Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community. Coordinates: 37°37′23″N 82°09′59″W / 37.6231°N 82.1664°W / 37.6231; -82.1664, Deputy Fred Burgraff and a group of local miners and residents, Major armed conflicts in American labor union history.
The museum is dedicated to educating the public about the events of the Mine Wars era, including the history of the United Mine Workers of America in the local area; the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912-1913; the 1920 Matewan Massacre; and the 1921 Miners March leading to Battle of Blair Mountain. "The company owned the houses, the only store in town, ran the church and controlled every aspect of the miners’ lives.”.
"It's important to me because my family helped bring that about in some part," he said. The entire event was covered rabidly by the national press, says Chatham University historian Louis Martin, who is also a founding member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Seven Baldwin-Felts detectives were killed, including Albert and Lee Felts.
by Rebecca J. Bailey.
On May 19 of the same year, twelve Baldwin-Felts Agency guards came from Bluefield to evict the miners from company houses. Vote Now! Matewan (/ ˈ m eɪ t w ɒ n /) is a town in Mingo County, West Virginia, USA at the confluence of the Tug Fork River and Mate Creek.
But while wages generally increased for miners throughout the period, they tended to rise more slowly in non-union areas, and the union itself struggled throughout the 1920s. A coal miner and president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from 1979 to 1982. Marker is on Mate Street (West Virginia Route 49) 0.1 miles west of Bridge Street (West Virginia Route 1056), on the left when traveling west. The problems persisted for decades and only began to improve once Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933.
Resident Wilma Steele, whose husband is a retired union miner, said she didn’t read about the battles of Matewan and Blair Mountain until she went to college. [1] Roughly 3000 men signed the union's roster in the Spring of 1920. In 1990, a trove of records were found and donated to the Eastern Regional Coal Archives located in Bluefield, West Virginia. Executive Albert Felts brought a dozen men to Matewan, including two who had been involved in violent strike-breaking efforts six years earlier in Ludlow, Colorado.
The leader of the McCoys was Randle McCoy.
The UMW’s campaign in southern West Virginia then stalled, along with labor setbacks in steel, meat packing and railroads following World War I. Appalachian coal operators felt they needed to remain nonunion in order to survive, Martin said. “They believed everything else was against them — the terrain, freight rates,” he said. “[Unions] became so dependent on federal labor laws and the National Labor Relations Board that they lived and died by what the federal government would allow them to do,” Martin says.
The final result is a massacre from which no one emerges unscathed. Local residents, however, changed…. The Trail System covers hundreds of miles of off-road trails. They believed they were fighting the onslaught of Communism. For Bailey, it’s easy to see this story in terms of good and evil—and that ignores the nuance of the story.
In 1990, a trove of records were found and donated to the Eastern Regional Coal Archives located in Bluefield, West Virginia. Feelings about unions are mixed, but locals say the movie helped lift a shroud of silence that kept people from even mentioning the shootings.
Now the Kentucky border town of about 430 residents leans on tourism about the massacre, as well as the famous feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. When workers were finally guaranteed the right to collectively bargain in 1933 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, West Virginia coal miners joined the UMW in droves, Martin said.
But these people were being abused.”. “When we essentialize a narrative into heroes and villains, we run the risk of invalidating human pain and agency,” Bailey says.
MATEWAN, W.Va. (AP) — The bullet holes in the brick wall of a former post office serve as a reminder of how Appalachian coal miners fought to improve the lives of workers a century ago.
Governor John J. Cornwell ordered the state police force to take control of Matewan. Ten people were killed in a gun battle between miners, who were led by a local police chief, and a group of private security guards hired to evict them for joining a union in Matewan, a small “company town” in West Virginia.
The Stone Mountain Coal Co. is long gone, but Matewan still stands, as does its union hall. “This was a romanticized version of events, creating an Old West type image of Appalachia.
State officials were reluctant to challenge the coal operators. The area where the shootout took place is known as the Matewan Historic District today. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Ten people died in the Matewan Massacre.
Much has been written about this incident and a movie by John Sayles was released in 1987 called "Matewan", a fictional account of the incident in 1920.
Hatfield, Burgraff, and Mayor Cabell Testerman met with the detectives on the porch of the Chambers Hardware Store.
Hatfield and his men cooperated, and stacked their arms inside the hardware store.
[3], Matewan, founded in 1895, was a small independent town with only a few elected officials. The town has lost half of its population since 1980, but it has survived the shootings, three dozen floods from the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River before a floodwall was built, a 1992 fire that destroyed several downtown businesses and the opioid crisis that has ravaged the state.
“Sid being part of the Matewan Massacre and really standing up for the miners and the miners’ basic human rights, there’s a lot of honor in that.”.
The patriarch of the Hatfield clan during the infamous Hatfield–McCoy feud which has since formed a part of American folklore.
With its tent colonies on the bleak hills! In one successful protest, 400,000 UMWA went on strike nationwide in 1919, securing higher wages and better working conditions.
The battle features in Glenn Taylor's 2008 novel, "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart". The first event linking the Hatfields and McCoys was at the end of the Civil…, During the early spring of 1920, unorganized coal miners in Mingo County, West Virginia began looking to join the UMWA.
Executive Albert Felts brought a dozen men to Matewan, including two who had been involved in violent strike-breaking efforts six years earlier in Ludlow, Colorado. Within 15 minutes, ten people were dead—seven detectives, two miners and the mayor. Many of…, During the early 1900s, the railroad depot became the center of the community. Museum tour guide Kim McCoy, whose maiden name is Hatfield, married a great-grandson of the McCoy family. Plans to publicly commemorate what became known as the Matewan Massacre have been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic until September at least.
None of the 19 men indicted were convicted.
Sixteen men died before they surrendered to federal troops. Touch for map.
California Do Not Sell My Info Terms of Use A vast network of ATV trails draws also draws recreational tourists.
The union helped push through major improvements to health, safety and pensions, across the U.S. workforce. Bailey, Rebecca (2008).
When the state militia swooped in several days later, they seized 1,872 high-powered rifles, 556 pistols, 225,000 rounds of ammunition, and large numbers of daggers, bayonets and brass knuckles from both groups.
Directed by John Sayles.
Marking Our Past: West Virgnia's Historical Highway Markers. When the charges against Hatfield and 22 others for the murder of Albert Felts were dismissed, Baldwin-Felts detectives assassinated Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers on August 1, 1921, on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse located in Welch, West Virginia. May 19, 1920 gunshots rang through the streets of Matewan, West Virginia, in an event soon known as the "Matewan Massacre." The assemblage of tents was known as Stony Mountain Camp Tent Colony.
On the stairway of the courthouse in August 1921, Hatfield and his deputy, Ed Chambers, were gunned down by Baldwin-Felts agents. Company towns were particularly prevalent in remote areas like southern West Virginia, which had the nation’s largest concentration of nonunion miners in 1920. But for Terry Steele, a former coal miner in West Virginia and member of the local UMWA, revolting was the only way to respond to abuse. The population was 499 at the 2010 census. The Matewan massacre is interpreted by the State of West Virginia through a Historic Highway marker produced by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. Much has been written about this incident and a movie by John Sayles was released in 1987 called "Matewan", a fictional account of the incident in 1920. This tragedy, along with events such as the Ludlow massacre in Colorado six years earlier, marked an important turning point in the battle for miners' rights. That is when the Army Corps of Engineers were brought in to build a giant flood wall. “The Hatfield name is very distinctive in our area,” McCoy said.
The coal companies controlled many aspects of the miners' lives.
MATEWAN, W.Va. -- The bullet holes in the brick wall of a former post office serve as a reminder of how Appalachian coal miners fought to improve the lives of workers a century ago.
Chaparral.
Fifteen months later, Hatfield was gone, too, gunned down by Baldwin-Felts detectives on the McDowell County courthouse steps.
Notably, there was a lawsuit in 1873 between the Hatfields and McCoys regarding the ownership of a pig.
The flooding peaked in 1977 and 1984,. As wealth consolidated after the war, says historian Rebecca Bailey, the author of Matewan Before the Massacre, unions found themselves in the crosshairs.
The coal industry was essentially the state’s sole source of work, and massive corporations built homes, general stores, schools, churches and recreational facilities in the remote towns near the mines. “The Baldwin-Felts agents were professional men. Cookie Policy According to one version of the story, the Baldwin-Felts agents tried to arrest Hatfield when he attempted to prevent the evictions from taking place.
It is still unknown whether it was Hatfield or the leading detective, Albert Felts, who shot Testerman first, though what followed was Hatfield shooting Felts. The combination of perilous working conditions and miner-guard tensions led to a massive strike in 1912 in southern West Virginia (Matewan sits on the state’s southern border with Kentucky).
Company towns were particularly prevalent in remote areas like southern West Virginia, which had the nation’s largest concentration of nonunion miners in 1920.
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