The Best Coal Camp in Kentucky Had a Golf Course. Who Paid for It?

The man on this green loaded coal by hand — sixteen tons a shift. The course belonged to the company he loaded it for.

So did his house, his hospital, his library and his swimming pool.

Why he still went home with seventy-eight dollars is printed on one piece of paper, and the photographer tacked it to a wall and made a negative of it.

Wheelwright, Floyd County, Kentucky, the last week of September, nineteen forty-six. Russell Lee spent six days here for the federal government.

He was working for the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry.

In May the President had signed an order taking the coal mines away from their owners, and the contract that followed obliged the government to survey how miners lived.

It went into two hundred and sixty communities.

It found conditions running, in its own words, from excellent to very poor — and called the tolerance of the worst of them a disgrace to the nation.

Wheelwright was not one of those. Wheelwright was what the coalfield looked like when a company decided to do it properly.

An incorporated town with a mayor, a police judge and a town clerk. Nearly everything in it belonged to Inland Steel.

The tipple and the cleaning plant at the top of the hollow. That is what the town was for.

A swimming pool, with a wading pool beside it for the small children.

A playground next to it. Both open, the caption says, to employees and their families.

George Fain, bowling. There are four alleys in the recreation center.

After the movie, the snack bar at the alleys fills up with the younger generation. Lee's word, not mine.

The movie was Saturday night, and this is the crowd waiting to get in.

Before it, the soda fountain. Miners and their families, packed to the walls.

Ella Jane Fain, eighteen, and her cousin, having a coke before the show.

The town policeman came in too.

Geraldine Fain, twenty-two, in the free library. The company supported it and a librarian chose the books.

The hospital and clinic. Also the company's.

With an operating room in it.

An X-ray machine, run by a laboratory technician.

And a doctor taking a miner's wife's blood pressure in the treatment room of the clinic.

The town board and the police, in front of a municipal building about to open. Space for a fire truck, the mayor's office, a court room.

The survey's own report describes what the best camps had. Excellent swimming pools. Fine bowling alleys. Libraries, in a few places. And even some fine country clubs with golf courses.

Harry Fain, coal loader, forty-five. His wife, forty-two. Geraldine, twenty-two. George, twenty. Ella Jane, eighteen. Harry Ray, fifteen.

Breakfast. When Fain works the night shift he eats with the family. Otherwise he and Mrs. Fain eat alone together at a quarter past five in the morning.

Geraldine does the breakfast dishes. She does a large amount of the housework, and the caption adds that she is an expert seamstress.

Her mother clerks in the grocery store down at Wheelwright Junction. This is her, after work.

The store is at Wheelwright Junction, which the captions treat as a separate place from the mine.

George is a veteran. He is in his last year of high school and hopes to go on to the university.

Harry Ray is fifteen, in class, and somewhere in this same week he was photographed practising his trumpet.

Sunday dinner, the table set.

And the front porch on a Sunday afternoon, when relatives come.

Then Monday.

The company's name is cut into the stone over the portal.

The morning shift, waiting to go under.

Fain rides in on a shuttle car — second from the right.

The rest wait for the mantrip.

The section foreman gives his instructions at the last station.

Then he tests for gas in the corner of a room.

And tests the top by striking it and feeling the vibration. That is how you find out whether the roof is going to come down on you.

Fain sets his own safety timber close to the face before he starts.

He assembles the auger.

Drills the coal by hand with it.

Makes stemmings — the packing that puts the powder charge where it belongs.

Tamps the charge.

Clears the bug dust out of the undercut. Bug dust is slate and coal ground up by the cutting machine.

He loads that too. About two tons of net coal comes out of it.

Then he loads what the shot brought down.

The seam here is about four feet thick. Everything he does, he does bent or kneeling.

He lays his own track, so the shuttle car can be spotted closer to the face. Sixteen to seventeen tons a day.

At the end of it he talks to his section foreman.

Cleans up, and checks out.

This is what he looked like at the end of a shift.

The brakeman and the motorman at the portal.

A member of the mine rescue team, fitting oxygen breathing equipment. The company had a safety department, and that was not nothing in nineteen forty-six.

And a Joy loader, the machine that was already replacing men like Fain.

On the twenty-fourth of September, Lee photographed something else. His caption sheet gives it one line.

Semi-monthly statement of Harry Fain, coal loader. A nail through one corner, a tack through the other, and the clapboard of somebody's wall behind it.

Employee's Statement. Inland Steel Company, Incorporated. Wheelwright Mine, Wheelwright, Kentucky. A steel maker's name on a coal loader's pay slip.

Quantity, three thousand five hundred and ninety-two — hundredweight of coal. A hundred and forty-six dollars and thirty-seven cents. Then four sixty-eight, twenty-five thirty-five, twenty-eight seventy-eight.

Total earnings, two hundred and five dollars and eighteen cents, for half a month.

The form prints a code of earnings so you can read your own pay. One, tons. Two, yardage. Three, hours. Four, day labor. Five, shift differential.

It stops at five. Two of Fain's four earnings lines are coded six, and the form does not say what six is.

Occupational deductions come off first. Three dollars and fifty-six cents for the check weighman.

Six thirteen for explosives — a man who loaded coal by hand bought the powder he brought it down with. That leaves a hundred and ninety-five dollars and forty-nine cents.

Then one line. Charges per statement — see reverse side. Ninety-eight dollars and one cent. Social security, a dollar ninety-six. Withholding, seventeen fifty.

Amount due employee: seventy-eight dollars and two cents. Of the hundred and ninety-five that was left, a little over half went straight back to the company, and the front of the form does not say for what.

Some of it you can see. The credit department, where miners drew money in advance of payday.

The meat counter in the company grocery.

The general store — groceries, hardware and furniture, all of it company owned.

The survey's report says the same thing in general terms. Published earnings, it warns, are gross, and take no account of numerous deductions for items such as rent, company store, union dues, assessments, supplies, burial fund, and medical care.

Its table gives the average bituminous miner two thousand six hundred and fifty dollars for nineteen forty-five — the best year in the table, and better than double what it had been in nineteen thirty-nine.

Wheelwright's best loaders beat it easily. Lee photographed one of them at home, and the caption card, in the language of nineteen forty-six, records who he was.

Family of Henry Armour, one of the top coal loaders in the mines here. Last year's income was in excess of five thousand four hundred dollars. Twice what the report gives for the average man in the industry, out of a four-foot seam.

Armour at home, reading the paper under a picture of Lincoln.

His daughter Rozella is taking a correspondence course. She wants to be a beauty technician.

The town they lived in was divided. Lee's caption cards say so plainly, in the wording of the period — a street, they read, in the colored section of the company housing project.

So the model town had two halves. This is a street in the Black section.

And another, with the hill coming down behind it.

Washday there.

Company houses, up on posts, with the line strung out down the hill.

And recess at the school their children went to. Lee's caption sheet for this town lists a recess at the grade school, and, three times over, a recess at the other one.

On Sunday morning the union local met in a schoolhouse.

Guy Boone, president of the local.

And the doorkeeper, who let you in.

They had four months of something new. The Krug-Lewis Agreement of that May had put a welfare and retirement fund into the contract, paid for by a royalty on every ton of usable coal mined. The survey Lee was working for existed to tell that fund what to build.

The Baptist choir had won the district singing convention the year before.

A pastor of the Free-Will Baptist church, preaching down at the Junction.

And above all of it, the slate dump, which the caption says has been burning several years.

Harry Fain's statement told him to check his account and report any error to the clerk before pay day. The itemisation was on the back. Lee's caption sheet lists two photographs of that statement. Only one of them is in the file.