Written in Blood Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction - Softcover

Wess Harris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 162963445X ISBN 13: 9781629634456

Publisher: Pm Press, 2017

Synopsis

Written in Blood features the work of Appalachia's leading scholars and activists making available an accurate, ungilded, and uncensored understanding of our history.

About this title

About the Author

Wess Harris is a sociologist, farmer, and educator who is widely recognized as an authority on West Virginia's Great Mine War. He curates the When Miners March Traveling Museum. Michael Kline has documented West Virginia folklife and music for decades. A frequent contributor to Goldenseal, where he was once assistant editor, Kline has also produced numerous audio documentaries for broadcast on WVPB, NPR, and BBC TV.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Written in Blood

Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction

By Wess Harris

PM Press

Copyright © 2017 Appalachian Community Services and PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-445-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Esau in the Coalfields: Owing Our Souls to the Company Store Michael and Carrie Kline with Joy and Chuck Lynn, 
Truth Buried Goldenseal, 
Behind the Coal Curtain: Efforts to Publish the Esau Story in West Virginia Michael Kline, 
Scratching the Surface Wess Harris, 
The Rented Girl: A Closer Look at Women in the Coalfields Michael Kline, 
The Memo Larry Layne as told to Michael and Carrie Kline, 
Images Past and Present, 
West Virginia's Gilded History Tom Rhule, 
Appalachian Scholar Walter Lane, 
Battle of Blair Mountain Pamphlet Logan District Mines Information Bureau, 
Victory on Blair Mountain! Wess Harris, 
Baseball and Treason Bill Kovarik, 
John L. Lewis: Forty Years of Upset Stomachs William C. Blizzard, 
An Open Letter Cecil Roberts to Randall Reid-Smith, 
Cecil Roberts Shares His Story Michael Kline, 
Hidden Coffins Unearth Needed History Fr. John S. Rausch, 
When Miners March — A Review Theresa Burriss, 
Written in Blood: The Impact of Widows and Orphans on the Passage of Kentucky Coal Mine Safety Legislation Attorney Tony Oppegard as told to Michael Kline, 
Jack and the Coal Giant Jack Spadaro as told to Michael and Carrie Kline, 
Modern Battles Nathan J. Fetty, 
Which Path, Appalachia? Carrie Kline, 
Connecting the Dots Wess Harris, 
Come All You Coal Miners Sarah Ogan Gunning, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Esau in the Coalfields

Owing Our Souls to the Company Store

Michael and Carrie Kline with Joy and Chuck Lynn

Originally published in a slightly different form in Appalachian Heritage (vol. 59, no. 5, Summer 2011).

Émile Zola writing of working conditions in the French coalfields of the late nineteenth century penned vivid pictures of coal camp life that resonated deeply with mining developments in the new state of West Virginia during the same period. This fiction, based on Zola's six months of intensive research living and taking careful notes in the coal mining district of Borinage, in the Alsace region of northern France, featured such familiar themes as child labor, appalling working conditions, hunger, ever-mounting debt at the company store, crippling and maiming from industrial accidents, and early death from industrial diseases. In Germinal, Zola explored another mortifying interaction between the company store and the village women and girls, daughters and wives of the coal miners: "It was a known fact that when a miner wished to prolong his credit, he had only to send his daughter or his wife, plain or pretty, it mattered not, provided they were complaisant."

In West Virginia we have our own versions of child labor, appalling working conditions, hunger, ever-mounting debt at the company store, mine guards, Gatling guns, and labor wars. But until quite recently, the use of female flesh to extend credit to feed the family was never mentioned by our own regional historians. We've pretty well accepted that early coal operators were a mean, iron-willed breed bent on ruthless control and rising profits — but surely not that mean.

Zola's Germinal was published in 1885. A year or two later the young Collins brothers arrived in the Fayette-Raleigh coalfields of southern West Virginia from their home in Alabama, where Justus Collins had gotten his start in personnel management overseeing prison labor in the mines around Birmingham. These young adventuring capitalists soon bought into thousands of acres of rich coal lands just as the new industry was emerging in the raw and lawless wilderness of our state. So successful was Justus Collins in this land of opportunity that in just a few years he had built and was operating three octagonal, turreted company stores in southern Fayette County, the Justice Colliery Company Store in Glen Jean, the Collins Colliery Company Store in Prudence, and the Whipple Colliery Company Store at the intersection of Rt. 612 near Oak Hill, West Virginia. These stores serviced the needs of families employed at the various Collins mines. The store at Glen Jean burned to the ground in 1934, the year of Collins's death. The same fate befell the Prudence store a few years later. But the Whipple Store, completed in 1893, has miraculously survived for nearly 120 years, a kind of social/industrial history vault in which many unspeakable secrets are stored.

This past July 4, my wife Carrie Kline and I had a prearranged date with Joy and Chuck Lynn, owners and interpreters of the Whipple Company Store Museum and Learning Center these past five years. They bought the imposing old building when it was on the verge of being condemned and razed. Recently retired from business in Florida, they were attracted to the aging structure because of all the history lived within its walls for more than a century.

Joy and Chuck agreed to take us on a tour of the building, even to show us the old embalming room in the basement which was in constant use from when the store was completed in 1893 until the federal government instituted the death certificate in 1932. We recorded their compelling interpretations, moving from one room to another throughout the long day. Our conversations began on the high, arched porch overlooking the parking area and roadways below.

The initial glaring question, of course, was why would two people entering their retirement years want to take on the colossal task of restoring and preserving this relic of the gilded era of coal company dominance. The more than 6,000-square-foot structure is in desperate need of a new roof, for starters, and, of course, heating and plumbing. The list of needed repairs is formidable. Joy Lynn explained that taking on the company store was more to her than just a passing fancy.

Joy Lynn: "My mother is a coal miner's daughter, and my grandmother is coal mining family all the way back to the beginning. Mother was raised nearby on the New River in Brooklyn. I was born in Oak Hill Hospital just two miles up the road, and Granny has been here all her life. Mother has been back and forth between Brooklyn and Michigan. I guess this is really a rescue project. The roof is in bad shape. But with the amount of history surrounding this building, tearing it down was something I didn't want to see happen. Restoring it as a museum was a project we wanted to take on."

The Whipple Company Store was completed a couple of decades into the burgeoning coal and timber rush in the wake of the American Civil War. Soldiers from invading armies of the North had gone back home after the War with tales of the huge trees and rich outcroppings of coal. Surveyors and engineers soon came for a closer look.

For a clearer sense of how this land and resources grab played out in Fayette County and beyond, I reread Ron Eller's Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. The fine-toothed precision of Eller's research makes for troubling reading. The chaos and looting of the region's natural wealth and environmental splendor was akin to the feverish activity of mad dogs in the sheep with blood on their fangs. The new social order that rose to power between 1880 and 1930 quickly abbreviated the U.S. Bill of Rights in industrial communities that they built and controlled, and took care of business with ruthless, self-proclaimed authority. In many coal and timber producing counties, venture capitalists with small armies of mine guards built their own courthouse towns — and courthouses — to baffle existing systems of law and order. Controlling the assessor's office and county land records were essential steps in the ever-expanding development of mills, mines, and railroads.

The vast influx of outside wealth in the 1880s and 1890s financed the passing of an old pre-Civil War order rooted in the rawness of the frontier, a well-defined local power structure dating to the times of earliest settlement. Now an invasive species of colonizers was having its way with local traditions of leadership and displacing a diverse, agrarian, largely bartering economy with rail transportation, industrial wages, Gatling guns, and a cash economy conducted through the company store.

Suddenly the remote vastness of the southern Appalachians buzzed with new industrial enterprise as European immigrants fresh from Ellis Island flooded into boomtowns and labor camps to join contract labor from the cotton fields of Alabama and local men and boys from hardscrabble farms scattered throughout the hollows and hillsides of the region.

Chuck Lynn: "The men coming here from Ellis Island, of course, [were] getting caught up in the system before they arrived. They got a train trip from Ellis Island down to here and were in debt to the company the minute they stepped off the train. Of course they'd be paid in company store scrip. They'd never have cash to send for their families overseas.

"The company would provide the new arrivals with carbide lamps and tools needed to start work. During the Depression immigrants were hoping to get work in their field if they were stonecutters or in the laboring trades. So they get off the boat and there's somebody saying, 'We'll give you a trip to where there are plenty of jobs and good living conditions and — oh, there's just a few catches along the way.'

"On election day the people who collected the ballots in most cases around here were the mine bosses. So the bosses handed out a ballot already filled out and ready to sign. If the miners didn't sign it, they would lose their jobs and get thrown into the streets. That's how the bosses kept all the politicians under control."

Construction of railroads penetrated the bountiful commons of the Appalachians to coincide with the opening of mines and lumber mills. In Fayette County coal and timber development followed the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, completed through the New River Gorge in 1873. Coal mining companies could timber up a heading and open a mine for very little investment. Before they could go to work shooting and loading coal, miners were impelled to build the infrastructure that made possible the removal of coal from underground, placing timbers and laying track without pay. They had to buy the tools with which to mine the coal. They were paid only for the coal they loaded — and the company did the weighing.

But even with all this easy access to untold fortunes and totalitarian control of their workers, the coal operators feared unions and unionizing activities in adjoining states and beyond. After the economic slump of 1893, the nonunion coalfields of West Virginia emerged on the national coal market with a decided edge over Ohio and Pennsylvania dogged with labor troubles and crippling strikes. Production rose astronomically in West Virginia over the next few decades, as the state's natural wealth was hauled away to the Great Lakes region and beyond in coal trains that always came back empty.

The Whipple Company Store has maintained an iconic connection with that era for almost 120 years. It is a flash point for local memory. And the man who built it, Justus Collins, driven by fears of organized labor, was determined to keep the union out of southern Fayette County. Forever. With that in mind, he designed the store primarily as a fortress and staffed it with armed operatives posing as clerks and spying on customers while filling their orders from shelves behind the glass counters.

Joy Lynn: "He called it the Whipple Colliery Company Store. Whipple was his wife's family name. She was Lucy Whipple Dent Collins [with Georgia roots], and their daughter was Amy Whipple Collins.

"Justus Collins designed his company store as a security system. It wasn't built for beauty. It was built so the company owners and the company store workers could hear and see everything. Back then the only form of security people had were the guns they were toting, and their eyes and ears. Justus Collins brought the Baldwin-Felts men here from Bluefield and from the coal mining companies that he owned near Pocahontas."

Lon Savage, author of Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War 1920–21, reports in The West Virginia Encyclopedia:

The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency played a controversial role in the early years of the coal industry of southern West Virginia, enforcing public law at the direction of coal operators who hired them. Their often brutal, repressive policies, especially toward union miners, contributed significantly to the violence of the period. From the beginning, Baldwin-Felts agents were deputized by hard-pressed local sheriffs to maintain law and order, but coal operators increasingly used them to prevent organization of the miners by the United Mine Workers of America. The guards kept union sympathizers from entering the coal camps. They spied on miners, reporting those with union sympathies, their highly organized spy system extending even into the UMWA leadership. In 1902 they helped break a strike in the New River Field. Eventually, their overriding purpose in West Virginia was to prevent unionization of the miners.

Joy Lynn: "Those men could stand hidden behind the bases of the arch on both sides of the front porch, stand there with guns, look in the windows opposite, and look out into the road in front of the company store. So the windows were strategically placed for that reason. The original wooden steps were very steep and narrow, no handrails."

The steep and narrow access would have made it difficult for more than a couple of men to rush the building at one time. Armed to the teeth, the guards were strategically placed to handle whatever threats the workers might pose in the heat of strikes or other disputes. The Whipple Store was a no-nonsense, state-of-the-art design for labor management at every imaginable level. It was a metaphor for the owner's resolve to keep the union out. It was fortified to protect the interests of an occupying owner class, and its staff of mine guards was capable of unleashing well-directed armed force from within if ever it became necessary to do so.

Joy Lynn: "So they monitored who came in and out. Women were primarily the shoppers in the company store. They actually enjoyed themselves and could converse with one another."

Joy recalls how eager her family was to get the store opened as a museum and learning center after they acquired it in 2006. At the time of the opening in May 2007, the last whispers of local memory about the fragile old structure were still audible.

Joy Lynn: "We decided to open in spite of the condition of the building because most of the people who could give us any history would be in their late seventies, eighties, and nineties. We've already had quite a number of people who lived this history come back here as visitors to the building. They've been giving us specific stories about their experiences here. I try to write people's comments after every tour so I can get as much of it documented as possible."

With her round, open face and friendly brown eyes, Joy Lynn invites confidences and sharing. Like Kanzeon, the Buddhist incarnation of compassion, she hears the cries and painful recollections of a troubled region. As a recipient of so many memories and testimonials, Joy explains her system for evaluating what she hears.

Joy Lynn: "Older people from surrounding communities come in here to tell me what I don't know. They often think that because I'm 'just a young girl' I can't possibly know anything about this, because they've lived it. When they tell me their stories, they get a dot on the wall and they get their story written down. When I have three dots I tell the story to others."

By triangulating what she hears, Joy has been able to develop an interpretation for the museum based on details that bubble up from her conversations with local visitors. These revelations are always stunning — often painful — and as a curator of local memory she is respectful of what she hears.

Joy Lynn: "We have had people coming in here whose mothers had to go through very hard times to raise them. They don't want that publicized. Some of the things are humiliating. And they made these sacrifices because they nurtured and cared about one another. They lived in these small communities by themselves and were governed by coal owners. People talk about how awful it was, but many people come in and tell stories about how life was so good. They cared about one another. They loved one another. They watched each others' backs."

The Whipple Company Store sold everything from canned goods, clothing, and crowbars — to live canaries. The birds were sold in little wooden cages and accompanied the miners to their workplaces underground. The tiny lungs were fatally affected by poisonous gasses, and the birds' sudden death warned the miners of the presence of odorless "black damp" in the underground room.

The old freight room's entrance is to the left of the porch and its floor-toceiling shelves are full of mining memorabilia. Some of the items were left behind with little interpretive information after the store closed in 1954, and it has been the Lynns' quest to learn from local visitors about the terminology and function of some mining equipment from earlier times. Some details are hard to hear. Joy points to a small aluminum dinner pail on a nearby shelf.

Joy Lynn: "This little mining bucket here we just had a recent story on. I didn't know anything about the dinner bucket. I called it a little kid's picnic bucket. A gentleman came in last year with his grown children and grandchildren. He had been a miner for fifty-some years. With his family members crowding around, he was telling them about all this equipment, and the canary story, and about the mine boss, and the children going in the mines. He finally turns to me, points to that dinner bucket, and he pokes me in the arm and he says, 'Little lady, tell me about that bucket.' I says, 'Well, sir, I don't know anything about that bucket.'

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Written in Blood by Wess Harris. Copyright © 2017 Appalachian Community Services and PM Press. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pm Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 162963445X
• ISBN 13: 9781629634456
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264