The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  Law enforcement was strictly in the hands of the coal operators. “To use the expression of the Middle Ages,” one owner bragged, “I was the high justice, the middle, and the low.” The primary aim of such justice: keeping unions out. Few other American businessmen were as antiunion as the coal operators. The industry spread blacklists of suspected union sympathizers and employed private guards, often from the Baldwin-Felts strikebreaking and security firm out of Bluefield, West Virginia. Such security could be costly: Pittsburgh Coal employed more than three hundred police, spending more than $670,000 during one two-year period. Local sheriffs were assigned deputies, generally paid directly by the companies, and these would arrest and jail any suspected union organizers. In Logan County, West Virginia, in the 1910s and ’20s, Sheriff Don Chafin received tribute from all the mine owners and named three hundred mine guards as his deputies. Chafin met every train that came into the area, grilled strangers as to the purpose of their visit, beat up union sympathizers and drove them from the county, and arrested and jailed political opponents. In other towns, voters were told whom to vote for, and these preferences were driven home by deputies who handed out printed slates of favored candidates at the polls. In Harlan County, Kentucky, miners weren’t even allowed to serve on juries—since they lived in company housing and paid no taxes—which left coal company officials, farmers, and merchants to dominate juries.3

  In places, coal miners and actual prisoners were interchangeable. In 1871, miners at Tennessee Coal & Mining Co.’s Coal Creek mines went on strike against harsh company demands—which included getting paid in scrip only and signing a “yellow dog contract” in which they pledged not to join a union—at which point the company shut down its mines. Shortly thereafter, it announced it would reopen the mines using convict labor rented from the state of Tennessee. Several pitched battles resulted, finally involving 5,000 Tennessee National Guard troops. Rebel miners were hunted down and arrested. The conflict continued until, after the governor lost a reelection bid, the legislature outlawed the convict-lease system.4 But other states continued the practice far longer: Alabama did not end the practice until 1928.5 In that state, the coal mining-convict association was particularly strong. From 1890 to 1905, Docena, Alabama—on the outskirts of Birmingham—was a prison camp. Then, TCI, formerly Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Co., turned it into a coal-mining company town with a labor force of former sharecroppers.6

  It would be a wonder if coal miners hadn’t rebelled. The history of the industry is one of clandestine union organization and retributive violence. Two spectacular examples suffice for now. In January 1875, Pennsylvania anthracite-region miners led by a union called the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) struck in protest of wage cuts of as much as 20 percent mandated by the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, which had come to dominate coal mining in the region. The WBA had emerged only seven years before and had won several agreements with the area’s Anthracite Board of Trade, in the process helping to impose order on a chaotic industry. But railroad chief Franklin Gowen favored a different arrangement. First, he drove most of Schuylkill County’s small coal operators out of business by buying up tens of thousands of acres of coal land. Then he set out to break the union with pay demands that seemed designed to provoke a strike. After four months, the union members were suffering, and by June the strike had failed totally. The union collapsed.

  Violence marked every step of the proceedings: Management engaged vigilantes and the private Coal and Iron Police to selectively assassinate union activists, sometimes firing into miners’ meetings. Twenty-six union officials were charged with conspiracy and imprisoned. For their part, some coal miners engaged in brutality, too, though the WBA repeatedly forswore violence. The months following the union defeat saw acts of sabotage and at least six assassinations of mine superintendents and public officials. Anonymous letters, some signed “Molly,” threatened reprisals for management misdeeds. Was this part of a union conspiracy or perhaps a secret Irish organization, the Molly Maguires, that had committed a series of assaults and killings dating to the 1860s?

  The Mollys now seem to have been less of an organization and more of an informal pattern of threats and violence: Night riders often engaged in personal vendettas following a tradition that grew out of rural Ireland. But during the strike, railroad chief Gowen vowed to get to the bottom of the Molly Maguire phenomenon and hired detectives from the Pinkerton agency to infiltrate labor ranks. In the aftermath, management announced that a terrorist conspiracy had been at work—involving not only the union but also an Irish fraternity named the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) and its alleged alter ego, the Molly Maguires. Virtually the entire leadership of the anthracite region’s AOH—in reality only a fraternity something like the Odd Fellows—was indicted and put on trial for murder and conspiracy. Arrested by the private Coal and Iron Police force, they were tried with evidence given primarily by a Pinkerton detective/agent provocateur and union turncoats, and prosecuted by attorneys who worked for the railroad and mining companies—including Gowen himself. Mere membership in the AOH was offered as proof of guilt. Some testimony intended to conflate the two organizations and to play up spooky practices referred to secret identifying AOH hand signals and verbal greetings: “The nights are very dark,” one member might say, and another must answer, “I hope they will soon mend.” (The melodramatic sign language and verbiage so impressed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that he included some of it in his Molly Maguires-inspired Sherlock Holmes tale The Valley of Fear.) In the end, twenty alleged Mollys were convicted and hanged.7

  In coal, violence often rose to the level of military confrontation. In the summer of 1921, for example, an army of miners variously estimated at 5,000 to 13,000 marched on Sheriff Chafin’s nonunion Logan County in an attempt to free jailed labor activists. Chafin and an army of 2,000 deputies, mine guards, and volunteers under the command of a West Virginia National Guard colonel fortified positions on Blair Mountain overlooking the town of Logan. Attempts to disperse the miners—including threats by President Warren G. Harding to send in federal troops and bomber aircraft—were to no avail, and a battle began on August 29. Aircraft, including some Army bombers and private planes hired by Chafin, did drop World War I surplus explosive and gas bombs on the miners. Amid sporadic gun battles, thirty of Chapin’s men were killed along with perhaps fifty to one hundred miners. Federal troops arrived on September 2, and the miners scattered. In the aftermath, 985 miners were indicted on charges ranging from murder to treason against the state of West Virginia, and many served prison terms.8

  Despite these abuses, unions caught on slowly in many coal-mining areas. In the words of Jim Garland, an Appalachian folksinger and brother of the more famous Sarah Ogan Gunning: “The mountain people thought that if your employer did not treat you right, you should quit or try to give him a good whipping.”9

  The demand for coal far outstripped its supply, though there was plenty of the stuff west of the Appalachians. By 1816, the iron- and glassworks of the burgeoning industrial town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were burning copious amounts of it. One observer reported “a cloud which amounts to night and overspreads Pittsburgh with the appearance of gloom and melancholy.” But it was difficult to ship coal economically over the mountains and on to the factories in Massachusetts and other parts of the eastern seaboard. In the 1830s, the cost of running a coal-fired steam engine on America’s East Coast was double the cost in England.

  Initially, much of the coal used by American industry was anthracite—a hard, clean-burning ore mined from deposits east of the Appalachians. In 1825, the Schuylkill Canal opened, making the Schuylkill River navigable between the coalfields near Port Carbon and Philadelphia. Mules and men pulled barges loaded with anthracite down the hundred-mile route. Soon other canals cut across New Jersey, connecting the Delaware River with the Atlantic Ocean. But rising demand for coal soon put the canals out of business, as companies built railroads right along the canal route. The
Philadelphia & Reading Railroad—one of the main actors in the Molly Maguires affair—was carrying 2.5 million tons of coal by 1859.10

  Consumption of coal by America’s growing industries and its burgeoning cities doubled every decade between 1850 and 1890. In the latter decade, the United States produced 243 million tons, bypassing production in then-second-place England by 43 million tons. North America held the world’s richest coal deposits, including plentiful bituminous, or soft-coal, deposits in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania that supplied much of the U.S. market until the late nineteenth century. In southern Colorado, three great bituminous fields were discovered, and mining began there in the 1870s when railroads moved into the region from Kansas City, Denver, and New Mexico. Finally, a vast field—50 million acres of coal reserves—stretched across Appalachia down to Alabama.11 Problem was, much of the Appalachian land remained heavily forested and dominated by towering mountain ranges. Moreover, prior to the late nineteenth century, no railroads or other transport extended there.

  Reports of the southern coalfields set off a stampede of land speculation after the Civil War. Speculators were often backed by northern or European capital—a fact that later led to charges of carpetbagging and plundering—but several of the most active land-grabbers were sons of Dixie. George L. Carter, for example, the son of a Confederate Army officer, was the key organizer of the Tom’s Creek Coal Co. and became one of the leading coal operators of southwestern Virginia. John C. Calhoun Mayo, a former math teacher and lawyer who married into the Old South aristocracy, acquired options on thousands of acres of eastern Kentucky land and by the turn of the twentieth century was a chief stockholder in Consolidation Coal Co. Mayo and figures like him showed the way for the absentee owners who bought up millions of acres of Appalachian land for as little as 25 cents to $3 per acre.

  Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, one of the primary cartographers for General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg, became the scout for a very different invader: the Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) .12 Railroad building accompanied and furthered the Appalachian land boom beginning in the 1880s, with four railroads playing key roles. The N&W pushed into southwestern Virginia, drawn by the vast deposits around Flat Top Mountain. The Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad (C&O) made tracks for southern West Virginia; the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) forged into eastern Kentucky and Tennessee; and the Southern Railroad pioneered development of western North Carolina. Generally the railroads came first, followed closely by would-be mine operators, but sometimes the developers just couldn’t wait. When N&W railroad builders reached the Tazewell County, Virginia, settlement of Pocahontas in 1883, they found it was already a thriving boom town with fifty houses, a company store, shops ranging from a butcher to a milliner, a newspaper, two saloons, and coal operations already in progress. A pile of 40,000 tons of coal awaited, along with one hundred ovens for the manufacture of coke, the porous, low-sulfur fuel used in iron smelting.13

  Appalachian coal production tripled in the 1890s, then increased fivefold up to 1930, at which point it constituted 80 percent of U.S. production. More than five hundred coal-company towns existed there by the 1920s, housing more than two-thirds of the area’s miners (80 percent in West Virginia).14 Hundreds of independent coal operators employing from ten to thirty miners joined the coal rush, leasing land from the big landholders. Operators could get a mine off the ground with as little as $20,000 or $30,000 in seed money. “All that was required was to build houses for the miners, a store to supply them, and a tipple structure to dump the coal into railway cars,” observed one operator. A coal camp might begin with little more than the mine, a company office, and a commissary or grocery store. Within a year or so, miners who’d been living in tents would be able to move into rudimentary housing, and if things went well, in time more family dwellings would appear along with schools and maybe churches. (Miners were never particularly keen on churchgoing.)15

  The bituminous seams were too widely dispersed to allow monopoly control, and mines were fiercely competitive. Even so, big operators dominated coal production in Appalachia, among them the U.S. Coal and Oil Co., predecessor of the Island Creek Coal Co., whose beachhead was Logan County, West Virginia. By 1910, mines there were producing more than 2 million tons of coal each year. The Pennsylvania Railroad and its ally, U.S. Steel, controlled the Flat Top-Pocahontas region of Virginia. U.S. Steel subsidiary U.S. Coal and Coke Co. extracted 5 million tons of coal annually from West Virginia mines, and Consolidation Coal Co. of Maryland led the way in the Elkhorn field area of Kentucky, with its operations center located in the model company town of Jenkins. 16

  Model towns with such amenities as comfortable housing, recreation facilities, and well-laid-out streets and parks composed only 2 percent of Appalachia’s company towns. As might be expected, many of these were the properties of the biggest companies, which could afford generosity toward their employees. Jenkins, Kentucky, for example, provided garbage collection and sewers. Holden, West Virginia, owned by the Island Creek Coal Co., had a theater, a library, two bowling alleys, and a clubhouse with showers. Widen, West Virginia, owned by the Elk River Coal & Lumber Co., featured well-run schools, a swimming pool, a hospital, and a YMCA that included a bowling alley, a basketball court, and a theater.17

  But big operators didn’t necessarily take more care with their towns. Wheelwright, Kentucky, for instance, was at various periods the property of Consolidation Coal affiliate Elkhorn Coal Corp., Inland Steel, and Island Creek Coal Co. Elkhorn, which operated the community between 1916 and 1930, offered the least in the way of development, with streets left unpaved and garbage simply dumped in a nearby hollow. White children attended a four-room schoolhouse, while black children had no school at all. Inland Steel, the proprietor of Wheelwright between 1930 and 1963, saw improvements as good for business. That company reconditioned four hundred houses, installing flush toilets among other things; built a water-filtration plant for the town; equipped the mines with better ventilation; and constructed a bathhouse with showers for miners. In 1965, Island Creek took over, and it showed no interest in Wheelwright, auctioning off much of its housing. 18

  In Colorado, model towns were built specifically to undercut worker militancy and labor organization. In 1894, with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) having called for a strike that led 125,000 workers in the East and Midwest to put down tools, coal miners in Colorado voted for a one-week sympathy strike. An unusual feature of the Colorado walkout were cross-country marches in which some 1,200 miners trekked across perhaps one hundred miles of countryside, from Fremont County down to Las Animas County. With flags flying and brass bands leading the way, they traveled from town to town urging miners to stop work. They often succeeded, as at Walsenburg, where 115 walked out and joined the marchers. The mining giant of the area, Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI), had over 7,000 employees and nearly 72,000 acres of coal land—so it had much at stake. It fought back with injunctions and path-blocking deputy sheriffs. But the most effective mechanism, the area’s coal operators discovered, was the closed company town.

  Often the Colorado mine companies had allowed and even encouraged workers to build their own homes on company land. Open camps such as Coal Creek, Colorado, consisted mostly of such worker-owned housing, ranging from log cabins to Mexican adobes. Other towns, including Rouse and Sopris, were “closed,” resembling the coal towns in Pennsylvania and Appalachia. The 1894 marches generally stalled at the borders of such closed camps. In the 1900s, companies in Colorado began expanding the number of such places and upgrading their housing. At Redstone, for instance, architect Theodore Davis Boal built eighty-five arts-and-crafts-inspired cottages for CFI. The town also featured hydroelectric power, clean water, a modern school and clubhouse, a theater, a well-stocked store, and more. CFI magnate John Osgood figured that such benevolent gestures would be the undoing of unionism, and his company continued the model-town movement with settlements at Primero, Segundo, Tercio, Cuar
to, Quinto, and Sexto. American Smelting and Refining Co.’s Cokedale featured electric streetlights and other modern amenities. Such towns offered kindergarten and adult-education classes, social clubs, and lectures on topics ranging from European art to germ theory.

  But the iron fist inside the velvet glove was not hard to find: Colorado’s model towns were generally surrounded by barbed-wire fences and patrolled by camp marshals and mine guards. There was surveillance in every town and saloon. Undesirables, from peddlers to state labor officials, were kept out. UMWA organizers were followed and harassed: “There was never a time that I wasn’t followed constantly by one to three guards,” testified District 15 president John McLennan. The companies bribed voters to control local elections, and as in Logan County, West Virginia, local sheriffs did their bidding. 19

  Kentucky’s coalfields—among the most famous nationally perhaps due to the frightening level of conflict in Harlan County—were among the last to be developed. The L&N, the Lexington & Eastern Railroad, and the Baltimore & Ohio made their way into eleven counties in the eastern part of the state on the eve of World War I. The L&N’s extension to the head of the Cumberland River in Harlan County signified the final opening of the area, and by 1914, miners were hauling over a million tons of coal.