Communities, Welcome to Blair Mountain, West Virginia
“Our philosophy is not to impact people.” — David Todd, spokesperson for Arch Coal.
Friday, October 19th, 2007
Blair Mountain is home to one of the most important and dramatic chapters in American labor history, and the largest armed conflict on US soil since the Civil War. 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. Thus 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 US 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 word 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 mountaintop removal mines for years. In 1993, a coal company 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,” A coal company 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 the mines.
Due to the ongoing threat of mountaintop removal mining on the historic battlefield site, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Blair Mountain one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places in 2006.
Text contributed by distinguished author Penny Loeb from her website www.wvcoalfield.com. Photo provided courtesy of Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Southwings.
