Coal Towns and Mill Towns

In November, I had the honor of closing the annual Sherwood Anderson Festival in Marion, VA with a presentation on Sherwood and two of his women. One was Eleanor, of course, his last wife and the woman who both inspired him in his last years and who fought to keep alive his memory until her own death in 1985. Eleanor knew Sherwood’s gift, perhaps more than even he did, and she opened doors for Sherwood in a way that he had not seen before. She took him to the mill towns up and down the southern East Coast, where the textile industry had permanently changed the dynamics of southern labor, and put women and children in working conditions no one would accept today. She showed him the sweatshops where mostly women and girls worked, since the pay was so low that men found it too demeaning to work there. Consequently, a large number of the working families were headed by “mill daddies,” men who stayed home while their wives and daughters went off to work long hours in the mills, breathing cotton dust all day, and suffering horrible wounds on a daily basis.

These men were brought up in an environment that paid homage to strong men, men who were the breadwinners and protectors of their families, and who had extended that sense of guardianship to their country during the Civil War and who risked everything for that philosophy. But later generations, who had no memory of the fleeting glory their grandfathers gained at Manassas or Chancellorsville, were suddenly faced with no way of making a living on the hardscrabble farms they had in the hill and plains of the South. Without gainful employment, these men seemed to have no choice but to allow their wives to go to work and they sat home brooding as drinking and violence became rampant.

This situation led to the other woman I talked about in my presentation: a fictional character named Kit Brandon, who was the subject of Sherwood’s last book. In that book, which was a failure at the time, Kit escapes the stultifying existence of mill life and becomes a moon-runner, someone who hauls moonshine out of the hills to the mill towns, where mill daddies buy up the product with the puny wages their women eke out while working their dangerous jobs. Although Kit Brandon was a fictional character, there was a real lady moon-runner who was famous in Southwest Virginia during that period and proudly displayed her diamond-encrusted teeth on the day of her trial for violating the liquor laws. But the real woman behind Kit Brandon was Eleanor Anderson herself, who never ran moonshine but was just as fearless. She walked unafraid into the mill towns to organize labor against the horrible conditions that existed there. She was an organizer for the Young Women’s Christian Association, which was one of the most unheralded of the American organizations that saw these problems and attempted to combat them. For years, the people in Marion never knew Eleanor’s work or the violence directed against her or the death threats from company goons.

But Sherwood certainly recognized her and found the kindred spirit he had been looking for his entire life. He saw in Eleanor a strength that he had seen in few women before, and his book, Kit Brandon: A Portrait was much a tribute to her even though such flamboyance would have been totally out of character. She was a quiet, unassuming woman who possessed amazing strength and conviction, and in Kit Brandon, Sherwood recognized her and the emerging power of women, even if he still had to keep quiet about Eleanor’s life outside her hometown.

Eleanor also took Sherwood into the coalfields of Appalachia, where the women stayed at home as their men went into the mines to die at the pace of a battle, which indeed coal mining was and to some extent still is. Anderson probably coined the term “Bloody Harlan” to describe the miners’ attempts to organize a union in Harlan County, KY, their battles against the coal companies and the retaliation they suffered.

For Sherwood, who came from a poor Midwest background and had been internationally acclaimed for his writing, it was unbelievable that conditions like this could have existed in America. Sherwood was born into poverty, but he knew there was a certain nobility to being a farmer. It was the coming industrial age that worried him. What he saw in the mill towns and coal towns was an utter denigration of the human spirit, subservient to the age of the machine and the sacrifices human beings were called on to make in order to keep the machine running, whether it was a loom or the entire American manufacturing system that required cheap labor and lots of it.

If he hadn’t died unexpectedly in 1941, he would have seen the nation plunge into war and American industry change dramatically and in many ways for the better. During the war, industry turned to women in a way that had never been seen in America and after the war ended, new governmental controls enacted on working conditions for all workers.

He might also have recorded the disappearance of the company towns that were so common during the first half of the Twentieth Century. It is difficult now to conceive of a town where the company owned everything: houses, stores, schools and even churches. But for better or worse, these towns existed and few of their stories will ever be told.

In 2006, I published Bright Wings to Fly, the first of a trilogy of books that I am writing to chronicle the history of my part of the Appalachians as seen through the eyes of my family. Wings was the story of the Civil War and what happened to my family during the War and the dark years that followed. It was also much the story of all mountain families. It ended with the coming of the railroads and the mining industry to Pike County, Kentucky.

In the early part of the Twentieth Century, the mining industry plunged into the hills of Eastern Kentucky, Southern West Virginia, and Southwestern Virginia with all the subtlety of a cavalry charge. It seemed that new mines were opening everywhere, and the companies created entire towns to house and feed the workers that came there for the jobs, which were in abundance. But the era of the coal towns did not last long; by the Second World War, many had already disappeared and those that remained expired shortly thereafter. Part of that can be attributed to the growing mobility of the American population and part can be attributed to the simple fact that companies could no longer afford to build and maintain entire towns. But it was an interesting and mostly unappreciated era in the development of this country.

In my next book, Hearts in Zion, which we hope to publish in late 2007 or early 2008, I will be writing about that era and the stories I was told about my town, which like so many others no longer exists. I can remember growing up there and watching the houses disappear without much concern. I wasn’t there when the town was born, I did not see it in its heyday, and neither was I born when the news came down that the mine was closing. I took no interest in its fate, since it was already dead when I arrived.

I saw only the remnants of the town and I watched the houses come down almost on a daily basis from the window of my school bus in the 1960’s. What stories were lost each time one of the camp houses tumbled? What ghost haunted those decrepit buildings? There are only seven of those early duplexes that still stand on Greasy Creek to give testimony to the fact that a real town once pulsed there, that people lived, loved, and died there. Over a hundred more are simply gone. Like so many other towns in the coalfields, little more than the name remains and memories have dissipated. Greasy Creek, which once boasted two post offices, now has none.

It is difficult to find information on Greasy Creek or any of these places; the companies that built the towns have gone out of business, through collapse or mergers, and the state governments where these towns were built have little information on them. There were no mayors, no city councils, no elections; the companies had their own police forces, and unless there was a murder or some other capital offense, there was no need for the county sheriff to be there. Consequently, the few records that can be found are usually in the possession of some steel company or a historical society that accepted their records. It is even more difficult to determine the type of life the miners led.

Sometimes these company-owned communities were very advanced. Greasy Creek had its own literary society, its own brass band, and its own ball teams; there were a number of such places that attempted to introduce culture along with entertainment for the workers. Other places were not so lucky; when a miner died in the pits of some of those less civic-minded towns, his family was expected to leave immediately and was more often than not evicted before the miner’s funeral. Other indiscretions were common: tabs had to be paid at the company store and often the miner’s few possessions were confiscated to pay the bills. Women and children were literally flung out on the street.

But the common denominator of all the company towns, mill town or coal towns, was that real people lived there and real people survived to tell their stories. The lasting tragedy is that so many of those stories are lost, and that is a realization that came late to me.

The era of the company towns was one of the many things I spoke to Eleanor Anderson about on a late summer’s evening in 1980, albeit briefly, when my wife and I had the opportunity to meet her. I asked her about the topic I was proposing for my Master’s thesis at Longwood and she was delighted that I wanted to resurrect Kit Brandon. But as we left, she asked me to remember to tell the stories. Stories. In the plural. Not merely the story of Kit Brandon, but stories. At the time, I simply thought she wanted me to tell all the stories surrounding Kit, but now I know it was more than that.

She had seen the mill towns and the coal towns and devoted her life to her work there. She knew there were things to be said about those places and it took me only another twenty years to realize that what she was asking was more of me than to write a thesis. She knew that I knew the stories long before I realized that I did. She knew that I had access to stories that would give validity to her work, stories that were disappearing every day.

I now place Eleanor in the pantheon of my household gods who tried to teach me something when I was young. In fact, one of the chapters in Hearts is entitled “Household Gods, “ although I don’t mention Eleanor there. But my debt to her is a part of my next book. It is a common dynamic of growing up that youth rarely appreciates its gifts. Sometimes it takes becoming an elder to realize they were right.