A Complete and Ruthless Rule: Emergence of the Company Town

The southern West Virginia Mine Wars of 1912-1921 drew scores of newspaper reporters to the Mountain State to inform America about what was going on in this seemingly primitive and violent Appalachian backcountry.

Upon their arrival, the savviest journalists quickly discovered that the Mine Wars were more than brief, episodic outbreaks of hostility between inherently violent people. They were the culmination of decades of exploitation and oppression, an inevitable result of a brutal way of industrial life and work that had evolved in the coal fields. Foremost, the battles were part of a decades-long struggle for dignity and political and social rights in southern West Virginia.

The intensity of the violence in southern West Virginia can be traced to the oppressive, exploitative nature of life and work in the coal fields there. The heart of that authoritarian system was the company town.

Ownership of the land and resources gave the coal companies enormous social control over the miners. "You didn't even own your own soul in those damnable places," recalled one elderly miner. "The company owned everything, the houses, the schools, churches, the stores — everything."

The coal company town was a complete system. In addition to owning and controlling all the institutions in the town, coal company rule in southern West Virginia included the company doctor who delivered the babies, the mines in which the children went to work, and the cemeteries where they eventually were buried.

Foremost, company rule included the company police in the form of mine guards, who would toss the miners into the company jail when they got disruptive, or administer the company beating when they attempted to unionize.

It was a complete rule and it was a ruthless rule. Consequently, when the miners did go on strike for their union, they did so not for simple wage increases, but for their dignity and freedom.

Winthrop D. Lane was a nationally renowned author and social worker when the New York Evening Post commissioned him to go to West Virginia and "make a study of the whole conflict." A graduate of the New York School of Social Work, Lane had devoted his life to social causes. He organized the first international conference on mental hygiene, served as director of the New Jersey Prison Commission, and authored several books. Two of them, Punishment and Reformation and What Makes Crime, examined the social and economic causes of criminal behavior.

Lane also served as a reporter and editor of several important and prestigious eastern publications including the Evening Post and the Survey, for which he covered the Mine Wars. In writing about West Virginia, Lane talked to countless people in order "to get at the facts and the psychology, the color, the atmosphere of the conflict." Later, he turned his articles into two books on industrial conditions in the West Virginia coal fields, Civil War in West Virginia (1921) and The Denial of Civil Liberties in the Coal Fields (1924). All of Lane's writing is rich in information and insight, and serves as an important reference for anyone writing about the period.

Black Avalanche

By Winthrop D. Lane

In this article — published in the March 25, 1922, Survey (New York) — Winthrop D. Lane captures the transition of southern West Virginia from a pastoral, agricultural society into a fully developed, industrialized economy. In so doing, he catches the essence of the cultural changes industrialization had wrought and how the stage was set for decades of violence.

Less than twenty years ago parts of those vast stretches of low mountains that cover so much of West Virginia slumbered in solitude. The traveler rode horseback up the stony beds of mountain streams and sought shelter at night in a lonely settler's hut or on the slope of the inhospitable mountain. Forests of oak, ash, cucumber wood and poplar covered the hills. Bears lumbered through the wilderness and wildcats howled at night. No railroad had yet penetrated the region. People lived in small groups here and there in the valleys; life on the whole was simple and devoted chiefly to agriculture. The earth reposed peacefully.

Today, in traversing this region, you pass coal-mining village after coal-mining village. As you ride up the valley of the Guyandotte River, or through McDowell, Mingo and other counties, where the hills stood in untouched quietness two decades ago, evidences of the transformation are on every hand. The houses of those who work in the mines are never out of sight. Large mouths gape blackly at you from the hillsides. Gaunt tipples, head houses and other buildings stare at you from the slopes of the mountains. Railroads send their sidings in many directions. Long lines of squat mine cars run along their narrow gage tracks and disappear around the curves of the hills. The earth is scraped and ugly. The blackness of coal is over everything, and mounds of fine coal stand about. Peacefulness and quiet have departed.

"We think coal and live coal," said a circuit court judge to members of Senator Kenyon's committee visiting the state recently. "If you take our coal from us, we shall go back to the days of the bobcat and the wilderness. Coal is our existence."

This change underlies all that is going forward in that territory today. The conflict over unionism that has invaded these peaceful valleys has made itself familiar through bloody scenes. Another struggle has recently transcended it in the lives of those who inhabit the coal region: the struggle with unemployment. To the miner his employment in the mine is the only way of making a living. Mining operations cover whole counties and ascend river valleys to their sources. They supply whatever opportunity for a livelihood there is. Occasional jobs may be found elsewhere, but they are unimportant and few. If a considerable number of mines close down, whole towns sit around idle. The coal fields of West Virginia comprise an area larger than Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Delaware combined. Any general search for other employment would lead to a small migration.

I have just returned from visiting parts of the state. In some places production has remained nearly normal, but in others the mines have worked little for more than a year. I looked into family cupboards that contained food for only a single meal. I saw the haunted look in the eyes of men who did not know how they were going to provide for the immediate wants of wives and children. Cows have been killed so that there might be fresh meat, although these were the only source of milk for babies. Children are staying away from school because they have no clothes and shoes. Families who have something saved up have helped other families; communities hitherto dependent upon coal have become dependent upon charity.

I

Before describing this situation, let us see what kind of civilization lies back of it. The story of the exploitation of West Virginia's coal resources is dramatic. When Thomas Batts and his few companions pushed their first sturdy way into this fortress of nature, they had no conception of the vast treasures that lay around them. Not until other explorers in 1742 saw "creeks full of coal" was the first record written of the existence of this mineral wealth. George Washington, surveying land in 1770 in what is now Mason County, saw a "Cole hill on fire." Settlement for long was slow. Pioneers, migrating from the eastern valleys and from Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, found the hills of West Virginia inaccessible and hostile. In the neighboring states of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, farms were cleared and towns established before West Virginia became peopled. As late as 1830 or 1840 the inhabitants of the state could still be found tilling their acres, tanning leather for their own shoes, making their own thread and wax, preparing flax and wool for their own cloth and carving dishes and bowls from blocks of cucumber wood and yellow poplar.

No use was made of coal at this time except by crossroads blacksmiths, who employed it in their little shops, and by frontier settlers who dug lumps of it from the outcrops of seams near their cabins and placed these on logs with which they had filled their fireplaces on winter nights.

In 1835 Samuel P. Hildreth published the first observation of the coal strata of West Virginia. Richard Cowling Taylor, the "father of English geology," visited the state in 1848 and described "that magnificent, central, elevated region within whose borders slumber in undisturbed darkness untold millions of acres of coal." Not until the few years just before the Civil War were corporations formed for mining this coal. These were few and unimportant, however, and the war put a stop to their operations.

About 1879 development began in earnest. Then people who knew the great value of West Virginia's coal deposits began to call this to the attention of outside capital. West Virginia advertised her wealth. At the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876, she "surprised the world," we read, "with the exhibit of her natural resources; and the thousands of dollars she thus expended resulted in the investment of millions within her borders." In the earlier operations the leading part had been taken by West Virginians. Now outside aid was sought. Companies were formed on every hand. Land was bought in large quantities. Tracts of it were still held by descendants of original grantees from the English crown and these suddenly found themselves wealthy. On a scale hitherto unimagined, corporations sprang into existence. Many of these had no intention of mining the coal themselves, but planned to lease their land to others who would do it; this practice is common in the state today. Some of the land was bought by railroad companies, who wanted it for the coal that it held as well as for rights of way. Manufacturing establishments in northern cities acquired some of it for their own future supplies of fuel; public utility corporations did the same thing. But by far the greatest number of companies planned exploitation for the general market.

This rapid development passed by certain parts of the state. A modern coal mine is useless until a railroad runs to its very door. The first roads into the state, the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio, the Norfolk & Western, left many districts untouched. Logan County had no railroad until 1904; today it is one of the most productive counties in the state. Other regions were almost as late in being opened. Mines, mine towns, mining corporations, labor unions, the problem of unemployment — all are new. Many localities are going through processes today that were typical of the older Pennsylvania regions fifty years ago.

Miners came into the valleys with a rush. Welsh coal diggers from the pits of Kidwelley; Englishmen from Lancashire; Belgians from the coal basins of Hainaut and Liege; these mingled with much larger numbers of Italians, Slavs, Austrians and Poles. The hills of the state resounded to the languages of foreign lands; more than thirty nationalities are represented among the workmen in these mines today. Americans, however, outnumber the foreigners. They have come from the coal fields of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania and other states. Negroes from the Southern cotton fields have found employment in the mines. And, not the least, the mountaineers of the state themselves. Watching the mines creep nearer and nearer to their cabins, they have looked with foreboding at first and then, realizing the futility of any effort to stand aside, they have shouldered picks and entered the mouths of the black tunnels.

The romance of the story is in part its size and in parts its suddenness. Take McDowell County, which was described two generations ago as "comparatively unpeopled"; on her hillsides sheep were raised and wool was grown. Today mines line her valleys and her annual production of 18,000,000 tons of coal places her first in output among the counties of the state.

Meanwhile, "much of this country is owned by non-residents," writes the historian. The few facts that are known as to coal land ownership show the magnitude of some of the interests involved. The Norfolk & Western Railway Company owns nearly every share of the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company. According to the annual reports of the railway for 1902, when this control was acquired, the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Company owned 295,000 acres in the Pocahontas field, or "about four-fifths" of that field. This is a leasing concern. A large number of mining operators are engaged in extracting coal from its land. Another large holder is the United States Steel Corporation. Through subsidiaries this corporation owns more than 53,000 acres of coking coal land and 32,000 of surface coal land in Logan and Mingo counties combined, and leases 63,000 acres in the Pocahontas field.

II

Let us see what kind of civilization has resulted. The typical coal mining town is not a town in the ordinary sense at all. The place where the town stands is the point at which a seam has been opened, buildings have been erected and machinery has been installed. The dwellings that cluster about the tipple or straggle along the bed of the creek are not occupied by the self-dependent citizens of a community which gives many opportunities for employment and presents a variety of facets to the world at large; they are occupied solely by the men who work in the mines. The town is the adjunct and necessary convenience of an industry; if the mines should disappear, it, too, would cease to exist. It is not even called a town in the language of the locality. It is called a camp.

No one owns his own house; he cannot acquire so much title to property. No one runs a store, operates a garage or sells groceries or haberdashery to his fellow townsmen. No one amuses them in a movie theater. There is no Main Street of small independent businesses, owned by different people, and making up that mosaic of commercial life that is typical of villages everywhere. There is little if any participation in common, group activities. No body of elected councilmen ever passes on repairs for roads, no group of people ever gets together and decides that the old school house is too ramshackle for the children or that the old church needs repainting. No family physician builds up a successful practice by competing with other physicians. No lawyer settles disputes over property rights among his neighbors.

It is not accurate to say that that no one does these things. The coal company does them all. It owns all the houses and rents them to the miner. It owns the store, the pool room, the movie theater, and often helps to build the school and the church. It often owns the Y.M.C.A. building, if there is one. The company employs the physician and collects a small sum monthly from each miner to help pay him. Sometimes it supplements the salary of the teacher and assists the minister in making both ends meet.

The company owns all the land and everything upon it. It therefore controls the life and activities of the little community. It is responsible for the sanitation; if sewage disposal is adequate, the credit belongs to the employer. The company's ownership sometimes extends to the roads, so that it can control ingress and egress. In some counties the company is the employer of the deputy sheriffs and is therefore responsible for police supervision. In Logan County the operators paid out $61,000 last year, as the president of the Logan Coal Operators' Association testified before the Kenyon Committee, in salaries for deputy sheriffs.