Sheriff Don Chafin, the 'Czar of Logan', and the West Virginia Mine Wars

Don Chafin was sheriff of Logan County during the West Virginia Mine Wars, notorious among miners for vicious, often fatal methods of crushing labor organizing. Miners called him the "czar of Logan."

Don Chafin. National Register of Historic Places, West Virginia.

Sheriff and clerk

Paid to stop the union

For the first two decades of the 1900s, miners fought to unionize the coalfields of southern West Virginia. Many coal operators hired private guards — such as the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency — to keep out the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) by intimidation and violence. In Logan County, the operators relied instead on Sheriff Chafin and his deputies.

• Under the dubious cover of law, Chafin posted deputies at the mines and on trains in and out of the county, hunting for any sign of labor organizing.
• He charged the Logan Coal Operators Association handsomely: $2,725 a month during the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek uprising, and $37,700 in 1919 — a year he was officially the county clerk.
• His reign of terror made him a symbol of the repression West Virginia's miners faced.

Blair Mountain, 1921

In August 1921, union miners and sympathizers set out to march to Mingo County to free miners arrested in the strike of 1919 — planning first to stop in Logan County to kill, or at least unseat, Chafin. Nearly 9,000 marched toward Blair Mountain, the ridge into Logan County.

With the governor's blessing, Chafin raised an army of his own: 3,000 armed volunteers, including teachers, shopkeepers and other white-collar workers who feared the marchers — especially with "radical" backers such as the Socialist Party of America. The Coal Operators Association supplied a huge arsenal, with machine guns and three biplanes that, on his orders, dropped bombs and chemical weapons on the miners.

Federal troops finally stopped the Battle of Blair Mountain. To the operators, Chafin was a hero for stopping the union, and he raised his fees further. Even after his 1924 conviction, he stayed wealthy and powerful locally.

The Don Chafin House in Logan, West Virginia, his home from 1920 to 1933. National Register of Historic Places, West Virginia.

The Don Chafin House

His house at 581 Main Street, Logan, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places — the nation's official list of places worth preserving, created under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. See its National Register nomination, and more resources on the West Virginia Mine Wars.

Sources

Based on "Sheriff Don Chafin," West Virginia Mine Wars series, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.