The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Introduction

Armed state troops at Paint Creek Junction in 1913, during the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike in Kanawha County (April 1912 to July 1913), which saw some of the fiercest fighting of the mine wars. Credit: West Virginia and Regional History Center.

Coal mining began in what would become West Virginia in the mid-1800s, and its bituminous coal became the fuel of choice for American industry. By the century's end demand was soaring, and by the early 1900s coal powered factories, railroads and streetcars and heated many homes and businesses. With so much money in coal, many assumed the men and boys who dug it were doing well. But the industry was disorganised, decentralised and ruled by boom and bust.

Dangerous work, company towns

Mine owners, focused on competition, ignored the workers who made their money. Coal miners had some of the highest death rates of any industrial workers: in the early 1900s, scores died every year in roof collapses, explosions and fires, and large disasters were frequent. West Virginia's mine safety laws were the weakest in the country, with little or no provision for enforcing them. Miners also faced low pay, long hours and the exploitation of company-owned towns — and more miners were forced to live in company towns in West Virginia than in any other mining state in the greater Midwest region.

The fight to organise

By the turn of the century, miners, like many American workers, looked to unions to improve their lives. In West Virginia they tried to organise under the United Mine Workers (UMW), an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, and mine owners and coal operators resisted fiercely. From 1912 to 1921 the struggle set off a series of violent episodes known as the West Virginia mine wars. At first the trouble centred on towns along Paint Creek and Cabin Creek in Kanawha County (1912–1913); in the later years (1919–1921) it moved south to three major coal counties, Mingo, McDowell and Logan.

Blair Mountain

The climax came in late August 1921. Thousands of pro-union miners marched 60 miles from Marmet, just outside the state capital, Charleston, towards Mingo County, to free striking miners arrested after the governor declared martial law. To reach Mingo they had to cross Blair Mountain, a ridge held by Logan County's notoriously anti-union sheriff, Don Chafin, and his citizen army.

The result was the Battle of Blair Mountain — the largest pitched battle in the history of the American labour movement and the largest insurrection on U.S. soil since the Civil War. It ended only when President Harding sent in the army; once the military arrived, the miners laid down their weapons.

The treason trials

That was the end of open violence, but not of the miners' struggle. In the spring of 1922 the state of West Virginia, working with private coal companies, indicted more than 500 of the marchers on charges including treason against the state, murder, accessory to murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Because feelings ran so high in the coal counties, the first trials were held more than 300 miles away, at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Charles Town, in the state's largely agricultural east. It was not the courthouse's first famous treason trial: in 1859, before it was largely destroyed in the Civil War, it had hosted the trial of the militant abolitionist John Brown after his raid on Harpers Ferry — a trial and execution that helped inflame the sectional hostility leading to war.

Only a handful of the 1922 defendants were ever tried, but the trials were the last gasp of the drive to unionise southern West Virginia's coal fields in the early 1900s. National newspaper coverage of the first, the trial of Bill Blizzard, exposed how far coal operators and state officials had worked together to stop workers organising. Though individuals stood trial for what happened on Blair Mountain, the trials were in effect a referendum on the UMW's right to operate in the state, and their outcome echoed through the whole labour movement: if workers fighting for their rights could be convicted of treason in West Virginia, the same could happen to workers anywhere.

The National Park Service series that this introduction opens goes on to the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strikes and the other events and places of the mine wars, with a story map of their geography.

Sources

Based on "Introduction to the West Virginia Mine Wars," the first article in the series "West Virginia Mine Wars," published by the National Park Service; the series was written by historian Rachel Donaldson, co-author of the National Historic Landmark study of the Jefferson County Courthouse, with design and layout by National Capital Area intern Max Sickler (2021).

• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.