Battle of Matewan Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Appalachia’s “Gunmen Of Capitalism” And The Matewan Massacre

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.

Bob Hutton is a historian at the University of Tennessee. His journal article on the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, “The Appalachian Gun Men of Capitalism,” is in the anthology, “Reconsidering Southern Labor History.” Hutton is also the author of “Bloody Breathitt – Politics and Violence in The Appalachian South.”

This interview is part of an episode of “Inside Appalachia,” featuring stories about Matriarchal Moonshiners, Legendary Lawbreakers and more.

January 17, 1947: Labor Lawyer Harold Houston Dies in Florida

Labor lawyer Harold Houston died in Florida on January 17, 1947, at age 74. When he was young, his parents moved from Ohio to Jackson County and then to Charleston.

In 1901, after getting a law degree from West Virginia University, Houston opened a legal practice in Parkersburg.

By 1912, he’d returned to Charleston and soon became chief attorney and counsel for most of the state’s major labor organizations. Among his clients were striking coal miners, Sid Hatfield and others accused of murder in the Matewan Massacre, and United Mine Workers of America leaders charged with treason following the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain.

After the treason trials, Houston was fired as UMWA counsel by national president John L. Lewis. In 1931, Houston helped Frank Keeney organize the West Virginia Mine Workers Union—which briefly competed with the UMWA. Houston also ran for local, state, and federal offices on the Socialist ticket.

In later years, he was involved in an automobile dealership and a real estate addition in the Spring Hill section of South Charleston that bears his name. He eventually retired to Lake Worth, Florida.

Do You Know Where the Word "Redneck" Comes From? Mine Wars Museum Opens, Revives Lost Labor History

In the early 1900s, coal miners were fighting for the right to organize and to stop the practice of using mine guards. They also wanted an alternative to shopping at coal company stores and being paid in scrip, instead of money. In the early 1900’s, miners led a series of strikes in southern West Virginia, leading up to the climatic march on Blair Mountain in 1921.

Now, this history is honored at a museum, called the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.

“My name’s David Hatfield, I’m the great-great nephew of Sid Hatfield, who was the police chief here back in 1920. So this mine wars museum means a lot to me, and to this town, and to this whole area. And I’m just grateful to all the people who worked on it, took their time, and blood sweat and tears, to make it possible. And if they could, I’d love for everybody to come down and see it because it’s something to behold.”

David Hatfield’s ancestor, Sid Hatfield, has come to represent many things for the people of Matewan, depending on who’s telling the story. For most people, Sid Hatfield became a hero who stood up for the families of striking miners.

But for the coal company owners and the Baldwin Felts Agents who opposed him, “Smiling” Sid Hatfield was seen as a lawless, renegade cop.

During the Matewan Massacre of May 19, 1920, Baldwin Felts agents approached Sid Hatfield and mayor Testerman by the railroad tracks.

“And just as they reenact here every year in Matewan, the two groups of men had a tense stand off, with the Baldwin Felts agents, asserting that they had a warrant for Sid Hatfield’s arrest, and the mayor insisting that their papers were bogus or falsified,” said Lou Martin, a historian and one of the board members of the Mine Wars Museum.

Nobody is sure which side fired first, but a gun fight erupted beside the railroad tracks in downtown Matewan.

Some of those bullet holes are still visible in the bricks in the back of the new Mine Wars Museum.

Beside the bullet holes, there’s also an audio exhibit where visitors can hear the story first hand- from interviews with Matewan residents. These interviews, as well as countless artifacts and research material from the mine wars, have been collected by local historians throughout the years. But there hasn’t been a local museum to curate them, until now.

“All through the decades there have been people, especially locally, trying to preserve this history, trying to honor it. We feel them cheering us on, and we know that a lot of people have been working towards something like this for a long time,” said Martin.

And some of those people who’ve been working to preserve the Mine Wars history for many years joined up with young organizers and historians to build the new museum.

Mingo County native, Wilma Lee Steele, is one of the board members for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Steele is a retired art teacher. For her the passion of sharing this history started from telling young activists about the history behind the word “redneck” and the red bandana. Striking miners tied Red Bandanas around their necks during the march on Blair Mountain.

“The thing that gets me, I guess, and what makes me want to do this, and tell other people about this, is that all these immigrants from all these different countries, they didn’t speak the same language. They did not have the same culture. And they were fighting each other and divided. But when they tied on these bandanas and marched, they became a brotherhood. And one of the things I love about the union is that the union was one of the early ones that said equal pay for blacks and whites. It’s pretty special.”

“It was strange growing up with this history because when I was first learning about it this history was not being celebrated at all,” said Chuck Keeney, a history professor at Southern Community College. He’s another one of the board members of the new museum. He’s also the great-grandson of Frank Keeney, who led striking miners in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–1913. These were some of the bloodiest battles of the Mine Wars.

“The first time I heard my great-grandfather’s name was I was around 8-9 years old. And it was my great aunt’s house. And it was just a family gathering, and I was actually out back behind her house and was trying to throw a little toy knife into the side of the hill. And an old man walked up to me and said to me, ‘you have to learn how to throw that thing well. Because you never know, you might have a Baldwin Felts thug after you one day.’”

“And I had no idea what he was talking about. So I asked him, ‘what’s a Baldwin Felts thug? And why would they be after me? And he said, ‘well don’t you know that you’re Frank Keeney’s great grandson?’”

During the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike, Baldwin Felts agents were sent to fight the striking miners. After the strike, Frank Keeney became the president of the UMWA District 17 in 1917.

But Frank Keeney had blood on his hands, and historians generally did not name him a hero. He was tried for treason and murder, though he was acquitted.

Until recently, the story of the Mine Wars was largely uncelebrated, even by the UMWA.

“So I mean there are enormous chunks of our own history that are just missing. It’s no wonder that the people in our state have an identity crisis; we don’t know our own story. If you don’t know your own story, how can you determine what you are?” said Chuck Keeney.

That’s why the local community and volunteers from far and wide have come together to build the Mine Wars Museum. The funds to build the museum came from the West Virginia Humanities Council, the United Mine Workers of America, the National Coal Heritage Area, Turn This Town Around, and hundreds of private donations.

And the museum, like the history, means different things for different people.

Wilma Lee Steele says she hopes the museum will become a place where people throughout the coalfields can come to reclaim their identity.

“I think that we have a lot to say, and I think we’re gonna say it. We’re gonna tell our history, and we’re gonna come together as a community.”

Beginning May 23, the museum will be open on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is located in downtown Matewan, 336 Mate Street. The museum’s board members are Greg Galford, Lou Martin, Chuck Keeney, Kenny King, Katey Lauer, Wilma Steele, Charles Dixon and Catherine Moore. Most of the museum’s designs and exhibits are by Shaun Slifer. in Matewan. For more information, visit www.wvminewars.org. Note: there are many stories about the origins of the term “redneck”. Most scholars agree that the term probably was originally used at least a century before the Mine Wars, to refer to southern farmers who were exposed to long hours in the sun while working in the fields. Do you have a story about where the term redneck came from? You can send a tweet to Roxy Todd @RoxyMTodd to join the conversation.

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Will Heritage Help Turn Matewan Around?

As part of the West Virginia Focus Magazine project called Turn This Town Around, experts with the West Virginia Community Development HUB are helping Matewan focus, pursue, and execute plans to revitalize the town.

Monday, marked the 94^th anniversary of the Battle of Matewan; a showdown between the United Mine Workers of America and Baldiwn Felts detectives hired by coal operators. The Mingo County town marked the anniversary over the weekend with a re-enactment. Re-enactment organizers hope the momentum of the project will help them complete a 14 year old dream.

Donna May Patarino lives in nearby Kentucky but has organized the Matewan re-enactment for the past 14 years. She, like many involved in the project, think that heritage will play a key role in the revitalization efforts.

Patarino says she wants children to know the stories of the past to appreciate the amenities of today.

“They have no idea what it would have been like to live on company owned property and have to shop at the company grocery store, go to the company doctor go to the company school," she said, "and I feel like they need to know."

The mine war re-enactment depicts efforts in the coalfields to unionize, demand fair wages, and better working conditions.

A crowd of about 100 people sit and stand under white canopies as they watch and listen to the reenactment.

On June 25, 1938, 18 years after the showdown, President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which established minimum wages, overtime pay, record keeping, and child labor standards for private sector and government workers.

Moving Mountains

So what are some of things that need to ‘turn’ in order to “Turn this Town Around”? Some of the challenges include:

Geography: It’s unlikely that they found Matewan by mistake. The roads that lead to the small town with a population of less than 500 are riddled with switchbacks as they weave their way up the edge of the mountains, far off the beaten path.
Flooding: The town sits at the foot of towering mountains in the Tug River Valley, so flooding has historically been an issue.
Corruption: Mingo County has also endured a few black eyes over the past nine months as the county’s circuit judge, prosecutor, chief magistrate and a county commissioner resigned following their convictions.
Poverty: More than 30 percent of residents in Mingo County live below the poverty level -almost double the rate for West Virginia’s at nearly 18 percent poverty rate from 2008 to 2012 according to the US Census Bureau.

“This looks like the town that time forgot,” eighth grade West Virginia history teacher Claire Webb said. “That was my first impression but I’ve been here just a couple of hours now only but the people here are just so rich and warm.”

Webb teaches at Wildwood Elementary School in Jefferson County.

For Webb, the trip was humbling. She says, Jefferson County is a different West Virginia than Mingo County. As basically a suburb of Washington D.C., her home county has a different environment socially, and economically. The same census report says Jefferson County has more than 50,000 residents with an 11 percent poverty rate, that’s six-percent less than the state average.

“We have different challenges we have a different perspective we have different lives in West Virginia and it’s all about where you’re from,” she said, “and these communities in the southern part of the state and the coalfields, it really is I do feel sometimes an alternate universe.”

“I’m so grateful to my fellow West Virginians for their love for their state that allows them to live here and deal with these immense challenges that exist on a day to day basis that exist with living in a southern coalfield.”

Mingo Momentum

The West Virginia Community Development HUB and volunteers aren’t starting from scratch. Federal, state, and local lawmakers are already investing time, money and energy into the region. Here’s a look at some of the work meant improve the region.

Geography: The geographic challenges are being addressed in part with the King Coal Highway; an incomplete road that runs close to Matewan. It’s an example of public private partnerships that allow coal companies to mine coal and leave road beds for paving.
Corruption: Just this week, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin appointed Family Court Judge Miki Thompson to the vacated Circuit Court Judge seat. Former Judge Michael Thornsbury left the seat vacant after pleading guilty to scheme that would protect the former sheriff, who was fatally shot.
Flooding: The late Senator Robert C. Byrd secured federal money to construct a flood wall more than 2,000 feet long, varying in height between 6 and 29 feet above the ground. The wall was completed in 1997.

While residents claim the floodwall has worked to protect the town from high water, Patarino says it’s kept more than flood waters out.
“It seemed like … people were afraid to come across those railroad tracks and come into town to shop at our businesses,” she said. “That’s why we’ve got to focus on our history. That’s why we’ve got to focus on that because that’s bringing people here and we’ve got to do all we can to turn this town around.”

Still Patarino says Matewan has a lot to offer visitors.

“Matewan has so much to offer and really you can name just a few small towns across America that have as much rich history as Matewan does. And a lot of those small towns are no more and we’ve got to hold onto our small town.

The reenactment is performed on the main street in downtown Matewan. The show climaxes during a shootout between union organizers and Baldwin Felts detectives hired by coal operators.

If they build it, will they come?

Patarino has worked on the Matewan Massacre drama for 14 years and has been preaching every sermon she can in favor of an amphitheater.

“We can teach our history on a regular basis to our young people,” she said. “We can bring music events in we can do all sorts of things at our theater for our young people that we would no other way be able to do.”

Patarino says the momentum of the Turn this Town Around is igniting even more hope for the $300,000 amphitheater dream.

Leigh Ann Ray, Project Manager for the Mingo County Commission says the county got involved about a year ago and gave $48,000 for engineering and architectural work for an outdoor theatre. Based on those drawings the theatre will cost about $300,000. Some of those funds have already been raised. Town officials were not available to share the financial progress of the project.