This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain. While the anniversary is still weeks away, organizations and communities in southern West Virginia are already commemorating the centennial.
As part of the Mine Wars, coal miners marched near the Boone-Logan County line from late August to Sept. 3. The march was the largest labor uprising in U.S. history.
It happened in the early 1900’s after coal miners in West Virginia endured years of dangerous conditions underground and brutal political and cultural treatment above ground.
By 1921, the miners decided to fight for their fellow miners in the Mingo County town of Williamson, who were locked up without trial. They were charged with violating martial law, an act that gives absolute power to the federal military during times of “war, rebellion, or natural disaster.” The battle ended when martial law was declared again, and U.S. Army troops disarmed the miners.
The uprising has been largely underreported but organizations and communities are hoping the events this year will provide more opportunities for people to visit and learn about America’s labor history.
Dozens of events are taking place online and in communities that played an important part in the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Mine Wars. Some of those towns include Matewan and Williamson in Mingo County, Madison, in Boone County and Welch in McDowell County.
The next event is a performance of the play “Terror of the Tug” in Summers County at Pipestem Resort State Park amphitheatre on Saturday, Aug. 7 at 8 p.m. The main events are happening Sept. 3 and Labor Day, the first Monday of the month, Sept. 6. Some of the events include outdoor plays, reenactments, tours, virtual roundtable discussions and retracing the march to Blair Mountain.
The anniversary is Sept. 3, so Labor Day Weekend marks the 100th anniversary of the centennial. You can find a list of events commemorating the 100th anniversary at this site.
The West Virginia Mine Wars were two decades of fighting between coal miners and their employers over the workers’ right to belong to a union. In 1921, the conflicts culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, when ten thousand armed miners fought several thousand company men in the remote hills of Logan County, West Virginia, before surrendering peacefully to the US Army. This August will mark the 100th anniversary of the battle.
Inside Appalachia Folkways reporter Rebecca Williams recently talked to Saro Lynch-Thomason, ballad singer and folklorist from Asheville North Carolina. Saro created the Blair Pathways Project, which tells the history of the West Virginia Mine Wars through music. Saro was also a Folkways Corps Reporter back in 2019.
Rebecca Williams
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Saro Lynch-Thomason is a ballad singer and folklorist from Asheville, North Carolina. Saro created the Blair Pathways Project, which tells the history of the West Virginia Mine Wars through music.
Rebecca Williams: Saro, will you tell us about the song The Company Store?
Saro Lynch Thomason: It was very common for coal miners and their families to live in company run towns. And so the house that you rented, you paid rent to the mine owners for that house, and then the dry goods store or the store you would have gotten your food, your clothes , and your textiles, that was also run by the company.
Thomason: The song The Company Store was submitted as a poem to the United Mine Workers journal, which was run by the United Mine Workers of America, the union, back in 1895. And it was written by a coal miner named Isaac Hanna. And this poem is a long complaint about how criminal the mine operators were in running company run stores.
Williams: What other things were miners complaining about back then?
Thomason: Working as a minor in the coal industry in the late 19th and early 20th century was really dangerous work. Things like roof falls or exposure to methane gas, and then the risk of explosions. All of that was much more common than it needed to be. And we know that thousands and thousands of people died in the industry just during this period.
Williams: Why did you decide to include an Italian labor song on Blair Pathways?
Thomason: Storenelli D’esillio is written by an Italian anarchist named Pietro Gori. Many people don’t realize that a large portion of the people who were mining coal in West Virginia in the late 1800s, early 1900s, were Southern and Eastern European immigrants. And those immigrant cultures and communities also brought far left politics.
Williams: There were also significant numbers of African American mining families in these coal camps, right?
Thomason: Yes. Some of these miners had come up from the deep south through recruitment campaigns or just looking to get out of sharecropping systems. Some of these African American workers had come into the state, helping to build a railroad. These workers were often also very invested in unionizing, and came into elected positions in the United Mine Workers of America.
Williams: One of the major strikes of the West Virginia Mine Wars took place on Paint and Cabin creeks in 1912 and 1913, where there were numerous deadly battles and skirmishes. Tell us about Walter Seacrist, who wrote the song “Law in the West Virginia Hills”?
Thomason: As a child, he actually lived in a strike camp. And as an adult, he joined the union and he started writing songs about his experiences of the Coal Wars.
Williams: The song mentions wives and children. So we know that it wasn’t just male miners involved in these strikes. You included a song called Lonesome Jailhouse Blues written by a woman from Kentucky in 1932.
Thomason: “Lonesome Jailhouse Blues” was written by a woman named Aunt Molly Jackson. And she wrote this song when she had been organizing with the National Miners Union, which was a communist union. And was put in prison for that organizing work. Many women were organizers and were really the backbone of strikes.
Williams: So how were women involved in the Paint and Cabin Creek strike?
Thomason: Women would often go down to the train stations and harass or sometimes attack or at least shame the replacement workers who were coming in. And women would also hold down picket lines in front of the mines. On top of that they were doing things like committing sabotage. Women would go and tear up, you know, the rail lines so that trains exporting coal from the region couldn’t run.
Williams: In 1921, these decades of conflicts boiled over into full-scale war during the week-long Battle of Blair Mountain, which is often called the largest armed insurrection in U.S. history since the Civil War.
Thomason: What strikes me about these conflicts is that you just have to get to a place where you feel like you have no other options. To do something like risking your life, essentially, by going to war really means that you have nothing else to lose.
Williams: I noticed that your album “Blair Pathways” doesn’t include a song about the battle. Why is that?
Thomason: You know, I think there’s different reasons why there may not be a song. events like this are also traumatic, and people want to forget about them. People did die in this battle. It was a battle that people had to be pretty secretive about if they were involved. It’s not something you necessarily wanted to let all your neighbors know about. So I think there would have been reasons to not talk about the fact that this enormous uprising had taken place.
Williams: One of the last songs on the album is called “Hold on.” It was one that you and others sang as you marched to Blair Mountain in 2011. Why were you marching to Blair Mountain?
Thomason: One goal was to promote the need for sustainable jobs in West Virginia. The other goal was to try and save Blair Mountain because Blair was endangered of being stripped mined for coal. And this really important, you know, historic battle site and it needs to be preserved. So the march took about a week, and we were in 90 to 100 degree weather, and music and song became a really powerful part of the march. People started to really understand how songs could bring people together, and really vindicate and enliven the work they were doing.
Rebecca: You helped lead the singing on the march. Why did you choose this song in particular?
Thomason: It’s such a great song to sing in groups. And it’s really structured in a way where you can create new verses.
Thomason: It comes from African American traditions, and in the civil rights movement, verses were adapted to be about that movement.
Williams: Saro, what did you take away from studying the mine wars and immersing yourself in this music?
Thomason: I think I came away with a better understanding of how complex these conflicts were. And how important it was that people know that they happened. Without that labor history. We wouldn’t have things like the eight hour work day and safety standards at work. We wouldn’t have any of those things if all these different labor movements hadn’t taken place.
Williams: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this and to revisit this history in time for the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair mountain
If you want to learn more about the West Virginia Mine Wars, sample or purchase more music from the project, you can go to Blairpathways.com. There you’ll find a series of essays that accompany the songs and more information about the musicians playing them.
Music Credits “The Company Store” Musician: Tim Eriksen (vocals) and Riley Baugus (banjo) Origin of Music: Isaac Hannah, 1895, United Mine Workers Journal “Stornelli d’esilio” Musician: Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano Origin of Music: Pietro Gori, 1895 “Lonesome Jailhouse Blues” Musician: Elizabeth Laprelle (vocals) Origin of Music: Mary Stamos or “Aunt Molly Jackson,” 1930s or ‘40s. “When the Leaves Come Out” Musician: Morgan O’ Kane (vocals, banjo) Origin of Music: Ralph Chaplin, 1913. “Hold On” Musician: 2011 March to Blair Mountain participants, song led by Saro LynchThomason Origin of Music: African-American traditional, 20th century, words adapted by Alice Wine, Blair verses created by Saro Lynch-Thomason 2011 “Law in the West Virginia Hills” Musician: Samuel Gleaves (vocals, guitar), Myra Morrison (fiddle), Jordan Engel (bass) Origin of Music: Walter Seacrist, 1930s
This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the largest armed uprising in America since the Civil War, and a major event in West Virginia history: the Battle of Blair Mountain. The battle came in 1921, several months after the Matewan Massacre, a shootout that’s also been immortalized in stories, song and film.
In these conflicts, the coal companies hired Baldwin-Felts private detective agency as henchmen to fight their battles.
Inside Appalachia co-host Mason Adams spoke with historian Bob Hutton about his research into the Baldwin-Felts agency, which started in the Virginia coalfields.
***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mason Adams: For folks who may not be familiar, do you mind briefly recapping the role of the detectives in those incidents?
Bob Hutton: Well, sure.
In the so-called Matewan Massacre, a number of agents of the Baldwin-Felts organization were evicting women and children from miners’ houses in downtown Matewan. They were prevented from doing so by the local police chief and the local mayor, who commenced a gunfight that ended up working not in the interest of the Baldwin-Felts agents. They weren’t on the winning side of all this.
The police chief in question was a guy named Sid Hatfield. He was later put on trial for another incident, and he was assassinated on the courthouse steps in Welch, West Virginia, by agents of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency. That’s nearly 100 years ago, coming up soon.
Later in 1921, you had the Battle of Blair Mountain. Agents of the Baldwin felts detective agency probably did play a role in that, although their role in Blair Mountain is somewhat more obscure. Certainly, they’re the antagonists. In the so-called Mine Wars, going back to Paint Creek and Cabin Creek in 1912, 1913, going up to 1921 — they’re the primary bad guys in both cases.
Adams: I think a lot of us have an understanding of Baldwin-Felts as sort of the Appalachian version of the Pinkertons. Tell us a little bit more about this detective agency. Where was it formed? Who were Baldwin and Felts?
Hutton: William Baldwin was actually named “the Pinkerton of the South” at a policeman’s convention in about 1905. The most important thing to remember about both William Baldwin and Tom Felts was that they were both natives of Appalachia. Both of them were born and raised in southwestern Virginia. Both of them had gotten into the detective profession way back in the 1800s.
Baldwin had gotten a job working for an older detective in Charleston, West Virginia. He later turned that employment into his own agency. By 1895 or so, he’s the primary detective for the Norfolk and Western Railroad, and he’s got Felts working for him. Over the next few years, Felt’s position in the agency grew, and eventually they became partners.
Over the course of that time, they hired dozens of individuals as henchmen, as spies, as patrol guards — all sorts of different kinds of private security or investigation capacities.
Adams: We’ve talked a little bit about the Baldwin-Felts detective agency’s role in the Mine Wars, but that entire period is also remarkable in history for the sheer amount of upheaval, racial terror, and establishment of Jim Crow laws in the South. What role did the Baldwin-Felts agency play with that?
Hutton: I’ve found that Baldwin-Felts was an enforcer of Jim Crow. Beginning in the 1880s, there’s a massive African-American migration to both West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. They’re all being driven there by the availability of jobs in the mines and the railroads. It’s a huge demographic change.
This being the era of Jim Crow, the enforcement of the color line and the attempt to maintain white supremacy: This ultimately was Baldwin-Felts’ job on the railroad and in the rail yards. There was a demand to make sure that these Black workers stayed in line. William Baldwin and Tom Felts often saw that as their job.
Adams: Does your research support the casting of the Baldwin-Felts detectives as the bad guys in these narratives?
Hutton: Frankly, it does.
There’s very little good that seems to come from their work. For instance, going back to the 1890s, there were a lot of railroad accidents. Lo and behold, the Baldwin-Felts agency would always find some sort of individual to blame for these accidents. Very often it happened to be a Black worker. This mythology of the Black train wrecker becomes basically their bread-and-butter by about 1900. Anytime there’s some sort of railroad accident that the insurance companies might be trying to blame on negligence, or that families might want to try to sue the Norfolk and Western, they always happen to find someone — sometimes a child —that they can say, “Well, this person put something on the tracks and tried to derail the train.”
There’s so many other incidents where they would rough up individuals to try to get a confession out of them, probably very often a false one. That’s to say nothing of the years of their decline in the early 1930s, where essentially their primary job is harvesting hobos, and selling them to a workhouse in northern North Carolina. These are not good people. One person around 1913 referred to them as “the gunmen of capitalism.” I think that’s an apt phrase.
Adams: That is a jaw-dropping story — the fact that it’s homegrown.
Hutton: Precisely. They did work for companies that could be termed as “invasive.” But a very important thing to remember about Baldwin-Felts is the organization was founded by mountaineers. It was run by mountaineers. And most of the gunman they hired who shot miners or beat up Black railroad workers were native mountaineers. So they’re getting their gun thugs from the same labor pool as the people that they’re torturing. And that’s that’s a dynamic that really needs to be explored.
The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum reopened Sept. 3 in a new location in Matewan, West Virginia featuring more detailed and researched exhibits about Appalachia’s labor union history in the early 1900s.
The museum originally opened in 2015 in an old hardware store in downtown Matewan. The small building still bears bullet holes from the Matewan Massacre – one of the many strikes that took place from 1900-1921. It was a prominent time in West Virginia’s history where labor workers began to unionize, fighting for basic rights from their companies, which at the time controlled the economy, politics and even entire towns.
According to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum webpage, it is a history that is often overlooked. After generating worldwide interest in the Mountain State’s miner history, the museum founders agreed to move the museum to a larger spot across the street that could host more exhibits.
Chuck Keeney, a founding board member of the museum, spoke with our southern coalfields reporter Caitlin Tan about the new additions.
**This story has been lightly edited for clarity.
Caitlin Tan:So, Chuck, for those who don’t know, tell us a little bit about the Mine Wars Museum.
Chuck Keeney: The purpose of the museum was to create a grassroots people’s history museum that focused on a very overlooked and even suppressed history in the state that highlights the labor struggles, and also highlights the underlying conditions that created the Appalachia that we know today.
Tan:Can you walk us through a little bit about the start of the mine wars in the best way you can? I know that’s a lengthy question.
Keeney: Yeah. Without getting into a lecture, the mine wars really were the struggle not just for unionization, but for basic constitutional rights, in which the American dream was denied to them because of this system that they were living under, completely and totally controlled by corporate interests. So, they were living in towns and communities in which everything was owned by absentee corporations, from the houses that they lived in to the stores that they bought in, they were not allowed freedom of assembly, they were not allowed freedom of speech.
Tan: So, something that stood out to me was that the redesign includes more information on the Treason Trials. In the press release, it was described as the labor turmoil after Blair Mountain, which, of course, was the largest labor uprising in America taking place in 1921.
Chuck, can you tell us more about the Treason Trials and why we might not have heard of them?
Keeney: Well, of course these people’s lives did not end after the Battle of Blair Mountain. Those people that fought, the union movement, the socioeconomic and political order in West Virginia all continued on, so it’s important to look at what happened after. There was a series of trials revolving around treason, murder, conspiracy to commit murder all around the Battle of Blair Mountain, that actually went all the way into 1924. And so these trials constituted one of the few treason trials in American history, because it was a serious constitutional issue. And it was also about to what lengths can workers go to challenge the power structure in America? When do they have a right to stand up and fight for themselves? And that’s really significant. You know, when you look at what’s happening in contemporary America with lots of protests, with lots of unrest, the legality of that, what is the individual’s right to protest?
Credit West Virginia Mine Wars Museum
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Outside the new location of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. The change of location was due to a need for more space for new exhibits.
Tan: And in that same vein, do you feel like some of the history offered at the museum is relevant or even applicable to modern day events right now?
Keeney: It all is applicable to modern day events for a lot of different reasons. First of all, minority issues of race and immigration, which are of course big topics right now. You look at the Battle of Blair Mountain. As the miners march toward Blair Mountain, they actually desegregated company towns when they went through on their way to Blair Mountain, which is not something that’s associated with this region.
When people use the word redneck, they often think of a racist, right? Or that stereotype regarding that. However, when you look at the rednecks of 1921, they were doing something that was very opposite of that. It was immigrants, African Americans and poor white people all working together for a common cause to better their working and labor conditions. And that’s very relevant to everything that we’re undergoing today.
The economic issues surrounding coal, and the influence of the fossil fuel industry is also a primary concern. Not just in this region, but when you’re talking about climate change, understanding those power structures and why fossil fuels are so permanently embedded into our economy and political system go back to these labor struggles that happened 100 years ago. And it’s also about learning from this past that we’re able to kind of forge a better way to the future, in my opinion.
Tan: The redesign includes more research on the roles of women and minorities during the mine wars, kind of like what you were just talking about. And I feel like those are two groups that typically aren’t part of the narrative that we hear about. Can you expand a little on that and what people might expect to see if they go to the museum?
Keeney: We now have a women’s resistance exhibit in the museum to look at the extraordinary role that women played in all of these strikes, and also women’s everyday lives in the coal camps. Catherine Moore, who’s one of our museum founding members, her research really focuses on women and minorities looking at African American organizers in Mingo County, and in the Paint Creek Cabin Creek strike. And so she’s really focusing on that in her research, and she was able to take a lot of that research and really give us a much broader look at these specific groups that have even been overlooked in previous histories of the mine wars.
The new West Virginia Mine Wars Museum is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays in its new location in downtown Matewan.
Labor leader Bill Blizzard died on July 31, 1958, at age 65. The Kanawha County native was the son of two passionate union activists.
During the 1910s, Blizzard quickly rose in rank in the United Mine Workers of America labor union. In 1921, he played a key role in the armed miners’ march on Logan County and personally led some of the front-line fighting at the Battle of Blair Mountain. He was charged with treason and murder for his actions. He was tried in the Jefferson County Courthouse in Charles Town—ironically, in the same building where John Brown had been convicted of treason six decades before.
Although Blizzard was acquitted of all charges, he lost leverage in the union. In 1931, however, he won favor again by helping to defeat a rival miners’ union. He served as president of UMWA’s District 17 from 1945 until 1955, when he was forced out by national president John L. Lewis.
Bill Blizzard was one of the most influential labor leaders in West Virginia history and one of the main reasons the UMWA became a political powerhouse in the state.
On May 27, 1922, a jury acquitted labor leader Bill Blizzard of committing treason against West Virginia. The charges were related to the recent Battle of Blair Mountain. Blizzard was one of several more radical leaders who’d risen to power in the United Mine Workers of America during the 1910s. After the battle, prosecutors brought Blizzard to trial first, believing they had the best case against him.
The trial was moved to Charles Town, the seat of Jefferson County, far from the southern coalfields. Ironically, 63 years earlier, abolitionist John Brown had been convicted of treason in the very same courthouse.
Blizzard’s trial centered on where he was during the Battle of Blair Mountain. The prosecution claimed he’d shadowed the marchers and closely followed their progress. The defense argued he’d remained in Charleston. Questions about the reliability of some prosecution witnesses, and Blizzard’s role in convincing the miners to lay down their arms, led to his acquittal.
In the end, only one miner, Walter Allen, was convicted of treason over the Mine Wars. Another miner, John Wilburn, and his two sons were convicted of second-degree murder.
