One hundred and ten years ago, there was a murder, payroll robbery and posse chase through the hills of Mingo County.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting has reached back to the golden age of radio to create a radio play of the event called “The Last Train to Glen Alum.” News Director Eric Douglas wrote the play and Landon Mitchell produced it. This audio drama stars a number of local voice actors and volunteers.
Douglas sat down with state historian Stan Bumgardner to discuss the event and the atmosphere in Mingo County at the time.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Douglas: Let’s talk about the atmosphere in West Virginia in 1914.
Bumgardner: 1914 is in some ways, a pivotal year in West Virginia. There’s no way to quantify this, but certainly one of the deadliest coal mine strikes, or strikes period, in U.S. history was at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek in Kanawha County. At the time of the Glen Alum robbery, prohibition had just come into effect in West Virginia, which happened nearly six years before it happened nationally.
But what was happening in southern West Virginia was just massive change. And I mean, everything was changing. Before the Civil War, and even after the Civil War, you know, this had been a sparsely populated area, just some scattered farmland, and really not much of that because of the terrain. If you look at the census numbers, very few people lived in Mingo County, and in certain parts of McDowell County, very few people lived there until the railroads came. The railroad started coming in the 1880s and then by the 1890s, the Norfolk and Western had reached what’s now Mingo County. At that time it was part of Logan County. Mingo County is our newest county. It came in in 1895 and it’s almost solely due to the arrival of the N&W, the Norfolk and Western, and the opening of coal mines. Towns were being built, seemingly overnight, they were all over the place in that part of the state, and places where almost nobody had lived.
Curtis Tate/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Douglas: I’ve always wondered about that. I knew Mingo split off from Logan, but I always wondered why, and so it was just growing so fast that somebody decided, no, we need a separate local government.
Bumgardner: The area that’s now Mingo County was kind of an isolated part of Logan County before the N&W arrived. However, when the N&W arrived,there was such an influx of people.The old rule was that you were supposed to be able to get to the county seat and back in a day. That’s how they determined county borders. And that’s why today, it seems ridiculous sometimes that we have counties with county seats that you can drive to, they’re 20 minutes apart, right? But back then you might need a whole day or more. The influx of population into Mingo County was incredible at that time period. The other thing is that you had competing railroads, competing coal companies. The Norfolk and Western was a little different from other railroads that came through. They had watched what had happened with the Chesapeake and Ohio, which came in the 1870s and when that railroad came through southern West Virginia, you had a lot of what I’d call freelance coal operators who just came in and took advantage of the fact that there was this railroad now that they could get the coal to market. That’s what was holding back the coal industry, mainly in southern West Virginia, is just, how do you get it out of there?
So when the Chesapeake and Ohio, the C&O came through, there were examples of miners who just became rich, who figured out how to run their own operations. There were coal operators who moved into the region. By the time the N&W came around, the organizers realized, “We’re missing out on half of the money.” The railroads were making a lot of the money, but there’s a lot of money to be made in mining the coal. So the N&W with a decade of knowledge about what has happened with the C&O, the N&W’s leaders went in and bought massive amounts of coal land adjoining the railroads and adjoining the branches of the railroads. So, Mingo County was very much an N&W county. If you’re in control of the economy and you can control the government, then you’ve got the whole shebang.
Douglas: Why was prohibition in six years before national prohibition? How did that happen?
Bumgardner: Men were getting paid on Friday, and by Saturday, the money was all gone on alcohol. And there were problems associated with alcohol and towns that cater to that. You had some now legendary drinking and red light districts and things in southern West Virginia that were being called to attention. Essentially, they had just gotten enough votes by 1914 but this was a movement that was sweeping the country. There were many states that were going dry before it happened nationally. It should be noted that there was a kind of a racist component to some in the temperance movement and they did this very publicly. They associated drinking and the problems with drinking, particularly with immigrants, and so that became a target. It was kind of an anti-immigrant movement as well as an anti-drinking movement.
Douglas: I’ve often wondered, this massive influx of immigrant populations coming into work in the mines and on the railroads, was there a lot of pushback among the native born, or did they remember that they were just one or two generations removed themselves and didn’t worry about it a whole lot?
Bumgardner: It was an interesting situation. There was a very anti-immigrant philosophy that was happening all across the country, that the immigrants were coming in, particularly from Eastern Europe, and that they were taking jobs away from native born West Virginians and native born Americans. But there weren’t enough laborers to fill the jobs. West Virginia’s economy was really booming. That sounds like something we can’t relate to because of what West Virginia’s economic situation has been for so long. But people were pouring into West Virginia to fill jobs, and they couldn’t fill the job fast enough, whether it was in coal mines or factories wherever. And so there was a need for all of this labor. But this gets into some of the trying to stop the labor movement from developing is that coal mine operators would one of them, Justus Collins even referred to it as a judicious mixture, which was, “We want the right balance of native born whites and blacks and immigrants to help balance off each other,” and it was successful at times. They fomented this resentment toward these other groups so they wouldn’t pull together in union.
Douglas: Let’s talk about the Black Hand for a second. So as my understanding, a lot of that was up in the northern part of the state, in the Italian community. But give me the short version of what the Black Hand was.
Bumgardner: The Black Hand is often associated with, it’s even used interchangeably with, the mafia, but it’s not. It’s a variation of all that. They were principally into extortion and it was extortion by Italian immigrants and Italian Americans against Italian immigrants that they would threaten, they would blackmail. There were kidnappings, or threatenings of kidnappings, of murder, and unless you paid up money, unless you paid a percentage of your business. If you were an Italian storekeeper, you were a target. If you were an Italian professional who made money, you were a target of the Black Hand.
Douglas: I recall reading that if you were the subject of this, you would get a letter. I don’t know if it was in the mail or it was just stuck under your door, and there would be a drawing of a black hand on it, or a couple different other symbols.
Bumgardner: It wasn’t just a one time deal. Once you paid them, you kept paying to them. It was a regular racket, so you had to pay a percentage of what you brought in. It was a very scary time for Italian immigrants. And that’s a key point, it was such a small percentage of people, of Italians, who were doing this to other Italian immigrants that they were taking advantage of these people who had limited knowledge of the laws, of the language, of anything else. And many people felt like, well, the law enforcement is not going to protect us. Our neighbors aren’t going to protect us, so we have to either pay up or defend ourselves.
Douglas: Now we’ve set the stage for the audio drama, “The Last Train to Glen Alum,” let’s talk about what happened.
Bumgardner: Again, it goes back to money. There were tens of thousands of dollars pouring into towns through railroad depots every day just to meet payroll. It was August 14, 1914 and the N&W train was coming into Glen Alum and Mingo County carrying its $7,000 cash payroll. Just like in old movies, they knew. The robbers knew exactly when the train was going to arrive. It always arrived at the same time. They knew how much money was going to be on, because the payroll was the same. It was very easy to plan when things are that scheduled and that regular. It makes it a lot easier to plan a robbery, especially when there’s not a strong law enforcement presence.
Douglas: Sheriff Hatfield didn’t have a half dozen deputies standing around.
Bumgardner: I don’t want to make it sound like a pleasant thing, because there was a lot of corruption. But, it was kind of like on “The Andy Griffith Show” in Mayberry, where there’s one sheriff and a deputy, and they can handle minor problems that occur. But three guys get murdered and $7,000 gets stolen, a handful of law enforcement people aren’t going to track these people down knowing that they’re premeditated murderers and robbers. I mean, this wasn’t a crime of passion. These people had planned this and killed in cold blood, and they certainly would be willing to do it again.
He started with they think between 25 and 50 men, but nobody knows exactly. The mines shut down, businesses shut down, and men joined the posse. It eventually built up to hundreds of men. So Sheriff Greenway Hatfield had a small army to go after five men, but still they were looking in one of the most rural, rugged areas of West Virginia.
And so it was easy to hide, but if you look long enough, you’re going to catch them, because the criminals didn’t really have a great escape plan. That’s been my take on it forever, is that they planned the robbery. They planned everything about it, but they didn’t really figure out “How are we getting out of here efficiently?” Maybe they thought word wouldn’t spread. Maybe they thought they had a few days before anyone would find out. But it clearly wasn’t thought out very well.
Douglas: Orland Booten was actually a real character in history. He was the reporter for what was then the Williamson Republican newspaper. He went on to the Williamson Daily News after that and was a reporter in that region for 40-something years. I think it’s kind of fascinating that this was an actual reporter on the ground.
Bumgardner: And that was a very new thing. They didn’t have newspapers in Mingo County because there weren’t many people in Mingo County until around the turn of the century. That they formed newspapers just says something positive here. Although they didn’t always get the stories perfectly correct in their articles, they played an important role throughout the 20th century in West Virginia.
Editor’s note: Booten’s name was spelled different ways, but the version in this story seems to be the most prevalent.
Douglas: When the posse ultimately killed the robbers, they were Italian or appeared to be Italian, but nobody knew who they were. They laid them out in town like you see in the Old West stories. But nobody ever came to claim them. What does that say to you?
Bumgardner: Especially with immigrants in the early 20th century in West Virginia, the head of the family would come over first and establish himself, and then send for their families. And sometimes they never sent for their families. Sometimes, bad things would happen to them like, as we discussed with the Black Hand. So when you have so many new people pouring into an area, it’s hard to document who’s there.
Mingo County’s population doubled between 1900 and 1910. There’s certainly a 1910 census that shows us who was there. But then, by 1920, it increased more than 50 percent again. And so there are people who are in and out of West Virginia between the censuses that nobody knew and that and that they probably didn’t have family, maybe not in this country. So when crimes like this happened, or people were killed, and you see this with miners, a lot with immigrant miners, is many of them were unidentified, or there was nobody to claim the body.
West Virginia Archives.
And that worked, also, if you’re a criminal. That worked to your benefit, because if nobody knows you, then they can’t identify you. That was happening with prohibition. Right after prohibition was enacted in West Virginia, almost the exact same time, you have an influx of criminals who are just essentially jumping from state to state, who are taking advantage of prohibition by selling bootleg liquor, and if something happens to them, you know, they don’t have family, they don’t know anybody around. They’ve just disappeared, or they’ve run off with somebody.
Another place you see that was the Hawks Nest tunnel disaster, not because they’re criminals, but you had hundreds and hundreds, some have estimated nearly 1,000 people over the years, died building the Hawks Nest tunnel. So many of them were anonymous because they had migrated to West Virginia, either from other countries or Blacks in the South. If they just disappeared, didn’t return home, didn’t send word home, the thinking was, well, maybe they just ran off, right? They went and got killed, and their identities were lost to history.
