• Mining Southern Appalachia

  The commercial mining of coal changed utterly the economy and way of life in Southern Appalachia. There had been coal mining before the coming of the industrialists – primarily by pick-and-shovel wielding mountaineers who found an outcropping and began digging – but the scale of development that was to occur over the first thirty years of the new century was beyond the dreams of all but a few natives of the region.

  The work in the early underground mines was savagely physical and dangerous – mines in one county alone killed an average of ten miners a week in 1907. Basically mining consisted of a 14-hour-a-day battle between a man armed with a pick, shovel and some blasting powder, and a solid wall of coal and slate. Holes were drilled along the top of the coal seam, then packed with powder and ignited. The loosened coal was knocked to the floor with picks, shoveled into coal cars, and then pushed to the surface. Oftentimes the work was done in seams of coal no thicker than thirty or forty inches.

  There was a labor shortage as commercial mining expanded. Local governments created taxes that forced subsistence farmers to seek outside employment providing cash. Thus second and third generation pioneers moved from their hillside cabins to join African Americans from the south and European immigrants in camps constructed by the companies that hired them. Pay came in the form of company scrip, which was exchangeable at the company store for food and clothing. Rent for housing, doctor’s fees, payment to a burial fund, and equipment expenses, were all deducted from the miner’s paycheck by the company.

  By 1923, 705,000 men made their living mining coal, and the center of the nation’s coal industry had shifted from Pennsylvania to West Virginia and Kentucky. Coal camps sprang up along every railroad spur.

  Women were not allowed in the mines. But it was coal camp women who raised gardens, reared children and nursed the sick. Most miners were sick or disabled at an early age, and older children went into the mines to replace them. It was a necessity for a family to be large, but it also increased the burden on women.

  The sudden transformation from a rural agricultural society to an essentially urban, industrial one did not come without conflict. The miners banded together into labor organizations, either ones of their own making or the Knights of Labor and, later, the United Mine Workers. The armed battles between miners and company-hired guards, known as “gun-thugs,” that ensued in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee revealed a deep-seated resistance to the exploitation thrust upon the region. The reaction to labor organization by the mine operators in those early days of mining is legendary: labor organizers were beaten and shot by armed company guards; coal camps were surrounded by barbed wire and searchlights in order to keep “troublemakers” out; strikes were dealt with by National Guard units; union activists were blacklisted and denied work in the mines.

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