PRESERVING HISTORY

One of the goals of the Boom Days of Coal is to preserve the stories and voices of the past. The geographical focus is the Upper Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, which is the Southeastern coal-producing area of Kanawha County. The community of Cabin Creek has been a center piece of the preservation effort thus far, and so many of the stories and people interviewed are connected to this community.                         

A Brief History of Cabin Creek

  By Shannon E. Bell 

Since the early 1900s, coal has dominated the lives of Cabin Creek residents. Made up of a 25-mile stretch of road comprised of more than fifteen “coal towns,” with such names as Notomine, Decota, Republic, Red Warrior and Carbon, the area known as “Cabin Creek” was created much like most other large communities in Southern West Virginia were formed. Once coal was found in the mountains and prospectors bought up the mineral rights to the land, they lured immigrants, former slaves, and others looking for work in by the hundreds with false promises of high pay, good housing, and new opportunities to dig the coal from the ground. The attractive image of life in a coal town was quickly tarnished and replaced with a bitter reality: working for the coal companies was much like slavery.

The various coal companies on the creek paid their wages in “scrip,” or their own form of money, which was only redeemable at the company store. Miners were required to purchase all of their mining equipment, all of their groceries, and all of their clothes from the company store. Many of the company stores over-charged the miners and their families with exorbitant prices. Arnold Miller, who grew up on Cabin Creek and was former president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), recalled that “the company store tried to get the miner in debt so he would not be able to go anywhere else” to work. Furthermore, those who tried to trade in their scrip for real money and shop elsewhere would be punished, as the coal operators would move the offending miners’ work stations to “rock piles or water holes or places where [they] couldn’t load very much coal.”[1] Miners were paid by the ton, but quite often they were cheated out of their proper pay. When the coal cars were weighed, sometimes the weigh bosses would rig the scales or dock a miner “for no reason at all.” If slate were found in the coal load, they would not pay the miner for the entire load. It was difficult for a miner to make enough money to feed his children.[2]

In addition to unfair wages, miners were required to live in the company houses, for which they were charged far more than they could afford on the wages that they made digging coal. Also from the miners’ paychecks came the school tax, burial tax, and physician tax, all of which further contributed to the hole of debt in which most miners found themselves.[3]

Cabin Creek’s situation was much like that of the other coalmining communities throughout West Virginia. When union organizing began throughout the rest of the state to help miners receive fair wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, the coal operators in Cabin Creek and nearby Paint Creek hired gunmen and detectives to keep the miners from organizing in order to protect their enormous profit margins. In fact, at that time “the gun thugs outnumbered the miners three to one.”[4] If a miner “was considered an agitator, showing an interest in the union, he was usually fired and blacklisted in all other mining camps in the area.”[5] Furthermore, men weren’t even allowed to gather and talk in small groups. According to Arnold Miller, if the gunmen “saw a couple or three miners along the railroad tracks somewhere talking, the thugs…would approach them and start insulting them. They’d beat them till they couldn’t get up…The man that worked in the mines in those days had no rights whatsoever, Constitutional or otherwise. It was nothing more than slavery”[6]

Despite the coal operator’s efforts to keep the union out of Cabin Creek and Paint Creek, they could not keep the feisty, eighty-year-old Mother Jones out. Mother Jones worked with the labor movement all over the United States, and ended up in West Virginia to work for the rights of miners. People told her that she was crazy for going to Cabin Creek, but she went, and she organized. Soon after Mother Jones came to the creeks, thousands of miners went on strike at her urging to “throw off the chains of slavery fettered by the mine guards.”[7] Tempers rose on both sides. The miners’ families were evicted from their homes and were forced to set up a tent colony at Holly Grove on Paint Creek. On February 7, 1913, coal operator Quinn Morton, the Kanawha County sheriff, deputies, and mine guards “drove an armored train with gatling guns through Holly Grove…while they were sleeping. Into the quiet tents of the workers the guns were fired, killing and wounding the sleepers. A man by the name of Epstaw rose and picked up a couple of children and told them to run for their lives. His feet were shot off. Women were wounded. Children screamed with terror. No one was arrested.”[8]   

The union organizing effort in Cabin Creek and Paint Creek continued to be a bloody battle fought between the mine operators and the miners. According to Mother Jones’s autobiography, “Men who joined the union were blacklisted throughout the entire section. Their families were thrown out on the highways. Men were shot. They were beaten. Numbers disappeared and no trace of them found. Store keepers were ordered not to sell to union men or their families. Meetings had to be held in the woods at night, in abandoned mines, in barns.”[9]

Finally, upon the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1933, the mine operators were forced to allow the unions into the mines. FDR was a hero to the miners and their families; in fact, it was quite common for a framed photograph of the president to hang above the mantle in coal camp houses.[10]                                                         

The union brought a new era to Cabin Creek. Times were still tough, and people were still poor, but living and working conditions improved drastically. The generation of people who grew up in Cabin Creek in the 1940s and 50s have a deep connection to the community and many wonderful memories. The Cabin Creek of the 40s and 50s was the archetypal “dream community” for any child. Home to over 50,000 people, Cabin Creek’s population exceeded the metropolitan area of Charleston. Cabin Creek was a center of economic, social, and political activity in West Virginia. There was a Y.M.C.A., swimming pool, ball fields, roller skating rink, train station, ice cream parlors, club houses, tennis court, service station, bowling alley, and many restaurants and company stores that filled the area.[11] There was always something for the kids to do, especially in the summertime when they would dam up the creek to make swimming holes to cool off or to fish. In an interview printed in Goldenseal magazine, Arnold Miller recalled of growing up in Cabin Creek, “I did not know I was a poor boy until a sociology professor told me that I was.” He continued, “We never once believed we were disadvantaged. Most of us felt like we had a jump on everybody else simply because we had the privilege of living at the head of Cabin Creek. Never feel sorry for a Cabin Creeker. We know how to do things others have never heard of.”[12]

It is clear from the collection of stories and photographs in Glimpses of Yesteryear, a memory book compiled for the Carbon Fuel “family reunion” in 1998 and 2000, that the Cabin Creek of the 40s, 50s, and 60s was a community rich with social bonds and connections. One can easily see the love that the individuals who grew up in Cabin Creek during this time have for their community. This love and connection is reflected in Nancy Houk Bulla’s recollection of the Cabin Creek town of Carbon,

Someone told me once that God gave us memories so we could have roses in December. Carbon has provided bushels of beautiful petals for all of us to draw upon…it was Carbon itself and its people and our life together that was a defining experience for me. Living in Carbon and watching Dad at work showed me that what you have is not nearly as important as what you do with what you have…The world of Carbon actually transcends itself in the hearts of all who were there. No matter what our differing individual experiences, we share a commonality – we are better for having lived there, although – as with most life travels – not one of us knew it at the time. In the years since Carbon, the memory of that unique experience continues to bind us together. And in that memory, we are one.[13]

As is clear from this reflection, those who lived in Carbon, and the many other towns in Cabin Creek, felt a special connection to each other and to their home. The many memories that fill Glimpses of Yesteryear express a strength of community; a richness of “social capital.”

In the 1960s, as mechanization increased, the coal companies needed fewer and fewer miners for their operations. From the late 60s through the 80s, thousands of miners and their families were forced to leave Cabin Creek and other coal mining communities, in search of employment elsewhere. Many mines closed, and when the mines closed and the people left, so did all of the businesses.

Very few of these children know that their community was at one time the center of union organizing in the state, that two presidents of the UMWA were born and raised in Cabin Creek, or even that there are still Mine War-era machine gun bunkers buried beneath generations of weeds and overgrowth in their mountains. One of the goals of the Boom Days of Coal is to preserve this rich heritage for future generations.