damages caused directly or indirectly by industrial operations.
In the early twentieth century, absentee owners controlled 81 percent of the collieries in West Virginia's southern counties. In McDowell County, for example, agents acquired forty-five thousand acres of land using capital invested by partners from London; Philadelphia; Hartford, Connecticut; and Staunton, Virginia. These capitalists then leased these lands to five mining companies ready to exploit one of the purest deposits of coal in North America — the low sulfur content of "smokeless" coal from the Pocahontas minefield that would produce the coke essential to steel making and fire the boilers of the nation's locomotives and steamships. Coal production in this region soared to even greater heights after 1895, when another railroad, the Norfolk & Western, reached down from the Ohio River along the Big Sandy River and followed the Tug Fork River deep into the Pocahontas coalfield.
The Pocahontas coal district on West Virginia's southern border with Virginia represented one of that state's four major minefields, defined by surveyors and engineers as distinct and contiguous formations of coal separated from one another by mountains and rivers. North and east of the Pocahontas, the New River minefield stretched over a large section of Fayette County where, by 1900, more than eight thousand workers cut and loaded 5 million tons of coal, much of it going directly into a thousand red-hot beehive coke ovens. To the northwest in Kanawha County, an older coalfield covered both sides of the Kanawha River not far from Charleston, the state capital.
Approximately 140 miles northeast of Charleston lay the Fairmont minefield, which opened during the 1890s when Johnson N. Camden, a railroad builder, oilman, and former U.S. senator from West Virginia, formed the Monongah Coal and Coke Company. Camden's engineers cut five mines into the hills and built houses in the town of the same name. By the mid-1890s, Camden's Monongah mines employed the latest machinery and technology, setting the standard for high quality and high productivity. Within a few years, these collieries** would become part of the empire created by the Consolidation Coal Company (often called Consol), whose owners purchased or leased more than fifty thousand acres of coal land. Consol would become the largest producer of coal in the nation by 1907, the same year one of its modern mines, Monongah, exploded and caused the deadliest disaster in America's industrial history.
Meanwhile, new minefields were also being prepared for development north of the Pocahontas field in the unsettled backcountry of Raleigh and Wyoming Counties. To the west, in Logan County, the new Guyan field opened when the C&O extended its line north along the Guyandotte River to the Ohio River. Farther west was the Williamson field, which extended along the Tug Fork River on the Kentucky border. By the time the Norfolk & Western Railway completed its line north to Huntington on the Ohio River in 1895, this new district in Mingo County was predicted to become the coal industry's El Dorado.
Because pioneer industrialists ran their businesses on very narrow margins, they often depended on the profits from their company stores to make up for losses in an unpredictable coal market. And because they had to pay higher transportation costs and absorb the expense of building collieries and whole communities in remote mountain sites, these businessmen depended upon keeping labor costs down so they could sell their coal at low prices and gain an edge in the national market. The operators' insistence on retaining this advantage led them to resist unionization with an extraordinary degree of force and determination.
Small collieries proliferated in West Virginia during the 1890s, but after the turn of the century, syndicates of northern industrialists, bankers, and other investors built modern industrial operations that employed three hundred or more laborers. Like infantry units of an invading army, these well-endowed companies conquered rough terrain, laid down miles of track, opened dozens of mines, erected tipples and company stores, recruited laborers, and constructed entire villages often in less than a year's time.
The rapid development of coal mining created a demographic explosion in sparsely inhabited mountain counties. In McDowell County — which contained most of the Pocahontas field — the population increased by 155.3 percent during the first decade of the twentieth century, compared with a statewide growth of 27.4 percent. The velocity and intensity of industrialization in West Virginia's coal country can be measured with such statistics. What cannot be so readily quantified are the effects this revolution had on mountain people and on the forests and valleys where they were born and raised.
Because industrialists needed to construct new towns in wilderness locations, more West Virginia miners lived in company housing than in any other section of the country — nearly 79 percent, as compared with 24 percent in Ohio. These workers were not ordinary tenants, however, for the state courts had ruled that the mine owner's relationship to his renters was not that of a landlord to a tenant, but rather that of a master to a servant. Therefore, the law allowed the owner to summarily evict families and to inspect miners' houses without a warrant.
The mine operator's power extended over almost every other facet of life as well. He hired and fired his hands at will. He built the schools and selected the teachers, built the churches and selected the ministers, built the store and selected the store manager. He owned or leased every acre of land in and around his town except the creek and the railbed, where a railroad owned the right-of-way. He controlled access to the town and all activity within it, and he hit down with a heavy hand on any activity that might menace his business.
Mine operators like the Virginian W. P. Tams Jr. saw themselves as fair-minded men who were good judges of character and virtue, men who knew right from wrong. If miners had a complaint, "all they had to do was come to me," said Tams many years later. He would hear all complaints, resolve all problems, and levy all penalties, including the ultimate punishment: terminating a miner and, in some cases, putting his name on a blacklist. "To use the expression of the Middle Ages," Tams explained, "I was high justice, the middle and the low." He recalled many occasions upon which he would ask a recalcitrant miner if he wanted to take "company discipline" or face "a court-martial." "A sensible man would always say, 'I'll take company discipline.'"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Devil Is Here in These Hills"
by .
Copyright © 2015 James Green.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Prologue 1
Part I Casus Belli, 1890-1911
Chapter 1 The Great West Virginia Coal Rush 13
Chapter 2 The Miners' Angel 32
Chapter 3 Frank Keeney's Valley 55
Chapter 4 A Spirit of Bitter War 78
Part II The First Mine War, 1912-1918
Chapter 5 The Lord Has Been on Our Side 99
Chapter 6 The Iron Hand 119
Chapter 7 Let the Scales of Justice Fall 139
Chapter 8 A New Era of Freedom 157
Part III The Second Mine War, 1919-1921
Chapter 9 A New Recklessness 181
Chapter 10 To Serve the Masses without Fear 197
Chapter 11 Situation Absolutely Beyond Control 215
Chapter 12 There Can Be No Peace in West Virginia 232
Chapter 13 Gather Across the River 252
Chapter 14 Time to Lay Down the Bible and Pick Up the Rifle 265
Part IV The Peace, 1922-1933
Chapter 15 Americanizing West Virginia 289
Chapter 16 A People Made of Steel 314
Chapter 17 More Freedom than I Ever Had 333
Epilogue 347
Acknowledgments 355
Illustration Credits 359
Notes 363
Index 429
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