The Company Town (12 page)

Appalachian coal production tripled in the 1890s, then increased fivefold up to 1930, at which point it constituted 80 percent of U.S. production. More than five hundred coal-company towns existed there by the 1920s, housing more than two-thirds of the area's miners (80 percent in West Virginia).
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Hundreds of independent coal operators employing from ten to thirty miners joined the coal rush, leasing land from the big
landholders. Operators could get a mine off the ground with as little as $20,000 or $30,000 in seed money. “All that was required was to build houses for the miners, a store to supply them, and a tipple structure to dump the coal into railway cars,” observed one operator. A coal camp might begin with little more than the mine, a company office, and a commissary or grocery store. Within a year or so, miners who'd been living in tents would be able to move into rudimentary housing, and if things went well, in time more family dwellings would appear along with schools and maybe churches. (Miners were never particularly keen on churchgoing.)
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The bituminous seams were too widely dispersed to allow monopoly control, and mines were fiercely competitive. Even so, big operators dominated coal production in Appalachia, among them the U.S. Coal and Oil Co., predecessor of the Island Creek Coal Co., whose beachhead was Logan County, West Virginia. By 1910, mines there were producing more than 2 million tons of coal each year. The Pennsylvania Railroad and its ally, U.S. Steel, controlled the Flat Top-Pocahontas region of Virginia. U.S. Steel subsidiary U.S. Coal and Coke Co. extracted 5 million tons of coal annually from West Virginia mines, and Consolidation Coal Co. of Maryland led the way in the Elkhorn field area of Kentucky, with its operations center located in the model company town of Jenkins.
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Model towns with such amenities as comfortable housing, recreation facilities, and well-laid-out streets and parks composed only 2 percent of Appalachia's company towns. As might be expected, many of these were the properties of the biggest companies, which could afford generosity toward their employees. Jenkins, Kentucky, for example, provided garbage collection and sewers. Holden, West Virginia, owned by the Island Creek Coal Co., had a theater, a library, two bowling alleys, and a clubhouse with showers. Widen, West Virginia, owned by the Elk River Coal & Lumber Co., featured well-run schools, a swimming pool, a hospital, and a YMCA that included a bowling alley, a basketball court, and a theater.
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But big operators didn't necessarily take more care with their towns. Wheelwright, Kentucky, for instance, was at various periods the property of Consolidation Coal affiliate Elkhorn Coal Corp., Inland Steel, and Island Creek Coal Co. Elkhorn, which operated the community between
1916 and 1930, offered the least in the way of development, with streets left unpaved and garbage simply dumped in a nearby hollow. White children attended a four-room schoolhouse, while black children had no school at all. Inland Steel, the proprietor of Wheelwright between 1930 and 1963, saw improvements as good for business. That company reconditioned four hundred houses, installing flush toilets among other things; built a water-filtration plant for the town; equipped the mines with better ventilation; and constructed a bathhouse with showers for miners. In 1965, Island Creek took over, and it showed no interest in Wheelwright, auctioning off much of its housing.
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In Colorado, model towns were built specifically to undercut worker militancy and labor organization. In 1894, with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) having called for a strike that led 125,000 workers in the East and Midwest to put down tools, coal miners in Colorado voted for a one-week sympathy strike. An unusual feature of the Colorado walkout were cross-country marches in which some 1,200 miners trekked across perhaps one hundred miles of countryside, from Fremont County down to Las Animas County. With flags flying and brass bands leading the way, they traveled from town to town urging miners to stop work. They often succeeded, as at Walsenburg, where 115 walked out and joined the marchers. The mining giant of the area, Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI), had over 7,000 employees and nearly 72,000 acres of coal land—so it had much at stake. It fought back with injunctions and path-blocking deputy sheriffs. But the most effective mechanism, the area's coal operators discovered, was the closed company town.

Often the Colorado mine companies had allowed and even encouraged workers to build their own homes on company land. Open camps such as Coal Creek, Colorado, consisted mostly of such worker-owned housing, ranging from log cabins to Mexican adobes. Other towns, including Rouse and Sopris, were “closed,” resembling the coal towns in Pennsylvania and Appalachia. The 1894 marches generally stalled at the borders of such closed camps. In the 1900s, companies in Colorado began expanding the number of such places and upgrading their housing. At Redstone, for instance, architect Theodore Davis Boal built
eighty-five arts-and-crafts-inspired cottages for CFI. The town also featured hydroelectric power, clean water, a modern school and clubhouse, a theater, a well-stocked store, and more. CFI magnate John Osgood figured that such benevolent gestures would be the undoing of unionism, and his company continued the model-town movement with settlements at Primero, Segundo, Tercio, Cuarto, Quinto, and Sexto. American Smelting and Refining Co.'s Cokedale featured electric streetlights and other modern amenities. Such towns offered kindergarten and adult-education classes, social clubs, and lectures on topics ranging from European art to germ theory.

But the iron fist inside the velvet glove was not hard to find: Colorado's model towns were generally surrounded by barbed-wire fences and patrolled by camp marshals and mine guards. There was surveillance in every town and saloon. Undesirables, from peddlers to state labor officials, were kept out. UMWA organizers were followed and harassed: “There was never a time that I wasn't followed constantly by one to three guards,” testified District 15 president John McLennan. The companies bribed voters to control local elections, and as in Logan County, West Virginia, local sheriffs did their bidding.
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Kentucky's coalfields—among the most famous nationally perhaps due to the frightening level of conflict in Harlan County—were among the last to be developed. The L&N, the Lexington & Eastern Railroad, and the Baltimore & Ohio made their way into eleven counties in the eastern part of the state on the eve of World War I. The L&N's extension to the head of the Cumberland River in Harlan County signified the final opening of the area, and by 1914, miners were hauling over a million tons of coal.

Thousands of miners moved in, tripling the area's population by 1920 and doubling it again by 1930. Harlan (confusingly, the name of both the county and the town formerly known as Mt. Pleasant) became the leading coal-producing area in the state, with the largest operations near the town of Benham, which was under the control of Wisconsin Steel Co., a subsidiary of International Harvester Co. Two miles from Benham, U.S. Steel subsidiary U.S. Coal & Coke Co. built the community
of Lynch, ultimately constructing 2,000 buildings and, by 1919, housing a population of 10,000. All the coal from Lynch was sent to another company town—Gary, Indiana, home of giant steel mills run by U.S. Steel.
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Harry M. Caudill, a lawyer, Kentucky state legislator, and lifelong resident of Letcher County, chronicled developments in Kentucky. He felt the coal companies took far more than they gave to the Appalachian region—if indeed they gave it anything at all. Caudill's
Night Comes to the Cumberlands
(1963), one of eight books he wrote about Kentucky and what he considered its sad fate, is a Kennedy-era classic that, like Michael Harrington's
The Other America
, helped U.S. progressives “rediscover” poverty and build a movement that shook the country's middle-class complacency.

Caudill took note of the smaller coal towns, which “copied in the most shabby fashion” the pattern laid down by the likes of Lynch and Benham. In places with “a variety of startling names—such as Neon, Blackey, Cumberland, Hellier, Hi-Hat, Garrett, Whitaker, Chevrolet, and Jeff,” houses were built for miners on which “not a dollar was spent . . . beyond the barest necessity” and which “were slums as soon as they were occupied.” He excoriated those he called “the Big Bosses,” who he said “exercised absolute dominion over the towns they had built,” whether these were the so-called model communities or “a cluster of thirty or forty grimy shacks centering about a rickety commissary and tipple.” In such locations, Caudill wrote,

Daily life in these communities was unremittingly grim, according to Caudill, plagued by the “monstrous coaldust genie” that hovered in the air above the tipple and “crept into every nook and cranny in the town.” Then there were the huge slate dumps—mountains of unwanted rock and low-grade coal that arose near every tipple and that tended to spontaneously burst into flames, with accompanying clouds of sulfurous, oily smoke. In the polluted atmosphere, paint peeled from the walls of houses, eyes and throats ached, and “communities gradually took on that sickly hue which miners called ‘coal-camp gray.'”
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With their solid grip on the state's politicians, the companies ensured that taxes stayed low—with the effect that infrastructure was little developed and state governments were mired in debt, he wrote. Caudill traced the coal industry's history, including its World War I boom, Depression-era bust, World War II revival, and ultimate collapse. But perhaps the author's most adamant and angry prose focuses on the area's environmental devastation. “Nowhere in the [Cumberland] plateau does a single tract of virgin forest remain,” he wrote. “Hundreds of worked-out mines have become subterranean lakes. . . . The valleys are sprinkled with hideous car dumps where Fords, Chevrolets, Cadillacs and once magnificent limousines lie piled in rusty array. As eyesores they are second only to the ghastly trash dumps . . . [that] abound on roadside and stream-bank.” For all of this, Caudill left little doubt, it was the Big Bosses who deserved the blame—the corporations that siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of resources and treated the Appalachian region as “a colonial appendage of the industrial East and Middle West.”
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Caudill remained an outspoken rebel until his self-inflicted death in 1990. (Parkinson's, it seemed, had sapped his will to live.) In a 1975 interview with
Mother Earth News
, he contrasted the fate of Switzerland, one of the world's richest countries despite its natural handicaps, and that of West Virginia, one of the poorest areas in the United States despite its natural wealth. His bête noire had become the strip miners, who he felt had taken up where the previous generation of coal operators had left off. The impoverishment of the Appalachian region could have been avoided, he insisted, had the states simply collected a very small tax, as little as 10 cents per ton, on the coal moving out of the area and used it to
finance public education. “We've got everything in the world here in these mountains that's required to build anything we want to build except the willpower and the mind,” he concluded.
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