Mine Wars Museum Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Southern W.Va. Tourism Highlights The Haves And Have-Nots

Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.

Tourism is a major component in southern West Virginia’s transition away from a coal based economy.

Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.

For $60 a head, Keith Gibson offers tourists visiting Matewan, West Virginia an airboat ride on the Tug River, a designated West Virginia flatwater trail.

“I worked at the coal mines,” Gibson said. “So I’ve had to relearn myself. Everything that I’m doing now is so different. Nothing like a coal mine.”

With headsets and microphones on to drown out the noise, Gibson tells his passengers tales of coal mine wars and the forbidden, feud-sparking love of Johnse Hatfield and Rosanna McCoy that began just over the Kentucky riverbank.

Hatfield Hideaway is among a growing number of new coalfield resorts.

Gibson said many come to his airboat tour for a respite from the choking dust of the region’s popular ATV trails. But he said getting to the remote border town may call for a feud with the state legislature.

“We have to work extra hard to attract people to drive that extra 100 miles on curvy roads to get here,” Gibson said. “Then, we have to work hard to accommodate them when they are here.”

Gibson said the legislature needs to consider the challenges border counties face, with prices often lower just a bridge ride away in neighboring Kentucky. He said he was getting close to economically recovering from the pandemic, when inflation hit.

“They have to have somewhere to stay, they have to have something to eat, but they don’t have to have an airboat ride,” Gibson said. “They don’t have to have a t-shirt.”

Jamie Cantrell knows about border battles. Her Matewan Trailhead Bar and Grill is just a half mile from the Hatfield Hideout Cabin and RV Camp in McCarr, Kentucky that she also has an interest in. She said the growing tourism industry here needs much more help from the state.

“Do some stuff with the roads to help people get here,” Cantrell said. “Finish the King Coal Highway. We always need more lodging. There’s people buying up homes and putting them on AirBnB left and right. We could use more food places. Politicians need to come into Matewan and see what we have to offer and try to get us some grant money to help restore a lot of these old buildings.”

With ATV’s whizzing through the middle of downtown Matewan, an old coal mining bank building has been converted into the Mine Wars Museum. Co-founder and museum board member Wilma Steele said the organization remains dedicated to correcting revisionist history.

“When I found out the United Mine Workers, in 1920, offered equal pay for blacks and whites and their members were not discriminating against their brothers because of culture or speech or any of that, that blew me away,” Steele said. “We don’t have that history. It’s not in the textbooks.”

About 1,500 African American men from McDowell County enlisted in World War I.

Steele said Matewan’s growing tourism industry stems from freshly voted in city leadership and a united community effort.

“The more that you work as a team and a town to do something, the stronger you get,” Steele said. ”The Mine Wars Museum, from the very first, has been that group that has been right here working and caring about development.”

A museum not too far from Matewan, the Kimball World War I Memorial in McDowell County, sits isolated and somewhat neglected. Curator Clara Thompson said this was the first and now the only remaining memorial to African American veterans of the Great War.

“Believe it or not, we had over 1,500 soldiers to go to World War I from McDowell County,” Thompson said. “When the soldiers came back from the war, they approached the county about constructing a memorial, because the white soldiers had also asked for a memorial and so they got it. They looked to place it in the county seat at Welch but there was none to be found. So that’s how we ended up here in Kimball.”

Replete with outstanding displays, open part time and struggling to maintain board members and infrastructure, the privately-funded museum works to make ends meet with a community center downstairs offering hall and kitchen rentals. Thompson said she gets national, even global visitors, yet the local population seems unaware of its own history.

Mine Wars Museum; the term “redneck” came from the red bandanas striking coal miners wore in solidarity.

“Why don’t the schools have the kids come here and visit this museum? That’s a part of their history,” Thompson said. “We could use funding so that we could advertise more, put out more brochures and things like that. But we don’t have funding and most grants, they ask for matching funds. Where are we going to get it from? It would be so nice if the legislature had that money already allotted to building these historic sites, so that they can do their job.”

The local representative in the legislature, Del. Ed Evans, D-McDowell, agreed the state needs to do more.

“You’re right, it is not open all the time. I don’t think there’s a full time employee,” Evans said. “We still have a large African American population here in Kimball on the hill behind us. Up the road here toward the North Fork and Keystone, you’ll find large African American populations.”

Evans said help with matching grant funds to enhance history-related tourism was an impetus for the legislature creating the Coalfield Communities Grant Facilitation Commission. Evans said the commission should be helping bolster declining coal communities like Kimball’s infrastructure and helping their memorial become a desired destination. But it hasn’t received the funding it needs to get started.

“It should have been underway immediately. The governor said he has to fund that off the back side of the budget,” Evans said. “We have plenty of backside but we haven’t funded it. I was always told it could be as much as $250 million put in there. That would be money that anybody that wants to write a grant could pull down from us for matching funds.”

The Kimball World War I Memorial is the last of its kind in America.

Secretary of Economic Development Mitch Carmichael is the chair of the Coalfield Grant Commission. He said with much of his efforts lately going to bring major corporations to West Virginia, he hasn’t formed a commission, hasn’t found out about funding and doesn’t have a timetable. But he said he’s committed to the process.

“We will be very active and make sure that we’re getting input from the local groups and facilitating growth in those areas,” Carmichael said.

In developing southern West Virginia tourism, the ‘haves and have nots’ seem separated right now by varying degrees of private business investment, community teamwork, infrastructure development, government assistance – and the continuing transition from a coal based economy.

Museum Brings Visitors Off Trails And Into W.Va. Coalfield Town

On a warm September morning, ATV riders roll into Matewan, fresh off the Hatfield McCoy Trails. The dirt paths in the backwoods of Southern West Virginia brought Ryan Logue all the way from Kansas City, Missouri.

In Matewan, W.Va., it’s common to see ATVs and riders lining downtown during riding season.

“The fact that you can just ride your ATVs just right up to the front door here,” Logue said, “and nobody cares if you’re muddy, they just say come on in. And the trails, you really have to see for yourself.”

The Mine Wars was a time of tension and bloodshed in American history when coal miners demanded better working conditions and fair wages. Logue heard about the Mine Wars Museum on YouTube.

“This was kind of a sidestep that we wanted to take,” Logue explained, “just to kind of see this and the fact that we can just write up pretty much right to the front door is just incredible.”

The Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, W.Va. moved to a new location on the same street in 2020.

The Mine Wars Museum opened in 2015 in the heart of coal county in Matewan. Last year, the museum moved to a more spacious location just across the street. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) purchased the building for the museum.

Inside the two front double doors is a display of red bandanas to the left. To the right, is a mural of the museum’s logo, and straight ahead, a petite woman sitting at a desk. A movie poster for the motion picture “Matewan” hangs over her brown hair.

Kim McCoy sits a desk before greeting visitors at the Mine Wars Museum.

Shop manager and tour guide Kim McCoy was born and raised in Matewan.

“I’m the daughter of a coal miner and the granddaughter of a coal miner, both my grandfathers were coal miners,” McCoy says.

“I was born right up the railroad tracks here at the Stony Mountain coal camp. That’s where I spent my holidays with my grandparents was in an old coal camp house.

“So when my grandfather would talk about the mine wars, you could hear the passion in his story and I remember learning these stories from him growing up.”

Logue and his friends took off their ATV helmets as McCoy guided them through the museum.

Matewan native Kim McCoy (left) shows Ryan Logue (right) and his friends through the Mine Wars Museum.

“Here in the museum, what you learn about is the Paint Creek/Cabin Creek strike that happened between 1912 and and 1914,” McCoy said. “It was the first time that the coal miners rebelled against the coal company owners on Paint Creek.

“The coal company owners would go up to Ellis Island and would bring in immigrants off the boat. They would promise these immigrants the ‘American Dream,’ but what they got was as close to slavery as you can get without it being called slavery.”

McCoy used that description because everything was controlled by the coal companies. When the immigrants arrived in the southern coalfields, they were given a job doing back-breaking work underground. They were given a place to live – even places to go to church but the workers didn’t own any of it. The coal companies did.

Miners were paid in scrip that could only be used at coal company-owned stores. Often, children were expected to work in the mines.

The notion of working so young sticks with Logue throughout the tour.

“I can’t even imagine at eight years old being told, ‘this is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life and it’s going to be absolutely terrible and we basically own you,’” Logue said.

The museum has a collection of recordings where visitors simply push a button to hear stories from UMWA President Cecil Roberts, and other voices from the coalfields like Grace Jackson, who marched with Mother Jones on Cabin Creek when she was 12 years old.

Kim McCoy shows visitors tents like the ones give to striking miners by UMWA.

At the end of the room, a wooden post holds up a wide canvas tent. It’s like the one striking miners lived in after being evicted from coal company houses.

“The living conditions of these people and all they wanted was a chance to just live a fair life and they were just kind of owned by this company,” Logues said.

Along with ATV riders, the museum has hosted elementary and even college students. Bobby Starnes teaches Appalachian Studies at Berea College, where one of her classes is actually called the Mine Wars. Her father was a ‘union man,’ like Kim McCoy’s. To Starnes, the stories of the coalfields go much deeper than a tale of organizing.

“As a teacher of Appalachian Studies, it’s an amazing resource. As the daughter of a coal miner, it touches every corner of my heart,” Starnes said as she fights back tears. “It’s my father’s story. It’s my family’s story. It’s my people’s story. And they tell it with such grace and dignity and beauty.”

Companies identified miners and the amount they produced with a metal tag that hung close to the entry of a coal mine.

Starnes and her students traveled about three hours from Berea, Kentucky, to Matewan, West Virginia to visit the museum. She says it’s been an important part of her curriculum.

“It just adds so much depth and understanding,” Starnes said. “When you can put your hand on a piece of scrip that some miner was paid with, and know that your hand is on top of the hand that earned that money by going into those mines. That means something. And we talked about the difference between looking at it in pictures and holding it in your hand.”

Starnes even volunteered over the summer to go through newspapers and sources to help with archiving. She couldn’t help but to read them all.

“After reading those stories, it becomes easy to demonize and marginalize people who are, quote, savage,” Starnes says.

“That’s a word that was used a lot in the documents. Part of it is that those stories were stories told by powerful people. I mean, who do you think owns the New York Times? Who do you think owned the major newspapers in the country, it was the same people who owned the railroads, and the coal mines. There is this image of us that is pervasive, and that we have to speak out against and clarify who we really are and what we really stand for.”

ATV riders from Kansas City, Missouri stopped into the Mine Wars Museum to learn more about the Mine Wars.

The Mine Wars Museum, Starnes says, does just that. It gives context and shares the stories of the coalfields to perhaps give meaning behind some of the behaviors of violence so many years ago.

The Mine Wars Museum is open Fridays and Saturdays 11am to 6pm

Events Across the State To Commemorate the 100th Anniversary of Mine Wars, Battle of Blair Mountain

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.

The Battle of Blair Mountain is one of West Virginia’s largest moments in American history.

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.

Some of the groups working to organize the events include the Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the National Coal Heritage Area Authority.

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.