Weather: AM Showers, 62/75F
Route: From Charlottesville 272 miles west on I-64 W, WV-97 W, to US-52 N.
Significance: In the late 19th and early 20th century coal was incredibly important the the U.S. economy. Because many coal mines were in relatively rural locations, operators were able to set up company towns where they controlled everything. Security was provided by private detective companies, food could only be bought from the company store, and housing was all owned by the operators. Unions were increasingly successful in the early 20th century in Pennsylvania - however the coal fields of West Virginia were further from urban centers and therefore cost more to get the coal to market - which made the operators even more aggressive in beating down any movement towards unionizing these towns. Matewan was unique in southern West Virginia, in that it wasn't a company town. There was a pro-miner mayor, who appointed a 27 year-old former miner, Sid Hatfield, as the police chief.
On May 19th, 1920 - members of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency served evictions to miners who had joined the union. Several townspeople saw them force a woman and her children to leave a house at gunpoint and then throw all of her belongings onto the street. Her husband was working at the time. Word spread of these evictions and anger started to grow. Hatfield presented arrest warrants to the detectives, who then presented a warrant for Hatfield's arrest. It is not known who fired the first shot, but soon 7 detectives and 3 miners were dead. Hatfield survived and became a hero to the miners of southern West Virginia because nobody had ever stood up the the private detective force before.
Hatfield and 22 miners were charged and put on trial for murder of the detectives. The jury ended up finding them not guilty. Through the rest of 1920 and the first half of 1921 tensions between the miners and detective agency grew. Miners went on strike intermittently, during which they sometimes destroyed operators' property to stop non-union employees from working the mine. Hatfield himself was accused of destroying the coal tipple at Mohawk, WV.
On August 1, 1921 an unarmed Hatfield was on his way to a court appearance in Welch, WV - when members of the Baldwin-Felts agency approached him and a colleague and murdered them in front of their wives. Given his hero status - his murder pushed many miners to believe that the only way to gain control of their lives was through violence. Over 10,000 of them gathered in Charleston, WV - with the plan to march south to Mingo County (of which Matewan was a part) to free jailed union members and end martial law.
Between Charleston and Mingo county was Logan county - whose sheriff, Don Chafin, was a strong company man. Chafin organized 3,000 men to stop the miners on their way to Mingo county. This was only a few years after the end of World War I and many men on both sides of the conflict had wartime experience. After negotiation and coming very close to stopping the miners from their march - Chafin's men attacked 40 miners. The attack solidified the miners' and they marched south. The Battle of Blair Mountain would last for five days and over 100 men would die. It is still the largest armed labor uprising the the history of the United States and the largest post-civil war conflict in this country.
Over 1 million rounds of ammunition were spent. Chafin even used airplanes to drop homemade bombs on the miner encampment. The conflict only ended when the U.S. Army was sent in. The miners had confidence that the Army would be objective, as many of them had served in the Army in the recent war. The outcome was the the union was destroyed in southern West Virginia until the depression, when many of the operators' tactics, including mine guards and blacklisting union members were made illegal.
Images:
Downtown Matewan (from wvpublic.org)
Video: Link to PBS show American Experience show about the coal wars.
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