Blooming Stills
A visit today to a United States District Court in most any section of the Blue Ridge Country where makers of illicit whiskey are being tried shows that the name moonshine no longer applies to the beverage. It got its name from being made at night. Now operations in the making are conducted by day, while only the transportation of the liquor is carried on after nightfall. Trucks and evendilapidated Fords with the windows smeared with soap to conceal the load are pressed into service. The drivers consider it safer to travel with their illegal cargo under the shades of darkness.
During the questioning of witnesses and offenders in court you learn that tips provided by law-abiding citizens are the usual means of bringing offenders to trial. In rare instances, however, members of a moonshiner’s own family have been known to turn him in.
The process of capturing the moonshiner has changed considerably from that of other days. Then the revenooer (mountain folk usually call him the law) slipped up from behind the bushes on the offender and caught him red-handed at the still. In those days the men who were making had their lookout men who gave warning by a call or a whistle, even by gun signals, of the approach of the law while the moonshiner took to his heels, hiding in deep underbrush or far back under cliffs. Today these mountain men have learned not to run. For the officers of the law are equipped with long-range guns and with equipment so powerful the bullets can penetrate the steel body of an automobile. The method of locating the still has changed too since the airplane has come into use. Looking down from the clouds the flyer spies a thin stream of smoke rising from a wooded ravine. He communicates by radio to his co-workers of the ground crew, who immediately set out at high speed by automobile to capture the still.
It is estimated that of the 170,000,000 gallons of liquor consumed in this country in 1939, at least 35,000,000 were illicit and that for every legal distillery there are at least one hundred illegal ones. The southern mountain region has always lent itself admirably to the making of moonshineand for this reason has been a thorn in the flesh of U. S. Alcohol Tax Unit. During the year 1939, according toLife, it is estimated that more than 4000 stills were captured in the states of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida.
However, it is not the moonshiner who reaps the richest revenue from corn whiskey, which he sells for ninety cents a gallon, but the bootlegger and others down the line who add on, each in his turn, until the potent drink reaches a final sale price of ninety cents a quart and more. The tax on legitimate whiskey is $2.25 a proof gallon which makes it prohibitive in a community competing with the moonshiner’s untaxed product.
Through the southern mountain region Negroes frequently are employed by white men operating stills on a large scale, where many boxes are used for the fermenting mash. The fines and sentences vary with the output and number of offenses.
The mountaineer, on the other hand, who operates a small still usually is a poor man. When brought into court he pleads that he cannot haul out a load of corn over rugged roads miles to a market and compete with a farmer from the lowlands who is not retarded by bad roads. Or again, if he is from an extremely isolated mountain section, he offers the old reasoning, “It is my land and my corn—why can’t I do with my crop whatever I please?”
If the federal judge is a kindly, understanding man he will listen patiently to the story of the mountaineer who has made illicit whiskey, and if it be only the first or second offense, a sentence of six months in prison is imposed. “But, judge, your honor,” pleads the perplexed mountaineer. “I’ve got to put in my crop and my old woman isailin’—she can’t holp none. I’ve got to lay in foirwood for winter, judge, your honor, my youngins is too little to holp.” Often the understanding judge replies, “Now, John, you go back home and get your work done up, then come back and serve your sentence.” Rarely has the judge’s trust been betrayed.
Learning
What with good roads, the radio, and better schools and more of them the scene is rapidly changing in the Blue Ridge Country.
The little one-room log school is almost a thing of the past. Only in remote sections can it be found. No longer is the mountain child retarded by the bridgeless stream, for good roads have come to the mountains and with them the catwalk—an improvised bridge of barrel hoops strung together with cables—spanning the creek has passed. The mountain mother’s warning is heard no longer. “Mind, Johnny, you don’t swing the bridge.” Concrete pillars support steel girders that span the creek high above even the highest flood point. Education soars high in the southern mountain region. Instead of a few weeks of school there are months now, and what is more Johnny doesn’t walk to school any more. The county school bus, operated by a careful driver, picks him up almost at his very door and brings him back safely when school turns out in the evening. Instead of the poorly lighted one-room school, there is the consolidated school built of native stone, with many windows and comfortable desks. If the mountain boy or girl fails to get an education it is his own fault. There is a central heating system and the teacher, you may be sure, is a graduate of an accredited college. TheKentucky Progress Magazineof Winter, 1935, gives a remarkable example of what is taking place in an educational way in the mountain region: “Twenty-nine well-equipped, accredited four-year high schools and two junior colleges now dot the five counties, Lawrence, Johnson, Martin, Floyd, and Pike ... seven high schools and one junior college have the highest rating possible, membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.... The advent of surfaced roads has made successful consolidation possible in many instances.”
Preceding the consolidated school an inestimable service has been rendered the children of the southern highlands by means of the settlement school. It would be impossible to discuss them all adequately, but of the outstanding ones of which I have personal knowledge are: that great institution at Berea, Kentucky, the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky; the Martha Berry School in the mountains of Georgia; the agricultural school of Sergeant Alvin C. York near Jamestown, Tennessee; and the John C. Campbell Folk School at Brasstown, N. C.
Under efficient guidance mountain boys and girls are taught to preserve the handicrafts of their forbears, knitting, spinning, weaving, making of dyes, and even a pastime once indulged in by boys and men—whittling. Idle whittling has been converted into not only an artistic craft, but a profitable one. Nowhere in the country is there to be found a finer collection of whittled figures, ranging from tiny chicks to squirrels, rabbits, birds, than those made by the mountain youths at the John C. Campbell Folk School.
Perhaps no greater service is being rendered mountain folk than that headed by Sergeant York in his agriculturalschool, because he is of the mountains and knows well the need of his people.
But even before the settlement school had been thoroughly rooted there was the Moonlight School of Rowan County, Kentucky, for adult illiterates. It was a great, a magnificent undertaking by a mountain woman—Mrs. Cora Wilson Stewart, born in Rowan County. She had been a teacher in the wretched, poorly lighted one-room log school. Becoming county superintendent, she set about to lead out of ignorance and darkness the adult illiterates of her county. Happily she had been preceded in such an undertaking by a pioneer teacher in rugged Hocking County, Ohio, in the days of the Civil War. There Miss Kate Smith, scarcely in her teens, who saw her brothers shoulder their muskets and march off to the Civil War, took upon herself the task of teaching, first, a bound boy, an orphan lad bound by the state to a farmer. The lad later became a stowaway in a covered wagon in which the young teacher and her parents rode west. This lad in his teens was only one of many adult illiterates taught by the Ohio woman and her plan proved that it could be done. That boy, William Wright, became a Judge of the Court of Appeals.
With book-learning have come many broadening factors in the life of the southern mountaineer. His sons attend agricultural college, his daughters are active workers in the 4-H clubs. They return to the hillside farm to show their mothers how best to can fruit. The boys have learned how to improve and conserve the soil, how to save forests. The consolidated school has taught mountain children to mix with others. They have Girl Scout groups and Boy Scout groups; they learn self-government under trained leaders.
Above all, book-learning is swiftly wiping out the old suspicions and superstitions about the medical profession. Time was when there was but one doctor in all of Leslie County, Kentucky. Mountain mothers relied on the old midwife; infant mortality was appalling. Then came the Frontier Nursing School headed by Mrs. Mary Breckinridge. Her work is known throughout the breadth of the nation. The Frontier Nursing Service has the support of the leading people of the nation. Debutantes gladly give up a life of frivolity and ease to become trained in obstetrics and give their services to helping mountain mothers and babies. Its purpose was to combat the infant death rate in remote Kentucky mountain sections. The nurses ride on horseback and visit and care for mountain mothers. Mrs. Breckinridge herself was a nurse during the World War in France and went back to the Scottish Highlands—from which her kinsman Alexander Breckinridge came to settle in the Shenandoah in 1728—where she became a midwife.
Mountain folk usually are slow to take on new ways. But the wonders wrought through the Frontier Nursing Service they have “seen with their own eyes.”
Learning has brought about a great change for the better in the life of the mountain woman. Once we saw her lank, slatternly, meek, stoic—mother of a dozen or more, obeying with patient fortitude the will of her man. We saw too the pitiable child-bride marrying perhaps a man three times her age because he could take care of her. There being so many in the family Pappy and Mammy were glad to be rid of one of their flock. Though both pictures were often as overdrawn as that evoked by a daughter of the Blue Ridge—a whimsical picture of a pretty maid in full-skirted crinoline with a soft southernaccent—moonlight and honeysuckle, a gallant, goateed colonel paying court to her charm and beauty while he sips a mint julep. This picture and that of the snaggle-toothed mountain woman in bedraggled black calico can no more be taken for fact than that Jesse James is still holding up stagecoaches or that cowboys in high boots and leather breeches are daily wedding the rich easterners’ daughters who have come West.
There are well-organized centers: weaving centers that market the wares of mountain women all over the nation; music centers and recreational centers. Women and their daughters are better dressed and certainly they give more care to their appearance than the mountain woman did when she rode to the county seat on court day with a basket of eggs and butter and ginseng on one arm and a baby on the other.
She still knits and crochets and hooks rugs—not from leavings of the family’s wearing clothes—but from leavings she buys from the mills. She does not have to take her wares to the county seat—today she stretches up a clothesline across the front stoop, pins her rugs and lace on the line, and the passing motorist buys all that her busy hands can make.
The question is often asked: How does the mountain woman regard her right to vote? Generally she is unconcerned with the vote. But as time goes on, by reason of the many factors that enter into her new way of living, she is evidencing more interest, both in the county and state elections. Strangely enough, though the mountain woman went hesitantly to the polls, a Kentucky mountain woman, Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery, of Elliott County, was the first woman to be elected to the legislature south of the Mason and Dixon line. She was self-educated and fora number of years was rural correspondent for newspapers, which experience perhaps gave her a broad understanding of political matters and the incentive to enter the field. Hers was a distinctive service to the commonwealth and particularly to her sisters of the southern highlands, inasmuch as she was first of her sex to actually voice before a legislature the problems and needs of the mountain woman.
Today with rural electrification the mountain woman ceases to be a drudge. She is on a par with her sister of the level land.
She no longer stumbles wearily to the barn after dark with a battered lantern, its chimney blackened with smoke. She has only to switch on a light and turn to milking. Or if her household has progressed to dairy farming, as many of them have, finding the sale of milk to the city creameries more profitable than raising vegetables, she has only to attach the electric devices and the cows are milked mechanically. She sits no more at the churn, one hand gripping the dasher, the other holding a fretful babe to her breast. Now that unseen juice, or ’lectric, comes along the wire and into the new churn and there! Almost before you know it there is a plump roll of butter.
The whole family benefits from rural electrification. The youngest girl of the household is not reminded of the irksome task of cleaning and filling the lamps, trimming the wicks. What if the single bulb swinging from the middle of the ceiling is fly-specked! It still gives ample light for the room. The hazard of the overturned oil lamp and the fear of burning the house down are gone too. “I’d druther have ’lectric than a new cookstove or a saddle mare,” any mountain woman will tell you.
She is through with the back-breaking battling troughand the washboard. Her proudest possession and the greatest labor-saving device on the place is the electric washer. Carefully covered with a clean piece of bleach, it holds a distinguished place in the corner of the dining room when not in use. It is the first thing to be exhibited to the visitor.
But whenever progress brings, it likewise takes away.
The fireside gathering where the glowing logs provided light and cheer for the family circle, conducive to story and riddle and song, has almost reached the vanishing point. Instead, the young folks pile into the second-hand Ford and whiz off to town. They don’t wait for court week, when in other days the courthouse yard was the market place of the hillsman. Though the old courthouse still stands as it did in early days, the scene has changed. There is one ancient seat of justice in the Big Sandy country within sight of the spot where the first settlers built their fort for safety against Indian attack, and over the door these words catch the eye—
READER, WHERE WILT THOU SPEND ETERNITY?
READER, WHERE WILT THOU SPEND ETERNITY?
Young folks don’t seem to give it much thought. Just across the road (it is paved now) the raucous sound of the juke box is heard playing I Understand, Hut Sut, You Are My Sunshine and Booglie, Wooglie, Piggy. The jitterbugs are at it early and late. They know all the hits on the Hit Parade. They know Frankie Masters’ and Jimmy Dorsey’s latest records and the newest step and shake. If they ever tire, which is rarely, there are booths and stalls where they may sip a soda, drain a bottle of coke, crunch a sandwich, a yard-long hot dog, a hamburger. Or, if he is real sophisticated and she “has been farther under the house hunting eggs than some have been onthe railroad cars,” he will cautiously draw his hip flask, when the waiter or proprietor isn’t looking, and pour a snort of year-old or Granddad in the glass of cracked ice. Sure, you buy your cracked ice, what do you think this is? “Let’s go on to the Rainbow,” she suggests presently, when only cracked ice is left in the glass. “Rainbow? You got your rainbow right here in the juke box,” he answers. “I don’t mean no rainbow like’s on the groan box, and you know it.” Maybe they go, maybe they don’t. But things are surely changing along the once quiet mountain trail. Now if the lad is real devilish he will try a slug in the juke box instead of a coin. Then the proprietor drops his beaming smile and asserts his authority. A young stripling or two may drop in, stagging it. One gets an eye on a pretty girl dancing with her date. But just let him try to cut in. “Can’t you read?” With the proprietor’s husky voice the intruder feels at the same moment the proprietor’s firm hand upon his shoulder. “What’s eatin’ you? Can’t you read, I say!” The owner of the big voice and bigger fist points a warning finger to the sign on the wall—
NO STAG DANCING
NO STAG DANCING
The stag isn’t slow in being on his way. He and his pals pile into their car and head toward the next tavern.
The present generation of mountain youth may have lost their superstition but they will take a long chance on beating the pinball machine. They will play it for hours—until the last nickel is dropped in the slot because, “Yes siree, just last night at the Blue Moon I saw a fellow get the jackpot. Double handful of coin!”
A mountain girl once ashamed because her granny smoked her little clay pipe puffs a cigarette nonchalantlyheld between highly manicured fingertips. She will spend her last dollar for a permanent and lipstick. She would not be interested in the simple fireside games, Clap In and Clap Out, Post Office and Drop the Handkerchief. Such things are far too slow for her highstrung nerves these days.
However, community centers are trying valiantly to bring back square dancing and community singing. The effort is successful in some localities, particularly through North and South Carolina. Old-time singing school with the itinerant singing master has given place to singing societies that meet sometimes in the summer months on the courthouse square or indoors.
Religious customs, too, are becoming modernized. The foot-washing of the Regular Primitive Baptists, while it is still carried on in some of the mountain churches, lacks much of the solemnity and imposing dignity of bygone days. The church house itself is changed, which may account for much of the modification of customs. The log church is replaced with a modern structure of native stone. The walls are painted. There is a gas chandelier suspended from the ceiling. While there is still no elaborate, elevated pulpit, the floor of the front portion of the church where the faithful wash each other’s feet is today covered with linoleum. The long spotlessly white towel used for drying the feet of the meek has given place to a brightly colored green and red striped bath towel (basement special, or such as are found on the counters of the five and ten). The singing, instead of being the solemn chant of the sixth century to which mountain folk for generations adapted the words of their traditional hymns, is in swift tempo, almost jazz such as can be heard at any point on your radio dial any day in the week.
The jolt wagon, with its rows of straight hickory chairs, carrying the whole family to meeting with a well-filled basket with victuals for all, is a thing of the past. At a recent foot-washing down in the Georgia mountains there was but one wagon in front of the little church. A string of automobiles of all sizes and makes was strung along the road for a mile.
The solemn funeralizing with its simple beauty is almost a thing of the past in the southern mountains. Today it is accompanied by the barking of the hot-dog vendor, “Get your hot dogs here. A nice ice cold drink of Coca-Cola here! Here’s your Doctor Pepper! Cold orange drink!”
The decorations on the grave—once paper flowers made by loving hands—are garish factory-made flowers in cellophane covers. Mother’s picture in the glass-covered box beside her headstone is gone long ago. The favorite hymn is sometimes sung and a few of the old-time preachers survive to weep and pray and sing and offer words of praise for the long-departed friend. The present generation do not speak of the funeralizing. Today it is a memorial. Strangely enough, however, only a few miles from the heart of the Big Sandy country, a memorial service was held for O. O. McIntyre for the second time on August 11, 1940. A twilight memorial it was called and his good friends and close associates came to hear him eulogized.
The mountain preacher of yesterday is passing fast. Then, his was a manifold calling. When he traveled the lonely creek-bed road with his Bible in his saddlebags, he was the circuit rider bringing news of the outside world to the families along the widely scattered frontier. He, like the mountain doctor, was truly counselor and friend.The people looked to him to tell of things that would be happening in the near future. They hung upon his every word from the pulpit. His reasoning in spiritual matters was sound and his eloquence impelling. His sermons often combined quotations from the early writers of England, passages from Shakespeare, true echoes of Elizabethan English, as might be expected considering his ancestry. Words flowed freely from his lips. The mountain preacher to this day has a natural gift of oratory. It has been handed down through generations. He needs only the spur and the occasion to burst forth. The mountain preacher, as some may imagine, was not always untutored or illiterate—of the type we sometimes encounter today in remote mountain regions. In early days he was quite often both preacher and teacher, such as William E. Barton, father of Bruce Barton, who after preaching in the thinly settled parts of Knox County, Kentucky, became the pastor of a Chicago church in later years. Some of the early roving preachers even studied theology in the great centers of learning both in America and Europe.
At one time, even as late as the last quarter of a century, there were strait-laced Baptist preachers (my own blood kin among them) who would not permit an organ in the church. But today it is quite the vogue for young evangelistic couples to hold forth with piano-accordion and guitar. “It peps up the joiners,” the evangelist says. On the other hand, in remote churches, where preachers still hold that note-singing and hymn books with notes are the works of the Devil, these same fellows will play up the hysteria of the audience with the “Holy Bark,” the “And-ah,” “Yep, Yep,” and the “Holy Laugh,” chiefly at foot-washing ceremonies.
The number of young people, however, who cling tothe custom of foot-washing is comparatively small. One reason may be that they are too busy with other things, or that they consider such practices old-fashioned.
Mountain Men
Old Virginia had its Patrick Henry, the Blue Grass its Clays and Breckinridges, but the Big Sandy produced from its most rugged quarter as fine and noble timber as could be found throughout the breadth and width of the Blue Ridge Country.
Early in his youth Hugh Harkins came from Pennsylvania to settle in Floyd County in the heart of the Big Sandy. That was far back in the 1830’s. He knew the saddlery trade but the young man preferred the profession of law. So acquiring a couple volumes on practice and procedure he began to study for the bar. He built himself an office of stone which he helped to dig from the mountain side and with every spare dollar he bought more law books and timber land. He died in 1869, but by that time his grandson, Walter Scott Harkins, had a thirst to follow his footsteps. The boy, even before he was old enough to understand their meaning, listened avidly to the speeches of his grandfather in the courtrooms of the mountain counties. And when Walter Scott Harkins was only a strip of a lad he rode the unbeaten paths to courts of law with his law books in his saddlebags. If the day were fair he’d get off his horse, tether it to a tree and climb high on the ridge. There with statute or law reporter in hand he would read aloud for hours. Again he’d close the book and with head erect, hands behind him, young Harkins would repeat as much as he could remember of the text. Often he waxed enthusiastic. He longed to be anorator. Sometimes thoughtless companions would jeer at the young Demosthenes, even pelt him with acorns and pebbles from ambush. But Walter Scott Harkins wasn’t daunted by any such boyish pranks. He kept on orating.
In the meantime, as he rode the lonely mountain paths, he took notice of the fine timber, just as his grandfather had before him. He was admitted to the bar in 1877 and hung out his shingle at the door of his grandfather’s office. Like Hugh Harkins, the grandson also began investing his earnings, meager though they were, in timber land.
One summer evening near dusk the young lawyer was riding toward the mouth of Big Sandy when he was startled to see in the distance a giant tongue of flame shooting skyward. At first he thought there was fire on the mountain but he soon discovered that the flame did not spread but continued in a straight column upward. He sat motionless in the saddle for a moment. By this time darkness had descended. The young lawyer was fascinated by the brilliant flame and determined to test its strength. Taking a law book from his saddlebags he opened the volume and, to his surprise, was able to read the small type by the light of the distant flame with as great ease as though an oil lamp burned at his elbow. Then he recalled the story of how Dr. Walker, the English explorer, had once read his maps by the light of a burning spring. Unlike the early explorer young Harkins determined to do something about it. The legal mind of the lad spurred his zeal to find the cause of the illuminating flame.
Walter Scott Harkins not only found the cause but he probed the effect with fine results. With the aid of other interested persons he acquired mineral rights of lands in the Big Sandy country which included the burning spring,the like of which in the next decade was to illuminate towns and cities and operate industries as far removed as one hundred miles.
Moreover Walter Scott Harkins lived to see more than 75,000 acres of his own forest leveled, whereby he piled up a fortune that could scarcely be exhausted even unto the fifth generation of Harkinses.
On the window of his law office in Prestonsburg, Floyd County, Kentucky, appears in letters of gold, an unbroken line of five generations of Harkinses who have followed the practice of law. Likewise the Harkins’ descendants hold unbroken title to the largest acreage of timber land in the country. The virgin forest brought its owner more than $160,000 and the second growth is ready to cut.
Lumber companies bought 70,000 acres of forest and constructed their own railroads to carry out the timber. They calculated it would take about twenty-five years to cull out all the big timber and by that time there would be a second growth. Wasteful methods of lumbering, together with frequent forest fires and man’s utter disregard for the future, have already brought about the necessity for reforestation in many mountain sections. As far back as 1886 out of the Big Sandy alone was run $1,500,000 worth of timber.
Rafts of logs carpeted the Big Sandy River and at its mouth was the largest round timber market in the world. With its row of riverfront saloons Catlettsburg, between the Big Sandy and the Ohio Rivers, was then called the wettest spot on earth. Through its narrow streets strode loggers and raftsmen. Theirs was talk of cant hooks and spike poles, calipers and rafts. “You best come and have a drink down to Big Wayne’s that’ll put fire in your guts.”The boss wanted his whole crew to be merry, so the whole crew headed for Big Wayne Damron’s Black Diamond.
Today the old riverfront lives only in memory. That part of the county seat is a ghost town. Timbermen and loggers gather no more for revelry at the riverfront saloon. And should you ask the reason, the old river rat will answer with a slow-breaking smile, “See off yonder—locks and dams! Can’t run the logs through that!”
Forests that were felled a quarter of a century ago are once again ready for the woodsman’s ax.
The present generation of timbermen look upon a very different scene. Their dim-eyed grandparents complacently beheld the push boat, that crude ark which was urged along the stream by means of long poles. It gave way to shallow drift steamers. And in turn the steamers were shoved aside for the railroad which was quicker. The boats,Red Buck,Dew Drop, once the pride of the river, soon went to anchor and deterioration.
The county seat changed as well. Once women came to do their trading there with homemade basket, filled with eggs, butter, ginseng which they swapped for fixings, thread, and calico. They motor in now to shop.
Typical of the changing scene is the town of Prestonsburg in Floyd County. It became a county seat in 1799 and was once called Spurlock Station. Today it is a thriving city with a country club. Daughters of once rugged farmers and struggling country lawyers now have a social position to maintain.
Mountain women are becoming class conscious! More’s the pity.
Coal
It is often said, “Old mother nature must have laughed heartily at the pioneer, who in his mad rush to go west hurried down through the wide troughs between the mountains, hurrying on through the valleys, passing unheeded the wealth in forests on either side, the wealth in minerals under his very feet.” But there came a time when the mountain men discovered the treasure.
Over in Johnson County, adjoining Floyd, where Walter Scott Harkins had an eye for timber, his young friend was being twitted for a different reason. “John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo,” they’d string out his long name, “when you’re cooped up in the poorhouse or the lunatic asylum, you can’t say we didn’t warn you to quit digging around trying to find a fortune under the ground.”
But young Mayo, like his friend Harkins the lawyer, would only say, thumbs hooked in suspenders, “He who laughs last, laughs best.”
Some of his youthful companions continued to poke fun but John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo turned them a deaf ear. On foot he trudged endless miles when he was a poor lad, or rode a scrubby nag along the Warrior’s Path, always seeking coal deposits, pleading with landowners for leases and options on acreage he knew to be rich in minerals. He surmounted seemingly impossible barriers, even having legislation enacted to set aside Virginia land grants. He tapped hidden treasures, developed the wealth of the Big Sandy country that had been locked in mountain fastnesses for centuries. Through his vision, thriving cities blossom where once was wilderness.
The United States Geological Survey shows one eighthof the total coal area of the nation to be in this region; it supplies nearly one quarter of all the country’s bituminous coal.
Public Works
Only in recent years has the mountaineer begun to forsake his cove, however unproductive the earth may be, for the valley and public works. Indeed mountain folk long looked down on their own who sought employment at public works, mines, lumber camps, steel mills. They decried any employment away from the hillside farm, because it meant to them being an underling. No mountaineer ever wanted to be company-owned. Leastwise none of the Wellfords of Laurel Creek. But Clate, youngest of Mark Wellford’s family, lured by the promise of big cash money, decided to quit the farm and take his wife and little family down to the foothills. “There’s a good mine there, pays good money, and there’s a good mine boss on the job,” so Clate was told. Some two years later Clate, a weary figure, emerged one evening from the company commissary. His face was smudged with coal dust. A miner’s lamp still flickered on his grimy cap. He carried a dinner bucket and the baby on one arm. Over his shoulder hung a gunnysack that bulged with canned goods and a poke of meal. At his heels followed his bedraggled, snaggle-toothed wife, a babe in her arms and another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet the roundedarms—her sleeves were rolled to the elbow—looked youthful.
Clate halted a few minutes to talk to another miner, a boy in his teens. “What’d you load today?” the younger asked after casual greetings. “’Tarnal buggy busted a dozen times, held me back,” Clate complained, shifting the dinner pail and the baby. “Always something to hold a man back.” “I’m figuring on going to Georgia,” the young lad sounded hopeful. “Got a buddy down there in the steel mill. Beats the mines any day.” He saw some young friends across the street and hurried to join them.
“Come on, Phoebe!” Clate called over his shoulder to his wife, “get a mosey on you. I’m hongry. And ’ginst you throw a snack of grub together it’ll be bedtime. An’ before you know it, it’s time to get up and hit for the hill again.” He plodded on up the winding path to a row of shacks. His little family followed.
The row of dilapidated shacks where the miners lived was clinging to the mountain side at the rear, while the fronts were propped up with rough posts. They were all alike with patched rubberoid roofs, broken tile chimneys, windows with broken panes. Rough plank houses unpainted, though here and there a board showed traces of once having been red or brown. Between the houses at rare intervals a fence post remained. But the pickets had long since been torn away to fire the cookstove or grate. There were no gardens. Coal companies did not encourage gardening. Miners and their families lived out of cans, and canned goods come high at the company’s commissary.
A tipple near the drift mouth of the mine belched coal and coal dust day after day. When Phoebe—you’d never have known her for the pretty girl she used to be far back in the Blue Ridge—rubbed out a washing on thewashboard, hung it to dry on the wire line stretched from the back door to a nail on the side of the out-building, she knew that every rag she rubbed and boiled and blued would be grimy with coal dust before it dried. What was she to do about it? Where else could the wash be hung? Once Phoebe thought she had found the right place. A grassy plot quite hidden beyond a clump of trees. She put the wet garments in a basket and carried them off to dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up. “What’s the big idea?” he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal’s Fork of Greasy Creek, never having heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, “I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Don’t try to get fresh,” the fellow scowled. “Don’t you know this ground is company-owned? The big boss keeps this plot for his saddle horse to graze on. Pick up your rags and beat it!”
She understood from the gesture the meaning of beat it and obeyed in haste.
There was little room to stretch up a line indoors, though she did sometimes in the winter when the backyard was too sloppy to walk in. Clate Wellford’s was one of the smaller shacks, a room with a lean-to kitchen. The others, with two rooms, cost more. Besides there were other things to be taken out of date’s pay envelope before it reached him; there were electric light, coal, the store bill, and the company doctor.
“None of my folks have been sick. We’ve never even set eyes on the doctor,” Clate complained to the script clerk on the first payday.
“What of it?” the script clerk replied. “You’d be runningquick enough for the doctor if one of your kids or your old woman got sick or met with an accident, wouldn’t you? The doctor’s got to live same as the rest of us.”
So the miner stumbled out with no more to say. Sometimes he’d vent his spleen upon his wife. “You wuz the one that wanted to come here! Wisht I’d never married. A man can’t get nowheres with a wife and young ones on his hands.” And the wife, remembering the way of mountain women, offered no word of argument.
When the owners of the coal operation came from the East to check up output and earnings they didn’t take time to make a tour of inspection of the shacks. Certainly they had no time to listen to complaints of miners.
Lured by the promise of big money Clate Wellford, like many other mountain men, forsook the familiar life of his own creek for the strange work-a-day of the mining camp.
Back on Shoal’s Fork of Greasy Creek there was always milk a-plenty to drink. Bless you, Clate knew the time when he’d carried buckets full of half-sour milk to the hogs. How they guzzled it! Here there was never a drop of cow’s milk to drink. You got it in cans—thick, condensed, sickeningly sweet. Couldn’t fool the children, not even when you thinned it with water. “It don’t taste like Bossy’s milk,” the youngsters shoved it away.
What was more, back on Shoal’s Fork there was always fried chicken in the spring. All you could eat. Turkey and goose and duck, if you chose, through the winter and plenty of ham meat. There was never a day date’s folks couldn’t go out into the garden and bring in beans, beets, corn, and cabbage. He’d never known a time when there were not potatoes and turnips the year round. The Wellfords had come to take such things for granted. But herein the coal camp you could walk the full length of the place from the last ramshackle house on down to the commissary and never see a bed of onions and lettuce. The shacks were so close together there was no room for a garden, even if the company had permitted it.
“That’s company-owned!” the boss growled at Clate that time he was trying to break up the hard crusty earth with a hoe.
“I’ve got my own onion sets,” Clate tried to explain. “My folks fetched ’em down.”
“Who cares?” the company boss snarled. “What you reckon the company’s running a commissary for? The store manager can sell you onions—ready to eat.”
So the miner didn’t set out an onion bed.
Again, Clate found some old warped planks outside the drift mouth of the mine; he brought them home and was building a pigpen. The mine boss came charging down upon him.
“What you doing with the company’s planks?”
The frightened Clate tried to explain that he had supposed the wood thrown aside was useless and that he was making ready for the young shoat his folks meant to bring him.
“What you suppose the company would do if every miner packed off planks and posts that he happens to see laying around?” he eyed Clate suspiciously. “We’d soon shut down, that’s what would happen. And as for meat. You can buy sow-belly and bologna at the commissary.” There was something more. “If you want to keep out of trouble and don’t want a couple bucks taken out of your pay, you better get them planks and posts back where you found them!”
The miner’s shack was perched on such high stilts thatthe wind whistled underneath the floor until it felt like ice to the bare feet of the children. It took a lot of coal in the grate and the kitchen stove to keep the place halfway warm. The children were sick all through the winter. Now and then the company doctor stopped in on his rounds of the coal camp to leave calomel and quinine.
With the birth of her last baby, Clate’s wife got down with a bealed breast after she had been up and about for a week. “I’m bound to hire someone,” Clate told his wife. So he hired Liz Elswick to come and do the cooking, washing, and ironing and to look after the children.
Out on Shoal’s Fork neighbor women came eagerly to help each other in case of sickness.
Though it was not much they had to pay Liz—she took it out in trade at the store, the makings of a calico dress, a pair of shoes—it was a hardship on the Wellfords. For Liz Elswick, like other women in a coal camp, never having handled real money, knew little of cost. Nor did she know how to supply the simple needs of the family. Phoebe was too ill to offer a word of advice, poor though it would have been. So, before long, Clate was behind with his store bill. Or to put it the other way around, for the company always took theirs first, Clate had nothing left in his pay envelope on payday.
Then, when he might have had a few dollars coming, something else would happen: shoes would be worn out, he’d have to buy new ones for the children couldn’t go barefoot in the winter. He himself had to wear heavy boots in the mine in order to work at all, for Clate had to stand in water most of the time when he picked or loaded. Another time the house caught fire and burned up their beds, chairs, everything. Even though he had steady work that month he had to sell his time to thescript clerk in order to get cash to replace his loss. A buddy in the mine was selling out his few possessions at a sacrifice because his wife had run off with a Hunkie. The Hungarian showed the faithless creature a billfold with greenbacks in it, promised her a silk dress and a permanent.
“Why don’t you buy new furniture at the commissary?” the script clerk wanted to know of Clate. “There are beds and chairs, bureaus and tables. Get them on time.”
“I can’t afford it,” Clate said honestly.
So, after much bickering, the company’s script clerk offered to give the miner script for his time.
“My buddy has to have cash money,” Clate argued. “He’s quitting. Going back to his folks over in Ohio.”
Clate found out that when he sold his time he got only about fifty cents for a dollar.
“What you think I’m accommodating you for?” the company’s script clerk wanted to know. “I’m not out for my health. Course if you don’t want to take it”—he shoved the money halfway across the counter to Clate—“you don’t have to. There are plenty of fellows who are glad to sell their time.”
There was nothing left for Clate to do. He and his family had to have the bare necessities, bed, table, chairs.
Soon he was in the category with the other miners, always behind, always overdrawn, always selling his time before payday. Soon he was getting an empty envelope with a lot of figures marked on the outside. Clate was company-owned! If he lived to be a hundred he’d never be paid out.
Though Clate Wellford and the other coal miners never heard the word redemptioner and indent, they were not unlike those pioneer victims of unscrupulous subordinates.Men in bondage like the sharecropper of the Deep South, the Okie of the West.
How different the children of the coal field looked to those along the creeks in the shady hollows of the Blue Ridge!
In the coal camps they were unkempt and bony, in dirty, ragged garments. They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud holes.
Why do they continue to live in such squalor and in bondage? Why don’t they move away?
If a miner should decide to move out, he has no means of getting his few belongings to the railroad spur some distance from the camp, for he has neither team nor wagon. All these are company-owned. The company, which controls the railroad spur, also has control too over the boxcars that are on the track. Only the company can make requisition for an empty boxcar. If a miner wants to move he cannot even get space, though he is willing to pay for it, in a boxcar to have his goods hauled out.
He stays on defeated and discouraged.
If, however, he does quit one coal camp and get out he is unskilled in other labor and if he should try to evade his store and other obligations with one coal company, the office employees have a way of passing on the information to another operation. There are ways of putting a laborer on the blacklist.
But why should he try to move on? Word comes back to the miner from other buddies who have tried other camps. “They’re all the same. Might as well stay where you are.”
Behind every shack is a dump heap of cans, coal ashes, potato peel, coffee grounds, and old shoes.
Rarely was the voice of the miner’s wife raised in song as she plodded through her daily drudgery. Now and then the young folks could be heard singing—but not an ancient ballad. Rather it was a rakish song picked up from drummers coming through the mining camps who sold their inferior wares to the commissary manager.
There was a church propped up on the hillside. But meeting usually broke up with the arrest of some of the young fellows who didn’t try hard enough to suppress a laugh when the camp harlot went to the mourner’s bench, or when some old creature too deaf to hear a word the preacher said went hobbling toward the front. Sometimes an older miner, who for the sheer joy of expressing a long-pent-up feeling, shouted “Praise the Lord!”, was dragged out by a deputy sheriff, along with the young bloods, on a charge of disturbing religious worship.
The limb of the law usually knew who had a few dollars left from the week’s pay. The law knew too that a miner preferred to pay a fine rather than lie in jail and lose time on the job next day.
There was no pleasant diversion around the coal camp for womenfolk and children, no happy gatherings such as the play party, a quilting, an old-time square dance. In their drab surroundings, little wonder men and women grew old before their time.
That was yesterday. Today there are model mining towns throughout the coal fields. Holden in West Virginia even has swimming pools and modern cottages for its miners. A miner can work on the side too—it is not uncommon to see signs over his cottage or barn door reading, “Painting and Paper Hanging,” “Decorating.” Thereare thrifty vegetable gardens, and miners’ wives vie with each other in the product of their flower gardens. Holden is sometimes called the Model Mining Town of America. It has welcomed visitors from all over the land.
In Harlan, Kentucky, once the center of many stormy battles between miners and operators, the county crowned a Coal Queen on August 23, 1941, commemorating the first shipment of coal thirty years previously. The queen, a pretty eighteen-year-old high school girl, won the title from six other contestants, enthroned on a replica of the railroad car which hauled out the county’s first coal. As part of the celebration a $1500 public drinking fountain was dedicated and speakers hailed the economic progress of Harlan County since 1911. Each day 1200 railroad cars loaded with coal leave the county.
It was an all-day program being sponsored by the Harlan Mining Institute safety organization in co-operation with the County Coal Operators Association.
Not only were mining officials present from many points but politicians as well were present, including Mrs. Herbert C. Cawood, Republican nominee for sheriff, a sister of the crowned coal queen.