The Role of Blacks in Building West Virginia’s Industrial Infrastructure
Before West Virginia’s coal could impress consumers with its extraordinary quality, it had to be shipped out of the state to the ports and industries of the Eastern Seaboard and to the steel mills and factories of the Midwest. Building railroads and starting up mines began more or less simultaneously in the early 1870s for one principal reason: the railroads’ financiers made certain to purchase vast portions of the southern coalfields even as their engineers were surveying the routes by which the coal would be exported to other parts of the country as well as abroad. By leasing the rights to mine portions of their land holdings to various companies, the railroads created a captive market for themselves as the sole means of transport of the coal mined on their property. Thus they were paid twice: once for the coal and again for transporting it.
Prior to the Civil War, only one railroad passed through any of the counties that would become part of West Virginia: the Baltimore & Ohio which ran to Wheeling and Parkersburg on the Ohio River, passing through the heart of what would become the northern coalfield and thus being a major force in the development of the resources unearthed there. In the forty years between 1869 and 1909, three railroads were constructed that turned southern West Virginia, to quote David Corbin, “into both an industrialized region and an economic colony” (Corbin 1981, 1). In order of completion, they were the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, the Norfolk & Western Railway, and the Virginian Railway. Their importance to this study is due to the fact that each was built by thousands of black laborers who migrated to the state in pursuit of jobs and who would remain to work on the railroads or in the mines they served.
Construction of the Chesapeake & Ohio was financed by a group of New York capitalists led by Collis Potter Huntington, who had acquired control of the railroad in 1867. Having been a major player in the construction of the western portion of the first transcontinental railroad, Huntington’s intention was create a coast-to-coast trunk line, though he was hardly indifferent to the profits to be made from transporting West Virginia coal for shorter distances.
Despite the otherwise formidable challenges of the mountainous terrain of West Virginia, acquisition of land in four connected river valleys provided the C&O with a right-of-way with easy grades, something any construction engineer would regard as ideal. From the east, the first of these valleys was that of the Greenbrier River. The second began where the Greenbrier flowed into the New River at Hinton. Further downstream, the New was joined by the Gauley River to become the Kanawha River. West of Charleston, the rail line left the Kanawha and entered the Teays Valley, a geological oddity in that the river that had created it had been captured by the Kanawha at some point in the distant past; thus the Teays Valley is a river valley minus the river.
Of the four divisions into which Huntington divided the railroad, the New River Division presented the greatest construction challenge. Ironically named, the New River is among the planet’s oldest, rising in North Carolina, east of the mountains that it traverses in its westward course, and cutting a deep and narrow gorge for more than a hundred miles through some of the highest ridges of the Alleghenies. Though the absence of any roads through that canyon posed significant logistical problems for both surveyors of the right-of-way and construction workers who subsequently created the roadbed and laid the rails, “the New River Gorge offered the only practical route across the mountains, since the natural fall of the river provided easy grades over the most difficult terrain” (Eller 1973, 38). For our purposes, equally important is that the New River provided ready access to coal, for the valley it created exposed numerous coal seams, the sites for future mines.
West of the New River, in the Kanawha Division, the route passed through still other coal deposits in Fayette and Kanawha counties. Surveying these in 1872, a geologist named Thomas S. Ridgway concluded that “the amount of coal available from West Virginia is incalculably large; sufficient, allowing for a normal ration of increase in consumption, to supply the Western markets for a thousand years to come” (Ridgway 1872, 387–88).
The ultimate destination of the C&O was Holderby’s Landing, near the confluence of the Big Sandy and Ohio rivers where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet. Huntington instructed his brother-in-law, Delos W. Emmons, to acquire five thousand acres on which to construct the railroad’s western terminus. The community that formed adjacent to this facility was later named Huntington and would become the largest city on the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and a regular destination for black dance bands in the 1930s (Eller 1973, 42).
That African American laborers built the C&O was noted in 1873 by the journalist Jedidiah Hotchkiss, who wrote frequently about the potential wealth to be found in West Virginia’s coalfields (Williams 2002, 183–84). In 1872 he traveled the length of the newly completed C&O and summarized his observations in a two-part essay that appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in December 1872, and January 1873, entitled “New Ways in the Old Dominion: The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad” illustrated by one or more commercial artists who accompanied him. The second part of this essay drew attention to those who had built the railroad:
Our artists were surprised to find negroes so generally employed as road-builders. They have proved in fact to be fine laborers, both as track-makers, and for mining, blasting, and all the other work of railroad building. They lived in shanties along the road, wherever their work lay; and as is usual with the negroes, they were musical, as well as orderly and sober. . . . They save money—the contractors reported this very generally; they have not the habit of drinking whisky; and on the work itself, as they took their chance with the white workmen, so they were treated with absolute equality, not the slightest bullying being allowed or attempted.... The contractors had but one complaint to make—that the colored men would go “home” for Christmas. Home to them meant Eastern Virginia and we were told that many of them returned joyfully to the old plantations where formerly they were slaves and where... they are still made welcome on holidays. (Hotchkiss 1873, 289)
At the conclusion of his text, Hotchkiss discussed the contributions of black workers, revealing both their numbers and their places of origin, information helpful to an understanding of the initial growth of the black population of the Mountain State:
Nor is the construction of such a road without what may be called wholesome political results. In the first place it was built almost entirely by the labor of negroes, who here proved themselves admirable and trustworthy workmen; sober, equal to the severest toil, and winning the good opinion of everyone. In the work they learned self-dependence, became more intelligent, were drawn away from their homes, and thus had the advantage of travel and of seeing a new life. These blacks, of whom five thousand were employed on the road, all formerly slaves in Eastern Virginia, will be the better citizens for this experience. (Hotchkiss 1873, 292 [emphasis added])
Not only was Virginia the home to many of these workers; it would continue to be the birthplace of the greatest number of African American immigrants to the Mountain State, at least up to the time of the 1930 census (Trotter 1990, 75–76). As the railroad was built and mines opened along it, the black population of West Virginia steadily rose.
Once the main line of the C&O was completed, there was still work to do. As Hotchkiss noted, “[a]t many points you will notice preparations for building short branch lines within three or five miles of the main line. It is a well-ascertained fact that coal can be mined at a profit within five miles of the line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad” (Hotchkiss 1873, 289). Just as they constructed the main line, blacks built those branch lines which over time extended further up the side valleys of the New and Kanawha rivers as the market for coal increased and mining operations proliferated.3
After the railroad was finished, African Americans continued to work as brakemen and firemen on trains and as laborers in the shops that maintained the equipment (Taylor 1926, 115). Others were main
tenance-of-way workers: the gangs of laborers who maintained the rail lines themselves. It will be recalled that Hotchkiss had noted the musicality of the blacks building the railroad. Both then and into the twentieth century, a varied repertory of railroad work songs made track work go more smoothly along the ten-mile stretch of right-of-way for which each crew was responsible (Clifford 2001).4 The songs of those “track liners” also became an important component of the musical culture of black Mountaineers.
Completion of the C&O was followed by work on a second railroad that eventually stretched across the lower portion of the southern coal-fields from the Virginia line to the Ohio River: the Norfolk & Western. The driving force behind it was Frederick J. Kimball, who envisaged a railroad devoted almost exclusively to the transportation of coal. He had made certain that allies acquired title to as much as possible of the Pocahontas coalfield situated on Great Flat Top Mountain, south of the New River and north of the Big Sandy River, the latter constituting a portion of the boundary between Kentucky and West Virginia. Thus, even before it was built, the N&W had created a market for its services (Lambie 1954, 19–24).
Originally, the N&W was to terminate at the eastern edge of the Pocahontas field, from which coal could be shipped to the railroad’s tidewater port at Lambert’s Point near Norfolk. Kimball assumed that another of the numerous railroad companies being incorporated during the 1880s would take up the challenge of reaching from the Ohio River east into the developing coalfields, after which his railroad could be linked with it. Not until 1886 was it apparent that no other company would take up the challenge, and not until 1889 was the route that today traverses Mercer, MacDowell, and Mingo counties determined. Only in 1892 was the entire route finished from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River (Lambie 1954, 123–25). As James Laing reported in his dissertation, The Negro Miner in West Virginia, “the Negroes took fully as large a part in the building of [the N&W] as they did in the building of the Chesapeake and Ohio” (Laing 1933, 65). How many African Americans were employed is uncertain but, given its length and the challenges associated with its construction, it seems logical to suppose that several thousand were involved, and like that of the C&O, the workforce that completed the Norfolk & Western remained in the state either to work for the railroad or to dig the coal that the railroad would ship out of state.
Construction of the third railroad to serve the southern coalfields was begun in 1902, underwritten by the wealth of Henry Huttleston Rogers, whose fortune came from Standard Oil. The Virginian opened up coal-fields lying between those served by the C&O and N&W operations and linked those fields to Sewalls Point on Chesapeake Bay just east of Norfolk. Its several branches snaked up narrow valleys within the Winding Gulf field in Raleigh and Wyoming counties, eventually serving more than fifty mines. Frederick Kimball initially conceived the N&W exclusively as a coal hauler, only to have it diversify once it reached into the middle west; Henry Rogers’s vision was more narrow: the Virginian’s sole purpose was to transport coal (Lambie 1954, 264–66).
Laing drew attention to the impact of the Virginian Railway on mining operations in the Winding Gulf field, noting the growth of the population of miners in Raleigh County, part of which lies in that field. He observed: “When operators in other fields were prospecting in the Winding Gulf coal area they took their trusted negroes. Many of these negroes who helped open up the mines in this newest field are still working at these same places” (Laing 1933, 69). Laing quantified the effect of the railway’s arrival on the population of Raleigh County by comparing the populations of black and native white residents in 1908, just before it went into operation, and two years later, at which point the white population had grown by 178 percent and the black population by 186 percent. He went on to state that “The growth of Negro population in Raleigh county has been steady until today it is the second county in the number of Negro miners” (Laing 1933, 70). McDowell County, served by the N&W, was first.
The forty-year period of railroad construction and mining development created an industrial economy in the West Virginia coal fields that continued to attract large numbers of blacks from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Ohio, as well as from other more distant states with the promise of work that paid better than sharecropping or other unskilled or semi-skilled agricultural occupations back home. By fulfilling that promise, this economy also provided the foundation for the musical culture of big band jazz and dance music that flourished during the 1930s.
Black Mountaineers’ Musical Culture before the Big Bands
West Virginia’s black immigrants brought a lively and diverse musical culture with them that would continue to be cultivated both in the numerous coal company towns as well as within the middle class residing in larger communities. The company towns, for which the vernacular term was “coal camps,” and the county seats constituted separate though related musical scenes, defined as “cultural space[s] in which a variety of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (Straw 1991, 373).
The repertories created by residents of the coal camps, largely fall under the heading of black “roots music,” comprised of a mix of several of the United States’ many oral musical traditions. While most of this repertory had been handed down through the generations, some of it no doubt began life in published form (early examples being songs by Stephen Foster) but had become so totally absorbed by one folk tradition or another that it came to be preserved in the collective memory of performers and audience alike rather than in print. Performers were either self-taught or part of a master-apprentice relationship with an admired musician of the previous generation, such as the area’s best fiddle player or banjo picker.
In addition to those musicians, gifted singers within each community could be counted on to improvise four-part harmony in the service of a gospel hymn on Sundays, and in some instances to create spontaneously individual calls during the week to synchronize the work of railroad track-liners. Recall that Jedidiah Hotchkiss had noted in 1873 that as “is usual with the negroes, they were musical...” (Hotchkiss 1873, 289). Until track maintenance became mechanized, thus eliminating the need for gangs of laborers to align the rails, replace and tamp crossties, and tend to other tasks requiring concerted physical effort, many continued to express their musicality in a variety of work songs. The father of John M. Watson of Beckley, one of the informants for this study, worked for the Norfolk & Western in various capacities, most related to track construction and maintenance. Watson’s memories of the singing by trackliners and the coordination of various physically demanding tasks thereby, remained quite vivid even after the passage of more than sixty years (Cranford et al. 2008).
One important genre of folk music was surely the blues, a tradition many would associate first with the Mississippi Delta and later with Chicago’s South Side but which is known to have flourished widely among southern blacks, including those residing on the eastern side of the central Appalachians in the Piedmont of Virginia and the Carolinas, the ancestral home of many black Mountaineers. A lifelong African American resident of Blue-field at the eastern edge of the Pocahontas coal field, Sam Bundy reported that while blacks living in his town gravitated to big band jazz and dance music, those living west of Bluefield in McDowell County favored the blues. He attributed this to the fact that many had migrated from further south where the blues was an indigenous music (BO 2.15.89, 8).
Not only were there blues musicians among the residents of the Mountain State, they were to be found within the casts of minstrel, medicine, and vaudeville tent shows that regularly toured the coalfields. A “route book” maintained by a bass player named Mose McQuitty, a native of North Carolina, documents much of his career extending from 1896 to 1937. He came to West Virginia on several occasions with two circus companies, Forepaugh & Sells Circus and Sparks Circus; with the Miller Brothers 101 Wild West & Far East Show
; and with two minstrel shows, Voelkel & Nolan’s Dandy Dixie Minstrels and Silas Green from New Orleans (Albright 2009). Nat Reece, born in Salem, Virginia, in 1924, but whose family moved to Itmann, West Virginia, four years later, told Barry Lee Pearson in 1990 that the Silas Green show “used to come to Mullins [seat of Wyoming County in the Winding Gulf coalfield and ten miles from Itmann] all the time. They came down for ten years straight.... They had blues musicians, guitar pickers” (Pearson 2000, 39). Employed by Silas Green between 1928 and 1931, Mose McQuitty recorded engagements by Silas Green in Mullins every summer in that period.
Nat Reece’s recollection of blues singers and guitar pickers among the entertainers in the Silas Green shows draws attention to one important contribution these touring shows made to the musical life of black Mountaineers: the introduction of the latest commercial musical styles to black West Virginians in the course of numerous performances. During a tour in late July and early August 1929, the Silas Green show traveled between Huntington and Bluefield playing twelve engagements in fourteen days (resting on Sundays). Except for Williamson and Bluefield, both large towns, every stop was at a coal camp or was situated close to several along the main line of the Norfolk & Western or on one of its branches. Departing Huntington, the tour went to Williamson, Iaeger, War, Kimball, Keystone, Gary, Vivian, Pocahontas (a coal camp just across the Virginia line), Maybeury, Bramwell, and Bluefield before departing the state (McQuitty n.d.). The following year the company returned to the southern coalfields with a new show, Funny Money, which it performed in the McDowell County town of Keystone on August 11, 1930. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, those in attendance were treated to “a scintillating musical comedy with mercurial situations, funny and laughable speeches and actions, tuneful music in two acts and seven scenes.” In addition, the show’s “costumes, electrical effects, etc. are new and of modern detail” (PC 8.16.30, 2/6).
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 3
