Primary Sources: Energy: Coal

"This project of tapes is focused on the coal camp of Barthell, founded in 1901 in McCreary County, Kentucky as the first camp of the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. Stearns later became one of the three largest coal producers in the United States in the 1920s. Former residents provide information on the physical layout of the camp and camp life; material culture and the company story; mining work routines, accidents, company policies; recreational activities, schools, and churches; and migrations out of the camps in the 1950s and 1960s."

An ehistory exhibit including things such as: An Anthracite Miner's Story (1902); A description of the life of a miner in 1902; etc.

"Richard L. Davis, the most important black leader of Ohio’s miners, was called upon frequently in the 1880s and 1890s to serve as a spokesman for the many black miners in his home state, as well as the thousands more who labored in Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia. He was also called upon to serve as an intermediary between black rank-and-file miners and the white majority and white national leadership of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), dealing with such issues as black participation in the union, strike breaking by African Americans, and the racist attitudes of many rank-and-file white miners toward African Americans. (Davis was twice elected to the UMWA’s executive board.) In this series of six letters submitted in 1891 to the National Labor Tribune, Davis reflected on the larger meaning and purpose of interracial unionism in an era of rising racial tensions and institutionalized discrimination." GMU History Matters

"The labor struggles of the early 20th century, many of which ended in violence and death, engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations. The most important—the Commission on Industrial Relations—was appointed by newly elected Democratic president Woodrow Wilson early in 1913. The commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when a coal strike erupted in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado. One of the most famous accounts of what came to be called the “Ludlow massacre” was the statement of a young electrical engineer, Godfrey Irwin, who was traveling through southern Colorado and provided an eyewitness account to a New York World reporter, reproduced here." GMU History Matters

"This project concerns the social and cultural history of coal communities in eastern Kentucky, with emphasis on Auxier and Van Lear. Family issues and gender roles are explored, as well as modernization, consumerism, religion, farm life, class distinctions, poverty, the Great Depression, company stores, birth control, divorce, company doctors, immigrants, home brew, homosexuality, blacks, the Ku Klux Klan, and the roles of women in the community. Also discussed are the North East Coal Company, the South East Coal Company, the Henry Clay Coal Mine, the Consolidated Coal Company, the Pittsburg Coal Company, mine safety, the 1922 strike, black lung, Jenny Wiley State Park, Alice Lloyd College, and the Kentucky towns of Ligon, Wheelwright, and McRoberts. Narrators talk about Dr. B. F. Wright, Harry LaViers, Sr., John C. C. Mayo, John L. Lewis, George Titler, and others associated with the coal industry."

Public Law 91-173,
as amended by Public Law 95-164

"An archive of documents created by major fossil fuel companies and associated groups related to their manufacturing, marketing, communications and scientific research, hosted by the UCSF Library. "

"This project documents the lives of immigrant coal miners in eastern Kentucky. In the early twentieth century, people from Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Scotland, Russia, and Yugoslavia settled in Hazard, Himlerville (now Beauty), Jackson, Lynch, and other eastern Kentucky towns. Immigrants and their descendants discuss schools, prejudice and other problems they have experienced, the roles of women in mining camps, social activities, ethnic clubs, moonshine, World War II, housing, coal mining, mechanization, union activities, the United Mine Workers of America, Miners for Democracy, United States Steel, wages, mine safety, company stores, scrip, and mine bosses."

"documents and images from Pennsylvania's renown coal mining industry"

"The violent labor struggles of the early 20th century engendered concern at all levels of society and led to the appointment of a federal Commission on Industrial Relations in early 1913. Headed by Kansas City lawyer-reformer Frank Walsh, the commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when the southern Colorado coal strike erupted late in 1913. The killing of three women and eleven children at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado, on Easter night, 1914, sent shock waves across the country. After the “Ludlow massacre,” as it came to be known, the commission held public hearings in Colorado where they heard horror stories about the brutality and rapacity of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the region’s largest operator of coal mines. These articles from the New York Times described the testimony of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., before the commission, where he denied any knowledge of his company’s brutal actions against the Ludlow strikers." GMU History Matters

A gateway to digitized collections of items housed in Kentucky archives.

"For early twentieth-century Progressive reformers committed to social justice, widespread child labor—especially in coal mines, textile mills, and department stores—was particularly disturbing. And as with other Progressive crusades, the exposé was a favorite tool. Probably the most influential and certainly the most widely read of the Progressive-era exposés of child labor was John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906). Spargo was a British granite cutter who became a union organizer and socialist and gained his formal education through extension courses at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1901, he emigrated to the United States where he became a leader of the conservative wing of the American Socialist Party. In the following excerpt, Spargo described work at the coal breaker, the area outside the mine where coal was sorted and graded, mostly by young children." GMU History Matters

"This digital collection includes materials related to the Molly Maguires found in the Reading Company records at Hagley. The Molly Maguires were an Irish secret society active among coal miners in Pennsylvania during the late nineteenth century. Included in the collection are correspondence, operatives’ reports, statements and accounts, and memoranda documenting the services rendered by Pinkerton's National Detective Agency to the Reading regarding the Molly Maguires."

"In 1938, the US Department of Labor released this film aimed at preventing the occupational disease of silicosis. It was produced in response to the national outcry over the death of more than 500 workers at Union Carbide's Hawks Nest Tunnel project near Gauley Bridge West Virginia in the early 1930s."

"The often violent labor struggles of the early 20th century engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations, including the federal Commission on Industrial Relations, appointed in 1913. The commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when a coal strike broke out in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado.The United Mine Workers of America, the union that represented the striking Colorado miners, quickly printed and sold (for 25 cents) thousands of copies of a pamphlet (excerpted here) entitled The Ludlow Massacre by Walter Fink, director of publicity of UMWA District 15. In addition to providing a dramatic retelling of the events leading up to the tragedy, the title of the pamphlet became the commonly accepted term for the event." GMU History Matters

"The Westmoreland Coal Company is the oldest independent bituminous coal producer in the United States and usually ranks among the top twenty producers in terms of output and sales. This collection has not been digitized in its entirety. The online collection primarily comprises photographs of the Stonega Coke and Coal Company mine and hospital at Stonega, Virginia as well as images related to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company."

"This project consists of interviews concerning women coal miners in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Topics include coal mining, coal camps, unions, Great Depression, sexism, poverty, Native Americans in Appalachia, economic conditions, political activism, and environmental pollution."

"Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust (found in sand, quartz, and granite), became a national cause célèbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. While silicosis was a crisis for the federal government, business, and insurance companies as well as labor organizations, its most devastating effects were on the workers who contracted the disease and the families and communities who watched previously healthy men waste away and die. The lasting impact that the silicosis “plague” had on individual workers’ lives in the 1930s is evident here in Laurie Mercier’s 1981 interview with Helen Raymond, who opened a tavern that catered to miners in Virginia City, Montana, in 1934."

"The brutal southern Colorado coal strike reached its nadir on Easter night, 1914, with the horrendous deaths by fire of three women and eleven children at the hands of the Colorado state militia. Mary Thomas, whose husband was on strike, was interviewed at age eighty eight by historian Sherna Gluck in 1974 for the Feminist History Research Project. Thomas vividly recalled the horror of the infamous Ludlow Massacre, described her efforts to save the lives of women and children by hiding them in a dry well, and her jailing in the aftermath the massacre. She was the only woman strike supporter to be jailed during the strike." GMU History Matters

"Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite—became a national cause célèbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. In 1938 the federal government declared silicosis AmericaÌs number one industrial health problem and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a National Silicosis Conference in Washington, D.C. Despite such attempts to deal with the silicosis crisis, workers continued to complain of their plight. Hundreds of letters were sent to federal officials from across the country. The three letters included here (sent to Secretary Perkins) attested to workers’ desperation and to their confidence that the government would agree to investigate. "

"Starting in the mid-19th century, industrial methods of producing goods began to overtake the small-scale methods of artisans and apprentices. The artisanal ideal of independence was eroded by the replacement of craft work by machine work, strict new work rules, and the growth of child labor. For miners and some other workers, the prevalence of store pay (wages paid only as credit), scrip wages (money redeemable only by the company), and company stores intensified their dependence on employers. If company stores lacked the items that miners wanted, they had no alternative but to do without. In these three excerpts from the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics First Annual Report in 1878, miners complained about the stranglehold that company-owned stores, scrip wages, and store pay had on the welfare and independence of coal and iron ore workers in the Buckeye State. " GMU HIstory Matters

"The sudden revival of the United Mine Workers of America in 1933 was a remarkable story. In late 1932 the UMWA was a shambles, yet by the fall of 1933 the miners’ union had won a contract that guaranteed it recognition and stability in the hitherto nonunion southern Appalachian coal fields and was perhaps in the strongest position of its history. There was much debate over who had been the architect of this revival: some miners credited Franklin D. Roosevelt while others felt that the President of the UMWA, John L. Lewis, was the truly instrumental leader. For Buster Ratliff, interviewed by Nyoka Hawkins in 1987, the coming of unionization was the end of “slavery”and the emancipators were both John L. Lewis and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as another UMWA leader, Tom Raney."

"The sudden revival of the United Mine Workers of America in 1933 was a remarkable story. In late 1932 the UMWA was practically defunct, yet by the fall of 1933 it was in the strongest position in its history. Perhaps the best historical narrative of the revival of UMWA was penned in lyrical form by an African-American former coal miner called “Uncle George” Jones. Jones had started working as a miner in 1889 at age seventeen but in 1914 blindness forced him out of the Alabama mines. Long known for his singing in church choirs, down in the mines, and on the picket line. Jones’ “This Is What the Union Done” not only expressed the miners’ sense of the role that Roosevelt and Lewis played in the union revival; it also beautifully captures a sense of the transformation when miners “got the union back again!” "