Company Towns of Kentucky and West Virginia, 1926–1946

Between nineteen twenty-six and nineteen forty-six, government photographers and federal surveys went through the company towns of Kentucky and West Virginia. This film is what they wrote down.

One thing first. The photographs are real. Most of the colors are not — they are a machine's estimate. The black-and-white originals are free at the National Archives.

Start at the top. Wheelwright, Floyd County, Kentucky — Inland Steel's town. A mayor, a police judge, a town clerk, and nearly everything belonging to the company.

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

Four bowling alleys in the recreation center.

A free library, with a librarian to choose the books.

A hospital, with an operating room in it.

At Lynch, in Harlan County, Kentucky — United States Steel's town — a country club, open to all employees, where dances were held for the miners' children every Saturday night.

And at Gary, West Virginia, a company clinic that logged two thousand and one calls in the month of July alone.

The federal survey of the coalfields wrote it down in nineteen forty-seven. The best camps had excellent swimming pools. Fine bowling alleys. Libraries. And even some fine country clubs with golf courses.

The photographer who shot Wheelwright had spent the month before in McDowell County, West Virginia — five camps, owned by five different companies — and he wrote the rents down, house by house.

Three rooms, seven dollars a month.

Of the front steps of this house — ten dollars fifty a month — he wrote that the carpenter who came to patch the back porch refused to walk up them, and did not repair them either.

At Panther, two pumps, one at either end of the row, furnished the drinking water for all of it.

The water, he 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.

A miner's daughter, drinking it.

In Harlan County the captions turn into arithmetic. Furman Currington had six rooms, which rented for fifteen dollars a month. Twelve people lived in them.

Row of privies. Third from the left is the Currington family's.

And this one, written down exactly as the survey found it. Missus Virgil Price peels a head of lettuce in garbage pile adjacent to privy.

Then the survey 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. The men who owned the mines housed their workers worse than the workers housed themselves.

A federal commission had seen the same houses in nineteen twenty-three. The nineteen forty-seven report quotes it, and says it still fits. If it is custom and tradition that mine families shall exist in squalor, it is time for that custom and tradition to be abolished.

In Wheelwright, the photographer shot one thing nobody else thought to photograph. His caption sheet gives it one line.

Semi-monthly statement of Harry Fain, coal loader — the man at the top of this film. A nail through one corner, a tack through the other.

Employee's Statement. Inland Steel Company, Incorporated. Wheelwright Mine, Wheelwright, Kentucky.

Total earnings, two hundred and five dollars and eighteen cents, for half a month. Good money in nineteen forty-six. Then the deductions start.

Three dollars and fifty-six cents for the check weighman — a man the miners paid out of their own wages to stand at the scales and watch the company weigh their coal.

Six thirteen for explosives. A man who loaded coal by hand bought the powder he brought it down with.

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 money left after the mine's own deductions, a little over half went straight back to the company — and the front of the form does not say for what.

Up on Scotts Run, in nineteen thirty-eight, a caption that is really a ledger. A sack of flour at the A and P: sixty-nine cents. The same sack at the company store: a dollar twenty-five.

Much of it was paid in scrip — company money, good at the company's prices.

At Pursglove the company sold its men insurance, five dollars a month. It covered accidents anywhere — except in the mines. Most miners signed up for it.

And at the end of a shift, the board. A man's name in chalk, and beside it the number of tons the company said he loaded. The board also told him whether there was work tomorrow.

Some men checked. This one is reading the company's work sheets to see how many tons of slate he moved — and whether the company agrees.

Checking had a price. This man loaded coal by hand for the Chaplin Coal Company for twelve years, complained about conditions, and was let go.

In July of nineteen twenty-six, Scotts Run went on strike. On the tenth day, the miners' families marched the length of the valley. One girl wore a white sailor cap with a motto painted on it. The motto was: Nothing Doing.

The marchers passed the Bertha Coal Company's store. The sign on it said: The Store With a Conscience. Ha, ha, look at that, somebody whooped.

The circuit court answered with an injunction against the picket line. The miners kept picketing anyway.

And eviction was already in play. A constable and a mine guard had tried to put a union miner out of a company house — and a justice of the peace held both officers for the grand jury. The charge was unlawful trespassing.

The company's answer to that strike is written on the back of a photograph taken twelve years later. Mexican and Black miners, the caption says, were brought into Scotts Run around nineteen twenty-six, to break the strike.

By nineteen thirty-eight, the same caption says, about one mine in four would hire them at all. Brought in first. Hired last.

One of them, fifty years old, said something while the shutter was open, and the photographer wrote it down. I don't want to just grow up to rust and die.

And when a town's men won an argument with the company, the company had one card left. This is Twin Branch, McDowell County. It is empty.

Henry Ford owned it. His company filmed it in nineteen twenty-four. Cleanliness and cheerfulness, the titles say, mark these Fordson mining towns from all others.

By the end of nineteen thirty-three the men at Twin Branch had joined the United Mine Workers. All of them. In December the local sent two representatives to Detroit, to ask Henry Ford himself for an investigation of conditions.

When they got back and reported for work, they were fired. The men struck until the two got their jobs back.

In January the company told the mine committee it would deal with the miners as individuals only — and if they didn't like it, the mine foremen would make them like it. The local struck again. Two days later the company closed the mine.

Twin Branch mine of Fordson will close, the Bluefield paper reported. Closed down for an indefinite period. The superintendent said he had, in quotation marks, nothing to say about a reason.

Boarded-up homes in an abandoned mining town. The company would not sell the houses, would not rent them, and would not let anyone live in them.

Twice, efforts were made to get the miners to come back non-union. Both times they refused — with a hundred families still living in company houses under notice to vacate.

Eight months after the closure, the local union still had two hundred and fifty-three members in good standing, paying dues at a mine that no longer existed. The town in these photographs is not what was done to them. It is what they were willing to lose.

The same valleys, lighter. The ride was called the crazy boat. Its trick was a jet of air that blew the women's skirts up as they came off, and the crowd stood in the dark and watched it happen.

The photographer's caption says the carnival came to the coal mining communities once a year. Once. This is what once a year looked like.

The line for the skooter cars. The only event of the year, her caption says. Then the trucks rolled on, and the year started again.

Payday, Saturday. Miners' wives made ice cream on the porch and sold it to the crowd — under a sign offering beer.

A front porch in Wheelwright on a Sunday afternoon, when relatives come.

And one thing, in the fall of nineteen thirty-eight, that was simply going well. Sugar cane pressed by a mule going in circles, the juice boiled down in a long vat into sorghum molasses.

Ten miles from Elkins, West Virginia, the government built an answer. Tie Gart Valley Homesteads. New houses, a new road — and no company.

The captions change here. Good roads and good land. Modern and convenient kitchen.

The government printed a fact sheet about the place. Number of family units: one hundred and ninety-eight. Number of applications received: one thousand six hundred and forty.

More than eight families applied for every house that existed.

The purpose, in the government's own words: to demonstrate the possibilities of rehabilitating the families of stranded miners. Stranded — the federal word for nearly everyone in this film.

One hundred and ninety-eight families got the kitchen. The rest of them got the hill.

The rest built for themselves. Gardens on the slopes. Union locals. And churches like this one, raised by the Black families of a McDowell County camp with their own money, on ground the company did not own.

The last frame. He worked in the mines from the age of fourteen. The caption does not give his name. The negatives are free at the National Archives. They have been free the whole time.