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West Virginia, Kentucky, western Virginia, and the surrounding region is deeply associated with mountains, deep hollers, proud if stubborn mountain folk, and the coal which brought both prosperity and despair to this area over the years. Coal has not only been the catalyst for economic growth and social tensions, but it has wrought a specific and complex folk culture with stories, music, and other cultural artifacts directly related to it.

When many people think of Appalachia, they think of a very rural and rustic place with worn-down homes and barns, and that is part of the truth, but Appalachia is as complex as any other part of the South or of America (photo by Mike Walker)

A few years ago the lauded country music singer and West Virginia native Kathy Mattea released to critical acclaim an album of traditional coal country ballads entitled very simply, Coal. Other singers have also covered these old songs, which some of them, including Mattea, first heard from coal miner fathers and grandfathers growing up. While other industries of the South such as ranching and turpentining have also produced folk music and rich oral histories, that of the coal mines has become etched on the nation’s collective memory in a special way and is unique in how it produces the identity for the region.

A lot of this situation is tied to how Appalachia has latched its fortunes to coal—at times, out of sheer necessity. Even today this status is largely true, and the fierce political debates we have currently over coal, its environmental impact, and its provision of much-needed jobs has a history reaching back decades. That history involves chapters of states like West Virginia adhering to loyal programs of patronage to both the Democrats and then the Republicans, and furnishes some of our nation’s most enthralling political lore.

A period photo of a typical early twentieth century coal mine in Capels, West Virginia. Note the coal tipple, the worker housing in the background, and how everything is economically poised on the mountainside, as there is really no other land available. (Photo by Marion Post Walcott, 1938, courtesy the Library of Congress)

Appalachia as we know it today was settled by a loose collective of English pioneers, indentured servants who had been released from their servitude, the Scotch-Irish, and others. It was settled by men and women who aspired to be their own bosses, to own their own land, to have a small farm somewhere away from the strictures of the British colonial aristocracy of eastern Virginia. But the hills of what is now western Virginia, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky and Tennessee were fertile in terms of land and ample in water sources, yet they also possessed a geography of hardship.

The winters could be formidable, the mountains were difficult to navigate, and settlements were often remote—at times due to weather, routes to them were all but impassable. Small plots of land were most viable in this territory, but they did not lend well to the production of large-scale crops or even significant herds of livestock, and even if they had, there was nowhere nearby for those commodities to find a ready market. The irony was, everyone had a cow, everyone had hogs and chickens and certainly a garden, so who would buy what any farmer had for sale? The settlers had their land, and they loved their land and the freedom that came with it, but few were prosperous, and many dealt with recurrent poverty. This was a trend continuing from the 1700’s into the 1930’s and actually even up to our current day.

Appalachia is known for its unforgiving and rugged—though beautiful—mountains, which bred a stock of people with strong independence and belief in hard work. Here, the Catawba Valley near Roanoke, Virginia, is seen from the Appalachian Trail. (Photo by Mike Walker)

Coal mining brought to this plight dependable jobs that paid well and were not at the mercy of the weather and whims of farming. Losing five spring calves to a late freeze or disease or having a low crop yield could be devastating, and coal mining put the economic risks into the hands of owners and bosses. Physical risks, however, were another story altogether. Mining at best was very dirty work, and the mines were full of other dangers from the threat of collapse to explosions due to the presence of combustible gases. Black lung and associated health problems plagued miners, but the trade-off of well-paying jobs a man could go right into out of high school (or even without it) and provide for his family appealed to the sense of independent spirit of these mountaineers.

A miner’s wife brings home groceries at a coal camp in West Virginia in 1938. Mining, despite its dangers and problems, allowed many Appalachian families a new degree of prosperity they had never before enjoyed. (Photo by Marion Post Walcott, courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Yet the miners—especially as mining became a highly-organized industry with wealthy owners of coal mines—were in reality anything but independent. Owners had several schemes commonly in place to ensure workers earned a meager wage and would be loyal to their mine and not abandon it for another operation. Chief among these was forcing miners to buy their wares—from mining equipment to groceries—at a company store owned by the mine. The mine owner also often built housing for his workers, sometimes building an entire small village in the middle of nowhere to accommodate a decently-large workforce in a remote area—located there, simply because the coal was there. The company store, or commissary, however, would charge inflated prices on the goods it sold, and miners would soon find themselves in debt, paying on purchases against wages they had not yet earned.

In great contrast to the miners’ families and their lifestyles were those of the mine owners and operators. Cities such as Princeton, West Virginia, grew markedly due to the wealth of coal and the need for support services such as logistics, accountants, and lawyers for the coal operations. Today, at a point where coal’s economic power has vastly decreased and business is conducted differently—using the Internet and other means to engage with far-flung business services instead of relying on local providers—Princeton has sought novel means to diversify its economy with the arts and other endeavors. Even if coal comes back insofar as jobs are concerned, it won’t bring Princeton or Beckley or other coal cities back to their heyday of prosperity, and these cities know that.

Downtown Princeton, West Virginia, today (photo by Mike Walker)

Perhaps most interesting is the town of Bramwell, West Virginia, nicknamed the “Millionaires’ Town” due to the number of coal barons who built impressive mansions there in the late nineteenth century. The quaint town in Mercer County at one time was supposedly home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the entire nation. Alas, in 1910, a fire raged through the downtown and destroyed many buildings, and the millionaires by and large found the small town less appealing and some left, though today a number of their grand homes still stand, and a regional museum is dedicated to the town’s unique history of wealth.

Bramwell may have been an exceptional example of how coal money transformed rural towns in Appalachia, but it was far from the only such example. Clifton Forge, Virginia, first saw its fortunes made on a different sort of mining—the extraction and processing of iron ore locally and the forges which gave the town its name—but with that commerce came the railroad which would become the town’s enduring primary industry. Coal of course also depended on rail for out-shipment and for moving heavy equipment about, so Clifton Forge served as a key railyard for King Coal.

A train with a load of coal at rest in Ronceverte, West Virginia. The buildings behind the cars were part of what once was a large industrial and warehousing section of the town. (Photo by Mike Walker)

Ronceverte, West Virginia, also benefited greatly from coal: While a ways from the epicenter of western West Virginia’s coal fields, Ronceverte like Clifton Forge became a transshipment center and also saw industry grow up due to the wealth of coal. Like Princeton, Beckley, and other West Virginia towns, Ronceverte was a place in the mid-twentieth century where not everyone worked in coal, but everyone knew someone or someone’s husband, son, father, or brother who did work in the mines. In towns like Welch, West Virginia, or Harlan, Kentucky, however, it may well have seemed around the same point in history that everyone literally did work in coal.

Welch, West Virginia, in 1938 (photo by Marion Post Walcott, courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Of course, such was not the case, but coal formed the basis of these towns and life revolved around coal in every possible way. Ronceverte, though it is at the heart of a county more dependent on farming and tourism, still felt the rise and fall of economic tides driven by coal, as have most cities in Appalachia. Indeed, the reach of coal’s economic might is a story writ in miniature of American industry: the vast manufacturing enterprises of what we now call “the Rust Belt” of the Midwest—even Detroit for that matter—came about in good part due to the ready supply of Appalachian coal in regional proximity to these industries. Detroit’s primary industry before Henry Ford and automobiles was actually wood stoves for cooking and heating, and it was due to that all-important industry of its time that iron and steelmaking were prevalent in Detroit, allowing for the automotive industry also to rise there. Without the coal to fire its furnaces, this could not have come to pass.

No matter how much we may associate industry with the northern states, in so many ways it was the coal of Appalachia—which mostly is of the South—that fueled the golden era of American productivity. It also remade the very fabric of Appalachia for both better and worse, triggering fierce—even violent—labor disputes, giving rise to unions pitted against big business, and most of all providing jobs that were passed down from father to son for generations. Now the future of coal is somewhat in flux, but coal lives on, as does its deep and lasting impression on Appalachian society.

HEAR KATHY MATTEA SING “HELLO, MY NAME IS COAL”

SEE MORE “COAL: THE SUSTAINING BEDROCK OF APPALACHIA” PHOTOS HERE

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A period photo of a typical early twentieth century coal mine in Capels, West Virginia. Note the coal tipple, the worker housing in the background, and how everything is economically poised on the mountainside, as there is really no other land available. (Photo by Marion Post Walcott, 1938, courtesy the Library of Congress)