In the early 20th century, West Virginia coal miners and mine operators fought a series of bloody battles that raged for two decades and prompted national debates over workers' rights. Miners in the southern part of the state lived in towns wholly owned by coal companies and attempted to join the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to negotiate better working conditions but most importantly to restore their civil liberties. Mine operators saw unionization as a threat to their businesses and rights and hired armed guards to patrol towns and prevent workers from organizing. The operators' allies in local and state government used their authority to help break strikes by sending troops to strike districts, declaring martial law, and jailing union organizers in the name of law and order. Observers around the country were shocked at the levels of violence as well as the conditions that fueled the battles. The Mine Wars include the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–1913, the so-called 1920 Matewan Massacre, the 1920 Three Days Battle, and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. In this struggle over unionism, the coal operators prevailed, and West Virginia miners continued to work in nonunion mines and live in company towns through the 1920s.
The West Virginia Mine Wars were a series of battles in the early 20th century between coal miners and mine operators over unionization. Facing dangerous working conditions, low wages, and oppressive company towns, miners attempted to join the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), but mine operators saw unionization as a threat to their businesses and their rights as property owners. They hired armed guards and enlisted the assistance of the local, state, and federal government to prevent unionization, and the conflict turned increasingly violent.
After two decades of growing frustrations and organizing efforts, the bloody Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–1913 resulted in a contract signed by the UMWA and the local operators. The strike also led to the election of new officers for UMWA District 17, which included all of southern West Virginia. The new officers were rank-and-file miners who had been radicalized by their experiences during the strike. Over the next several years, the union attempted to organize the mines in the state's southernmost counties—Boone, Raleigh, Logan, Mingo, and McDowell—and made considerable gains during World War I. After the war, the UMWA's national leaders saw completing the unionization of southern West Virginia as critical to the organization's future, but coal operators were determined to stop the union's expansion at all costs.
Figure 1. Kelly Creek, West Virginia. Coal Mine Tipple, ca. 1920.
Figure 2. Miners at the entrance of a mine in Gary, West Virginia, 1908.
In 1902 UMWA officials called a strike in anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, and UMWA President John Mitchell told West Virginia members that they did not have to strike, having only recently formed their locals. They voted to join the strike anyway, and 16,000 miners shut down more than 400 mines in the state. In the upper Kanawha River valley, owners quickly conceded and signed UMWA contracts, hoping they might win new customers during the anthracite strike. In the New River coalfield, operators decided to hold out. Justus Collins, a particularly imperious operator, hired armed men from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency of Roanoke, Virginia, to protect his property and the nonunion miners crossing the picket lines. This escalated the conflict and set a precedent followed by many operators during the Mine Wars. While the strike in the anthracite field ended in October 1902, it dragged on in the New River coalfield. Determined to stop production, strikers shot at nonunion miners from cover, which led to a gun battle that left two miners and two Baldwin-Felts agents dead.13 In February 1903, several months into the strike, the Raleigh County sheriff accompanied by Baldwin-Felts agents entered the village of Stanaford to arrest several miners who had violated a court injunction. The company agents ambushed the miners, starting what became known as the Battle of Stanaford, in which six miners died.14 Two strikers escorted Mother Jones to Stanaford shortly after the battle. As she later described in her autobiography, she heard sobs coming from a miner's shack, and when she opened the door she saw a woman grieving over her husband, his mattress "wet with blood."15 Collins and the operators ultimately succeeded in breaking the strike.
Figure 3. Mother Jones around the time of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike.
Figure 4. D. O. Baldwin (left) and Thomas Felts (right) of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, 1912.
Figure 5. Fred Mooney (left) and C. Frank Keeney (right) after their arraignment, 1922.
Meanwhile, the strike in the Tug Valley continued with many still living in tents. When US Senator William Kenyon held hearings to investigate the violence in southern West Virginia, he spoke to George Echols, an African American man who was born a slave, became a coal miner, moved to Mingo County, joined the union, and was elected vice-president of his racially integrated local. After he was evicted from his house, Echols moved to the Lick Creek tent colony, which was also racially integrated at a time when coal camps and public schools were not.62 By the time of the Battle of Blair Mountain, miners like Echols had been on strike and living in tents for more than a year.
After its failure in southern West Virginia, the United Mine Workers of America struggled to maintain its contracts and its membership, which declined from 600,000 in 1923 to 200,000 by the end of the decade.66 The inability of the UMWA to organize southern West Virginia coincided with a series of failed strikes by steelworkers, meat packers, railway workers, and potters. Previously powerful unions struggled to stay solvent in the coming years. In 1924 Lewis pressured District 17 officers into surrendering their autonomy to the international office, and the UMWA had little influence in West Virginia for the rest of the decade. In 1930 Keeney joined a group of dissidents and formed the West Virginia Mine Workers Union, focusing his efforts on miners along Kellys Creek, only a few miles from Cabin Creek. They lost their first strike in 1931, but the union continued to advocate for the hungry miners for the next two years. Ultimately, Keeney drifted away from the labor movement.67 Through the 1920s and early 1930s, the miners of West Virginia continued to live in company towns, earn lower wages than other industrial workers, and face dangerous conditions underground. They, along with industrial workers across the country, would have to wait until federal labor laws changed before they had another opportunity to bring the union to the Mountain State.
During the 1970s, historians began exploring the Mine Wars through a variety of lenses. Fred Barkey's 1971 dissertation "The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898–1920" examined the extent to which Socialist organizers reached the miners fighting for unionism in southern West Virginia, and in 1973, Kenneth Bailey wrote an influential journal article that revealed coal operators' plan to hire a "judicious mixture" of native whites, immigrants, and African Americans to thwart unionization. And Richard D. Lunt's 1979 Law and Order vs. the Miners, 1907–1933 focused on the legal history of the Mine Wars, especially influential court cases. These scholars placed the Mine Wars in the broader context of American history, recognizing that they were not an aberration, nor was the violence an outgrowth of a dysfunctional mountain culture. Instead, they were one of the major conflicts of the early 20th century over the rights of citizenship and the regulation of industrial capitalism.
Three trends in academic history influenced study of the Mine Wars. First, "new labor history" focused historians' attention on, among other things, class consciousness. Influenced by new labor historians, David Corbin's 1981 book Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 argued very powerfully that the sporadic conflicts of the early 1900s, which became more frequent and culminated in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, represented the emergence of a class consciousness that welded together miners across mountainous terrain and across ethnic and racial lines. Corbin's findings mirrored studies of other groups of workers who experienced industrial capitalism in the same period and also joined the labor movement, but at the same time challenged popular representations of a "backwards" region. In the 1960s, books like Jack Weller's Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia had perpetuated the notion of a deficient Appalachian culture, plagued by fatalism and either pathological individualism or pathological family orientation. Corbin's study emphasized miners' ability to organize and their rational response to oppression.
Second, the 1970s witnessed the emergence of Appalachian studies as a formal, multi-disciplinary subfield, largely in response to books like Yesterday's People. Ronald Eller's 1982 book Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers described the creation of company towns and the incorporation of Appalachians into industrial capitalism, seeing it as another example of the exploitation of Appalachians.
A third trend was Appalachian historians' greater focus on the region's often overlooked diversity. Ronald Lewis and Joe Trotter studied African American coal miners of the era. Trotter's Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32 examined African Americans' migration to the region and class and community formation. Janet Greene wrote about women's strategies for survival in company towns of southern West Virginia. And Fred Barkey studied Italian miners' participation in the labor movement and strikes.
In the 1980s, popular histories of the Mine Wars reached a broader audience than ever before. In 1986, Lon Savage's Thunder in the Mountains recounted the events of 1920–1921 in a very readable format that made a larger-than-life figure of Sid Hatfield. In 1987, Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven told the story of fictional West Virginians whose lives were interwoven with the history of the coal industry and the Battle of Blair Mountain. And that same year writer-director John Sayles's independent film Matewan brought the miners' struggle to national audience.
There were few studies of the Mine Wars during the late 1990s and early 2000s, but more recently there has been renewed interest in them. Rebecca Bailey's 2008 book Matewan Before the Massacre challenges historians to remember new labor historian Herbert Gutman's words: "All history is local." In her careful analysis of Mingo County history, she asks: If oppressive company towns had radicalized miners, then why did the shootout took place in Matewan, an independent town? And how did pro-union candidates get elected if coal companies had complete control over state and local government? In answering these questions, Bailey examines the ways that the union drive intersected with a multitude of local struggles for power that had previously been overlooked in favor of region-wide explanations of the conflict.
Finally, the Mine Wars have once again reached a national audience with the 2015 publication of James R. Green's The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. This carefully researched history is both broad in its scope—beginning with the late 1890s and ending with the 1933 unionization drive—as well as detailed, providing in-depth descriptions of events that other histories have only summarized. Green's book inspired the PBS American Experience documentary The Mine Wars, which aired on January 26, 2016.
The Mine Wars, as one would expect, generated thousands of pages of trial transcripts, government investigations, and congressional hearing. Journalists from major newspapers as well as from Socialist and labor periodicals wrote numerous articles at the time. Two of the best known accounts were New York journalist Winthrop Lane's Civil War in West Virginia and James Cain's articles in the Atlantic Monthly. There are autobiographies by participants like Mother Jones and Fred Mooney. And there have been oral history projects, most notably the 1989–1990 Matewan Oral History Project at the archives of Appalachian State University. The West Virginia and Regional History Collection in Morgantown hold the paper collections of office holders like Governor Ephraim Morgan and coal operators like Justus Collins. Paper collections of national labor leaders like John Mitchell and John L. Lewis contain correspondence from organizers and UMWA officials. Finally, two projects have focused on the archaeological record of the Mine Wars, but much work remains to be done.
(1.) The phrase was the title of a book by Graham Adams Jr., Age of Industrial Violence, 1910–15: The Activities and Findings of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). Chuck Keeney explores the memory of the mine wars in his essay "The Mind Guard System: Mine Wars and the Politics of Memory in West Virginia," West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies 12 (Spring and Fall 2018): 47–70.
(2.) Ronald L. Lewis, "Coal Industry," West Virginia Encyclopedia, October 13, 2016. Also, see Jerry Bruce Thomas, "Coal Country: The Rise of the Southern Smokeless Coal Industry and Its Effect on Area Development, 1872–1910" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1971); and Charles Kenneth Sullivan, "Coal Men and Coal Towns: Development of the Smokeless Coalfields of Southern West Virginia, 1873–1923" (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1979).
(3.) Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (New York: Hill & Wang, 2017), 160–169; Wilma Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chap. 3. For percentages of out-of-state owners, see Dunaway, First American Frontier, 57.
(4.) Darlene Wilson, "A Judicious Combination of Incident and Psychology: John Fox, Jr. and the Southern Mountaineer Motif," in Dwight Billings, Katherine Ledford, and Gurney Norman, eds., Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 98–118; Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
(5.) Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 4.
(6.) Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 24–42; Paul H. Rakes, "Coal Mine Mechanization," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, June 19, 2012; and "Mining Methods in the Hand-Loading Era," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, October 20, 2010.
(7.) Paul Rakes, "A Combat Scenario: Early Coal Mining and the Culture of Danger," in Culture, Class, and Politics in Modern Appalachia, eds. Jennifer Egolf, Ken Fones-Wolf, and Louis Martin (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2009), 56–87.
(8.) Michael K. Rosenow, Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 172, n. 93; U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission, Vol. 12, Report of the Industrial Commission on the Relations and Conditions of Capital and Labor in the Mining Industry (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 90.
(9.) David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 8; Kenneth R. Bailey, "A Judicious Mixture: Negroes and Immigrants in the West Virginia Mines, 1880–1917," West Virginia History 34 (1973): 141–161; Bailey, "Strange Tongues: West Virginia and Immigration to 1920," in Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change, 1840–1940, eds. Ken Fones-Wolf and Ronald L. Lewis (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2002), 246. Note that there were an additional 7,545 miners of unknown origin: Bailey, Transnational West Virginia, 246.
(10.) David Brody, In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), 140–142. Other sources on the origins of the UMWA and the 1897 strike include Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 154–156; James R. Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015), 40; and J. E. George, "The Coal Miners' Strike of 1897," Quarterly Journal of Economics 12 (1898): 186–208; and Corbin, Life, 43–45.
(11.) Rosemary Feurer, "Mother Jones: A Global History of Struggle and Remembrance, from Cork, Ireland to Illinois," Illinois Heritage (May 2013): 28–33. For Jones's organizing in West Virginia, see Elliot Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), chaps. 4, 7, and 9.
(12.) Edward M. Steel, "Mother Jones in the Fairmont Field, 1902," Journal of American History 57 (September 1970): 290–291.
(13.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 46–53.
(14.) Lois C. McLean, "Battle of Stanaford," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, October 29, 2010.
(15.) Mother Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones, edited by Mary Field Patron (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1925), 69–70, quoted in Green, The Devil Is Here, 53.
(16.) Corbin, Life, chap. 2.
(17.) For testimony on these abuses, see U.S. Senate, Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913).
(18.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 83–85.
(19.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 87–89, 94–95. According to Green, this is what newspapers reported, but they could not provide an accurate list of the casualties from the battle.
(20.) Testimony of Lee Calvin, Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia, Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. Senate (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 665–680; Green, The Devil Is Here, 132–137.
(21.) Washington Times, June 8, 1913; and St. Louis Dispatch, March 20, 1913.
(22.) Ralph H. Chaplin, "Violence in West Virginia," International Socialist Review 13 (April 1913): 729–735, quote on 729.
(23.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 152.
(24.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 141–151.
(25.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 151, 157–164.
(27.) John Hennen, The Americanization of West Virginia: Creating a Modern Industrial State, 1916–1925 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), chap. 3.
(28.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 182.
(31.) Corbin, Life, 199–200; Green, The Devil Is Here, 188–189.
(32.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 194–196, 202–206.
(33.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 183–185; Corbin, Life, 115.
(34.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 208–209.
(35.) Rebecca J. Bailey, Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2008), 1–7.
(36.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 214.
(37.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 215–221.
(38.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 227–231; Lon Savage, "Battle of the Tug," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, November 5, 2010; Corbin, Life, 205–206.
(39.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 236–238; Corbin, Life, 208.
(40.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 240–243, quote on 243.
(41.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 243–248, 254.
(42.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 253–256.
(43.) Brandon Nida, "Patterns of Liberation: Archaeological and Spatial Analysis at the Blair Mountain Battlefield, 1921" (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014), chap. 4; Boyden Sparkes, "Jack Dalton vs. Bill Blizzard," in Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars, ed. David A. Corbin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 169.
(44.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 258–260, quote on 259.
(45.) Shae Davidson, "Mother Blizzard," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, September 26, 2012; and William C. Blizzard, When Miners March, ed. Wess Harris (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010).
(46.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 261–262.
(48.) Nida, "Patterns of Liberation," particularly chaps 6 and 7; Joe W. Savage, "Stopping the Armed March: The Nonunion Resistance," in The Goldenseal Book of the West Virginia Mine Wars, ed. Ken Sullivan (Charleston, WV: Goldenseal Magazine, 1991), 73–79.
(49.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 266.
(50.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 266–271.
(51.) Lon Savage, Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 123, quoted in Green, The Devil Is Here, 272.
(52.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 272–273.
(54.) Michael M. Meador, "The Siege of Crooked Creek Gap," in The Goldenseal Book of the West Virginia Mine Wars, ed. Ken Sullivan (Charleston: Goldenseal Magazine, 1991), 68.
(56.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 276–278.
(57.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 266, 278. On the bombing, see Meador, "The Siege," 69–70, and 72 for an image of one of the bombs.
(58.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 280–282.
(59.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 294–298.
(60.) Lon Savage, "Walter Allen," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, August 17, 2017; and Shae Davidson, "Blizzard Treason Trial," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, June 24, 2015.
(61.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 300–302.
(62.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 302–303.
(63.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 303.
(64.) J. W. George Wallace, "Cliftonville Mine Battle," The West Virginia Encyclopedia, June 20, 2012.
(65.) Green, The Devil Is Here, 303.
(66.) Justin McCarthy, Brief History of the United Mine Workers (Washington, DC: United Mine Workers Journal, 1950), 11.
(67.) Jerry Bruce Thomas, An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 44–46.


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