![]() ![]() By August 28, some 10,000 union men had massed near the border of Logan County and begun trading gunfire with company supporters. ![]() Keeney and Mooney made a last-minute attempt to call off the march after meeting with the War Department’s General Harry Bandholtz, who warned that any violence would prove disastrous for the union, but the proposed ceasefire collapsed when two miners died in a skirmish with Chafin’s forces. On August 24, the main body of coal miners set out from Marmet and headed south toward Mingo County. Chafin and his supporters had soon constructed a network of machine gun nests and trenches around Blair Mountain, a 2,000-foot peak that stood directly in the miners’ path. “No armed mob will cross the Logan County line,” he proclaimed. Upon learning of the march, Chafin scraped together a 3,000-strong army of state police, deputies and citizen militiamen and prepared for a fight. The miners’ route to Mingo required them to pass through Logan County, a coal company stronghold ruled by an anti-union sheriff named Don Chafin. “It is time to lay down the bible and take up the rifle,” miner and Baptist reverend John Wilburn declared. Many of the marchers were World War I veterans, and they came armed to the teeth with military-issue Springfield rifles and shotguns. Led by UMW organizers Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney, they resolved to march on Mingo County to confront the coal companies and free the union men imprisoned in the area. Within days, thousands of union supporters had flocked to the outskirts of Marmet, a small town located near the state capital of Charleston. ![]() The assassination outraged the miners, who considered Hatfield a hero for his involvement in the Matewan shootout. The tipping point in the “Mine War” finally came on August 1, 1921, when Sheriff Sid Hatfield was shot dead by Baldwin-Felts agents as he entered the McDowell County Courthouse. “Murder by laying in wait and shooting from ambush has become common,” Mingo County’s sheriff wrote in May 1921. The coal companies responded by bringing in non-union replacement workers, and over the next several months, the two sides engaged in a fierce guerilla war. The so-called “Matewan Massacre” galvanized support for the UMW, which collected new members and organized a strike in the summer of 1920. A verbal argument quickly escalated into a gunfight, and when the smoke cleared, seven Baldwin-Felts agents had been killed along with Mayor Testerman and two local miners. After catching wind of the detectives’ activities, Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman and a pro-union sheriff named Sid Hatfield raised a small posse and confronted them near the local train station. On May 19 of that year, members of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency arrived in the town of Matewan to evict union miners from houses owned by the Stone Mountain Coal Company. The hostilities only ramped up in 1920, when the UMW finally started to organize workers in Mingo County. Companies compelled their workers to sign so-called “yellow dog contracts” pledging not to organize, and they used armies of private detectives to harass striking miners and evict them from their company-owned homes. Safety conditions were often deplorable, yet despite the efforts of groups such as the United Mine Workers (UMW), the mine operators had kept unions out of the region through intimidation and violence. Workers mined using leased tools and were paid low wages in company currency, or “scrip,” which could only be used at company stores. Since the late 1800s, the coalfields of the state’s Mingo, Logan and McDowell Counties had operated under a repressive company town system. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the result of years of bitter labor disputes between the miners and coal companies of southern West Virginia. ![]()
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