What $7 a Month Bought in McDowell County, West Virginia, 1946
The film of this episode premieres September 3, 2026 on YouTube. The documents, the transcript and the sources are below now.
McDowell County, West Virginia, August 1946. The United States was in possession of the nation's coal mines under Executive Order 9728, and section 5 of the agreement that ended the strike ordered a survey of housing and sanitary conditions in the coal camps.
Transcript
Two rooms
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A room in West Virginia, in August of 1946, with a hundred sets of work clothes hauled up to the ceiling on chains.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The man who took this photograph wrote a caption for it. The changing room in the washhouse, he wrote, for white miners.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
At the same mine, on the same day, he photographed a second room.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The archive's transcription of that caption reads: locker room in washhouse used by — and then a word is missing.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
This is a story about a record made on purpose, by a government that wanted the numbers written down. Some of what it wrote down is still there. Some of it is a gap.
Seventeen days
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
McDowell County, West Virginia. Coal came out of these hollows for a hundred years.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The camps sat where the seam and the railroad met, which meant the houses sat beside the tracks.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A tipple, a string of loaded cars, and a company store, arranged in the order the money moved.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
In August 1946 a photographer named Russell Lee spent seventeen days in this county.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He worked five camps, owned by five different companies, and he wrote down what he found at each one.
Government possession
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He was not a journalist. He was on a federal payroll, and he was there because the United States was, at that moment, in possession of the coal mines.
A strike had shut the industry down that spring. In May the President signed an executive order, and the mines passed into the hands of the Secretary of the Interior.
The agreement that ended the strike names him by his new title: Coal Mines Administrator.
Read it and you find the ordinary furniture of an owner. The Administrator sets the wage. The Administrator will direct the operating managers.
And section five ordered a survey. Its purpose was to determine what should be done to give the mine workers of the nation housing and sanitary facilities conforming to recognized American standards.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Teams of doctors and engineers went out across the coalfields. One of them carried a camera.
They inspected two thousand and twenty-eight houses, lived in by nine thousand five hundred and thirty-two people.
Eighty-seven percent of the company houses were between twenty and fifty years old.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The colors here are a machine's estimate. Lee shot black and white negatives, and a model has guessed at the rest.
The originals are free at the National Archives. If a color here is wrong, the negative is right, and it is one click away.
Gary
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Start with the best of it. Gary, West Virginia, a town built by the U.S. Coal and Coke Company, which was the mining arm of United States Steel.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Two thousand and one calls were made at this clinic in the month of July alone.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
There was an operating room.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Prescriptions were covered, and house calls. The medical deduction from a man's pay was capped at one dollar and twenty cents a month, for his whole family.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The company store had refrigerated cases. Lee's caption says the meat department was clean.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Yards were clean, he wrote, and there was a regular garbage collection truck.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A section foreman's house here had six rooms, running water, and a complete bathroom.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
His daughter had a piano.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Housing at Gary for the Black miners, who lived apart from the rest of the camp. Lee wrote his captions in the language of 1946, and this film does not repeat it.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And at the back of the best camp in the county, the stream.
His caption: seepage from numerous privies pollutes this stream.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
That is Gary. Hold it in your head, because everything after this is inside the same county.
The dispensary
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Welch. The mines here belonged to the Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
This is the main treatment room of the company dispensary.
Lee's caption asks you to notice something. Note, he wrote, the condition of the toilet in the left rear.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Of another office in this camp, Lee wrote that the equipment and supplies permitted only minor first aid treatment and examination.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The houses ran in rows. There was no playground; the space between the houses and the road was used for baseball.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
In one house, the only running water was a drainage arrangement the miner had installed himself.
The pay slip
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And here is the thing Lee photographed that nobody else thought to photograph.
A pay slip for a half month, tacked to the wall of the house it paid for.
Because in a company town the rent is not a bill you pay. It is a line taken out before you ever see the money.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
So Lee wrote the rents down, house by house, across the county.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Three rooms, seven dollars a month.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A man who put running water in his own kitchen, at no cost to the company.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
There was a church, in a building the company gave them.
Gilliam
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Gilliam. A two-family house, about fifty years old.
The Howard family had three of its rooms. The rent was seven dollars a month.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He worked the night shift, going on at six, so the family ate supper at half past four.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He asked the blessing.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
They owned an electric refrigerator. The power bill was about four dollars a month, paid straight to the power company.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And here is the sentence that holds this whole county together.
The only houses with running water inside in this camp, Lee wrote, are those in which the tenants made the installation themselves, at no expense to the company.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Trash collects and decays everywhere, he wrote. Seepage from the privies collects in the low spots.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He photographed the gully behind the white section, and wrote down which section it was.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A miner's widow, living on the state old age pension.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And the church the Black families built, with their own money, on ground the company did not own.
The steps
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Bradshaw, in the far corner of the county.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Lee's caption for this one is an instruction. Notice the foundation posts.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A man built his own runway up to his own front porch.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Four rooms, ten dollars and fifty cents a month.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
There was running water, Lee wrote, but no sink, no bath, and no faucet.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Of the front steps of that house, he wrote that the carpenter who came to patch the back porch refused to walk up them, and did not repair them either.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The family was leaving. The husband and the son had already gone to a mine in Virginia and were looking for a house to buy.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Of the road outside, he wrote: this is all the street there is.
The water
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Panther. A double row of houses with a ditch running between them.
Garbage went into the ditch. Lee's caption points out the small girl throwing hers.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Two pumps, one at either end of the row, furnished the drinking water for all of it.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
This is a miner's daughter drinking it.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The water, Lee wrote, was red and thick with iron rust. As much as a quarter of an inch of sediment stood in the bottom of a bucket.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A quarter of an inch.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Four rooms, nine dollars a month.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A man who kept his chicken feed in one of his three rooms, because there was nowhere else to put it.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A house at least forty years old. Some years back, Lee wrote, the company had remodeled these houses — and he put the word remodeled in quotation marks.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The newest houses in this camp were a year and a half old. They had no running water, and the company did not supply screens.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And one caption where the photographer stopped and argued with himself. He wrote: notice, notice — this is probably not the child's mother.
He would not let a wrong fact leave his hands, in a file he must have assumed nobody would ever read this closely.
The range
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
So: five companies, one county, seventeen days in August.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Seven dollars a month bought three rooms with a privy at Gilliam, and three rooms at Panther where the water ran red.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Ten dollars and fifty cents bought steps a carpenter would not climb.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And at Gary the same wage bought a hospital with an operating room in it.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Same seam. Same county. Same union contract. Same month.
In these places, it wrote, the greatest range of conditions was observed.
It described two camps five miles apart. In one, nearly all the homes had bathrooms and hot and cold running water, and five rooms rented for twenty-two dollars.
The other held some of the most ramshackle and unhealthful dwellings of the entire survey. Four dreary rooms, six dollars and fifty cents.
The sharp differences between these two communities, it wrote, go far beyond the character and quality of the housing.
And then the report did the thing that makes a document worth putting on screen. It counted.
Of the company-owned houses it inspected, eighty-eight point four percent disposed of sewage into a privy.
Of the houses the miners owned themselves, fifty-eight point three percent did.
The men who owned the mines housed their workers worse than the workers housed themselves.
And it was not one bad district. The condition of the privies used by occupants of company-owned housing, the report says, was in every area inferior to that of the privies used by occupants of privately owned houses.
Screens told the same story. Thirty-four percent of the company houses were adequately screened, against fifty-eight percent of the ones owned by others.
Water was piped into slightly less than half of the eleven hundred and fifty-four company houses surveyed.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
So the range was not an accident of geology or of poverty. Every company was digging the same coal, under the same contract, in the same market.
The recommendation
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
What differed was how much of the money went back into the hollow, and nothing in law required any of it to.
Which is why the last chapter of a report this thorough is so quiet.
It is recommended that coal-mining companies take active steps, without delay, to assure a safe and potable water supply.
Recommended. The survey could measure the range. It could not close it.
What closed some of it was written into the same agreement, four pages earlier. A welfare and retirement fund, paid for at five cents a ton.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Within ten years that fund had built ten hospitals across the coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia — because no law was ever going to make a company build one.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
McDowell County held ninety-eight thousand people in 1950. At the last census it held nineteen thousand.
Three hundred of them came to this family reunion in the summer of 1946. Lee wrote that the family had been in the area more than a hundred years.
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Russell Lee · McDowell County, W.Va., Aug. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Everything you have seen was written down by a man sent to look, in a county where the difference between one company and the next was the difference between an operating room and a bucket of rust.
The negatives are free. They have been free the whole time.
Sources
- p. 233 — Krug-Lewis Agreement, opening: the agreement is between the Secretary of the Interior "acting as Coal Mines Administrator under the authority of Executive Order No. 9728 (dated May 21, 1946, 11 F. R. 5593)" and the United Mine Workers of America, and covers "the period of Government possession."
- p. 234 — sec. 4 (a): "A welfare and retirement fund is hereby created and there shall be paid into such fund by the operating managers 5 cents per ton on each ton of coal produced for use or for sale."
- p. 235 — sec. 5: the survey is to determine what improvements should be made to provide the mine workers "with medical, housing, and sanitary facilities conforming to recognized American standards"; sec. 8: "the Coal Mines Administrator will direct the operating managers."
- p. 23 — 2,028 houses visited, occupied by 9,532 persons (5,341 adults, 4,191 children under 18); 87 percent of company houses inspected are 20 to 50 years old.
- p. 30 — the two camps five miles apart: one with bathrooms and hot and cold running water, a five-room house at $22 a month; the other "some of the most ramshackle, unhealthful dwellings of the entire Survey," four dreary rooms at $6.50. "The sharp differences between these two communities go far beyond the character and quality of the housing." Screening: 34 percent of company-owned houses adequately screened against 58 percent of those owned by others.
- p. 40 — "The miners and their families who live in company camps depend on the local facilities that mine-operating companies have established for them; in these places the greatest range of conditions was observed." Water was piped into slightly less than 50 percent of the 1,154 company houses surveyed.
- p. 45 — Figure 2, sewage disposal: company-owned houses (805) 5.2 percent sewage system, 6.4 percent septic tanks, 88.4 percent privies; privately owned houses (735) 33.8 / 7.9 / 58.3. The reversed-out figures on the chart are degraded in the scan; the private-house split was settled by the only reading that sums to 100. Table 17 on the same page gives the adequacy appraisal by area and ownership.
- p. 46 — "The condition of the privies used by occupants of company-owned housing was in every area inferior to that of the privies used by occupants of privately owned houses."
- p. 224 — Sanitation and Public Health recommendations: "It is recommended that: 1. Coal-mining companies take active steps, without delay, to assure a safe and potable water supply…"
- U.S. Coal and Coke Company as the mining subsidiary of United States Steel, and Gary as its company town — *The West Virginia Encyclopedia* (e-WV), entries "U.S. Coal & Coke Company" and "Gary."
- The UMWA Welfare and Retirement Fund built ten hospitals in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia, opening in 1955 and 1956 (Miners Memorial Hospital Association). Note that the hospital in that group called "McDowell" is McDowell, Kentucky, not McDowell County, West Virginia.
- McDowell County population: 98,887 at the 1950 census, its peak; 19,111 at the 2020 census — U.S. Census Bureau.