The Matewan Massacre, 1920

Sid Hatfield, sheriff of Matewan from 1919 until his death in 1921, around 1920.

One of the most notorious events of the West Virginia mine wars was a deadly shoot-out on May 19, 1920, in the coal town of Matewan in Mingo County. It involved private security guards hired by mine owners to keep their workers in line, the local sheriff Sid Hatfield, Matewan's mayor Cable Testerman, and townspeople. It became a major spark for the March on Logan County, which ended in the Battle of Blair Mountain — the largest armed labour uprising in U.S. history.

The strike and the evictions

In the spring of 1920, with the support of the United Mine Workers (UMW), then the main union for American coal miners, Mingo County miners went on strike, largely because the operators kept using private mine guards to crush their efforts to organise. Once the strike began, the operators refused to compromise and started evicting union miners' families from company housing.

They then hired guards from the notorious Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to forcibly remove families from an independent tent camp set up near Lick Creek for the evicted families — though they had no legal authority to do so. Among the agents who came to Matewan were Albert and Lee Felts, brothers of the agency's owner, Tom Felts. Albert Felts and another detective, C. B. Cunningham, had taken part in the brutal suppression of a miners' strike in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 — the Ludlow Massacre.

The shoot-out

When Sheriff Hatfield and Mayor Testerman went to the tent colony to see what was happening, they asked the agents for eviction warrants. The detectives had none and falsely claimed a court order. Later that day, back in Matewan, tension between Hatfield and Albert Felts boiled over, each claiming the right to arrest the other. The argument turned violent when someone opened fire. When it was over, Testerman, seven Baldwin-Felts guards — Albert and Lee Felts among them — and two townspeople were dead.

Aftermath

The Matewan Massacre, as it came to be called, fed the wider labour struggle. By July 1920, more than 90 percent of Mingo County's miners had taken the union oath. Hatfield, unhurt in the shoot-out, became a symbol of the miners' fight against the violence and tyranny of the mine guard system.

Today the Matewan Historic District and the Ludlow Massacre Site are both National Historic Landmarks — places of exceptional value in illustrating the nation's history, designated through the National Park Service's National Historic Landmarks Program under the Historic Sites Act of 1935, and all listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Sources

Based on "Matewan Massacre," part of the series "West Virginia Mine Wars," published by the National Park Service; the series was written by historian Rachel Donaldson.

• The article's present-day photograph of Matewan, from Wikimedia Commons, is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.