Blair Mountain, WV
The Battle Then and Now
Thursday, August 31st, 2006
Lucas Brown and Lauren Benningfield, AV Staff
These entries are based on research or interviews conducted by Appalachian Voices staff and volunteers- we’d love for you to add another story or eulogy, and let us know if you’d like to request a change.
History of the Homeplace
Blair Mountain’s heritage is rooted in local miners fighting for their rights. In 1921, Blair was the battlefield for the clash between over ten thousand miners fighting for the right to unionize, and the anti-union forces of the local sheriff and neighboring non-union counties. Labor organizers had decided to march on the area in protest of Sheriff Chafin’s harsh and violent treatment of union supporters, and they knew that they were “calling for the union to gamble its future in one desperate show of force” - if the march was successful in the Logan County, “the bastion of nonunion labor,” then the United Mine Workers would be able to organize in any mine in the state. If they failed, it would take years to recover.
Miners started pouring in from all over the coalfields, either hiking in on the roads or hijacking trains to carry carloads of miners to the area. When President Harding threatened to send in Federal troops , the miners voted to go home rather than take on the whole U.S. army. False rumors started to spread, however, that Sheriff Chafin was shooting women and children, and the miners turned back around and “the greatest domestic armed conflict in American labor history” began. After days of brutal fighting, in which home-made bombs dropped from planes marked the only time the U.S. has bombed its own soil, federal troops arrived and the weary miners dispersed. Though ending in a defeat, the march and battle prompted a series of investigations into the harsh conditions of Appalachian coal mining, and an awareness of these conditions and of the miners’ struggle spread throughout the nation.
The Battle Today
Now, Blair Mountain is the site of another battle. Local residents, including descendants of the 1921 miners, have been fighting Arch Coal’s mountaintop removal mines for years.
In 1993, Arch Coal and its land agents began a plan to buy out all the nearby residents, so that no one would be around to complain about the mine’s blasting, dust, and sludge. “Our philosophy is not to… impact people,” said David Todd, a spokesman for Arch Coal. “And if there are no people to impact, that is consistent with our philosophy.” Enacting this plan to turn an entire community’s homeplace into an industrial mine with “no people to impact,” Arch Coal bought more than half of the homes in Blair, forcing every resident who sold to sign an agreement saying that they would never protest strip mining again, and that they would never move back to any area near Arch Coal’s mines. Those who have stayed deal with the pervasive dust, dried wells, and airborne flyrocks from the blasting that all come from the 24 hour per day, 365 days per year operation of the mine.
According to Barry Sarifin of Nightline, “People here say that in the old days, communities turned into ghost towns when the coal ran out. Now, they turn into ghost towns when mountaintop mines move in.”
Several organizations, including the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and the Sierra Club, are trying to get this landmark into the West Virginia State Historic Preservation office’s registry.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:35 am
The protection of Blair Mountain is one of my main goal.
Check out my facebook article and pictures on Face Book.
The old and new red bandanna of courage
Wilma Steele
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=243072060084&ref=mf#/profile.php?id=1187511437&ref=profile
May 11th, 2010 at 12:30 am
Being the son of a high school history teacher, I have throughout my life been fascinated by our state’s history. All we have left to remind us (and those who visit the state of WV) of the people and events which made WV the beautiful state rich in history that it is are the historic landmarks many of which have until now withstood the test of time. Now we have out of state coal operators coming into WV and literally blowing it away with their continual process of mountaintop removal. This not only causes flooding and erosion but destroys miles and miles of beautiful untamed forests all in the name of industry. As a result people are forced to either sell out and move off of land their families have owned for two hundred years or remain and live in the dust and noise and send their children to school everyday in the shadows of coal stockpiles and silos with the sound of machinery clanking outside as they attend classes. Yes, there are schools in WV within a few yards of coal operations, the schools were there first and it should not be this way. Now that the coal operators have managed to run nearly everyone off of their land and have destroyed that they have now set their sights on our precious historical landmarks like Blair Mountain. If the state of WV does not step in and declare Blair Mountain a historic landmark it too will be gone right along with all of the communities and historic places that have fallen already and will fall in the future in the name of industry. Eventually all of the small towns and historic places that make WV the unique state it is will be gone forever and the people with them and WV will be little more than an industrial dumping ground for coal operators and others like them to destroy and leave in ruins as they have done in the past. Reclamation does not replace the timber, rocks, creeks and top soil removed by strip mining, it only puts a band aid over a scar that will never again be what it once was, wild, untamed, and beautiful.
I am not against coal mining, I am against people banking their entire existence on it and communities living and dying based on the prosperity or dissolution of coal operations, there has to be something better for WV as a whole. If there were a variety of industries in rural WV to give coal operators less options as to where they will mine and how they will go about it things would be better but as long as coal is the only game in town people are going to sell their souls in the name of it, do you really think people will continue to fight for historical landmarks if their almighty job at the mine is in jeopardy? This is not my opinion, I live in a place just like what I described above and I see my town, my county dying a little more everyday as a result. whether you agree or not it makes no matter, but I am right.