The Giants They Erased From History — Miners of Appalachia
There is a mountain range in the eastern United States that built the American industrial economy. Its people dug the coal that powered every factory, every locomotive, every steel mill that made the country rich. And when those people tried to organize, tried to demand wages that would let their children eat, the corporations that owned the mountain sent private armies to kill them.
The mainstream history books call it a labor dispute. What actually happened was something closer to a war. Before we dive in, comment where in the world you are watching from and don’t forget to click subscribe. The Appalachian Mountains stretch from northern Alabama to southern Quebec, but the region we call Appalachia in the cultural and economic sense covers roughly the central and southern portion of that range from West Virginia down through eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and into the western
Carolas. This is some of the most geologically ancient terrain on Earth. The mountains themselves are older than trees, older than most of the life forms that now inhabit them. And beneath them lie coal seams that took 300 million years to form. Those coal seams were what the industrial revolution wanted. They were what the railroads came for.
And they were what transformed one of the most self-sufficient, fiercely independent, and economically coherent regional cultures in North America into something that mainstream economics has spent a century and a half calling backward, isolated, and in need of development. That transformation was not an accident.
It was not the natural result of market forces bringing progress to an underdeveloped region. It was a deliberate, legally executed, often violently enforced process of dispossession. And the people it dispossessed were not primitive subsistence farmers who had been waiting for the modern world to arrive.
They were landowners, farmers, hunters, crafts people, and community members who had built a functioning regional economy that had been sustaining families for generations. Understanding what was taken from the people of Appalachia and how it was taken requires understanding what they had before the coal companies arrived. Because the history of Appalachian poverty is inseparable from the history of Appalachian theft.
And that history is one of the most consequential and least taught chapters in American economic life. Before the railroads reached the central Appalachian coal fields in the 1870s and 1880s, the mountainous regions of West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia were populated by communities that had been there for generations.
Many families had roots going back to the late 18th century when Scots, Irish, English, German, and other European settlers had moved into the mountains following the Revolutionary War. Over the course of a century, these communities had developed a way of life built around small-scale farming, hunting, and gathering, livestock, and a barter economy that supplemented cash scarce rural households.
The key economic asset of these communities was land. Mountain families owned their land in fe simple, meaning outright with no conditions, and that land was both their productive base and their inheritance system. A family might own 50 or 100 or 200 acres of mountain and valley land, grow enough food to feed themselves and their animals, harvest timber, and game, and supplement their income through small-cale trade in livestock, herbs, jinseng, and other forest products.
They were not wealthy by the standards of the eastern seabboard. But they were not poor in the way that Appalachians later became poor. They had something that poverty does not permit. They had independence. The legal mechanism by which this independence was dismantled is called the broad form deed. And it is one of the most consequential and least discussed legal instruments in American economic history.
A broad form deed was a real estate contract in which a land owner sold the mineral rights beneath their land while retaining the surface rights. On its face, this seems like a reasonable transaction. The land owner keeps the farm and sells what is underground. The buyer gets the coal. Everyone gets something. What the mountain families who signed these deeds in the 1870s and 1880s did not understand.
And what the land agents who came to collect these signatures understood very clearly was that the language of the broad form deed gave the mineral rights holder not merely the right to extract what was underground but the right to destroy the surface in any way necessary to get it out. The deed conveyed the right to use the surface without liability for damage, to remove timber for mine supports, to redirect streams and water courses, to deposit waste material on the surface and to conduct any other activity incidental to mineral extraction.
In practice, this meant that once a family signed a broad form deed, they had sold not just their mineral rights, but their effective control over the land they thought they still owned. The agents who collected these signatures were sophisticated legal operatives working for some of the largest corporate interests in the eastern United States.
The families who signed them were often illiterate or had limited formal education were accustomed to handshake agreements with neighbors and had little or no experience with the kind of corporate legal instruments that were being presented to them. The price paid for these mineral rights was often a few cents per acre.
Some historians have documented payments as low as 50 cents per acre for land whose coal would eventually be worth thousands of dollars per acre. The scale of this transfer is difficult to comprehend. By the early 20th century, absentee corporate interests owned the mineral rights to approximately 90% of the coal bearing land in West Virginia.
In eastern Kentucky, the proportion was similar. The families who had owned this land free and clear before the railroad arrived were now living on land where they did not control what happened underground or by extension what happened to the surface above it. They had been legally dispossessed by instruments they did not fully understand through transactions that a later era would recognize as unconscionable and their poverty was the direct consequence of that dispossession.
Once the mineral rights were secured, the coal companies needed labor and they found a convenient solution to the labor supply problem that simultaneously solved what they perceived as a community independence problem. They built the company town. The company town was one of the most complete systems of economic control ever devised in a nominally free society.
The coal company owned the houses where the miners lived. It owned the store where they bought their food, clothing, and equipment. It owned the church where they worshiped. In many cases, it owned the school where their children were educated and the doctor who treated their illnesses. And it paid its miners not in United States currency, but in script, a company issued token that could only be spent at the company store.
The script system was not incidental to the company town model. It was its economic foundation. When a minor was paid in script rather than dollars, he could not save money that retained value outside the company system. He could not take his wages to a competing store. He could not build financial independence that might allow him or his family to leave.
The script locked the miner and his family into the company ecosystem as completely as any formal system of debt bondage without requiring the legal framework that debt bondage would have needed. The mining companies accomplished through currency what slavery had accomplished through law.
The prices at the company store were not set by market competition. They were set by the company which had monopoly power over the only retail outlet available to its workforce. Historians studying company store records from the West Virginia coal fields in the early 20th century have documented markups of 30 to 50% above market prices for basic goods.
A minor who was earning a wage that might have been adequate in a competitive market found that the script system and the company store pricing combined to leave him with virtually nothing after rent and food were accounted for. The phrase 16 tons popularized by the song of the same name written by Merl Travis and recorded most famously by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955 captures this dynamic in its famous line about owing your soul to the company store.
What the song describes is not a metaphor. It is a precise economic description of how the script and company store system actually worked. Miners accumulated debt to the company store faster than their wages could pay it off and that debts functioned as a legal mechanism for preventing departure.
A minor who left while he owed the company store could be pursued for debt. The company owned the constabularary. The company frequently had influence over the local courts. Leaving was not legally impossible, but it was practically very difficult. The men who worked the coal fields of Appalachia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not passive victims of a system they did not understand.
They organized. They resisted. They built one of the most remarkable labor movements in American history. And the companies that owned them responded with a level of private violence that no other industry in the United States has ever deployed against its workers. In peace time, the United Mine Workers of America was founded in 1890, and within a decade, it had become the most powerful industrial union in the country.
Its organizing campaigns in the West Virginia and Kentucky coal fields brought it into direct conflict with coal operators who had no intention of allowing collective bargaining to reduce their control over the workforce or their profit margins. The response to union organizing in the Appalachian coal fields was not primarily legal. It was violent.
The coal operators maintained private security forces supplied primarily by the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, one of the most brutal private military organizations in American history. Baldwin Felts agents were not security guards in any conventional sense. They were armed men with legal authority derived from their status as company employees and frequently from formal deputization by compliant county sheriffs and state officials.
They evicted striking miners from company houses in the middle of winter. They broke up union meetings by force. They shot and killed organizers and miners who resisted. And they did all of this with the explicit or tacit approval of the state governments that were deeply imshed with coal company political power.
The Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike of 1912 and 1913 in West Virginia produced conditions that a United States Senate investigating committee later described as approximating a reign of terror. The strike began as a wage dispute but escalated after Baldwin Felts agents began systematic violence against striking miners and their families.
The miners, many of them veterans of the Civil War or descendants of people who had fought in it, were not unarmed. They returned fire. The conflict produced a kind of guerilla warfare in the mountain hollows of Canawa County that killed an unknown number of people on both sides and led the governor of West Virginia to declare martial law on multiple occasions.
Mother Jones, the Irishborn labor organizer whose real name was Mary Harris Jones and who had been organizing workers since the 1870s, came to the Paint Creek Strike Zone at the age of 76 and was arrested by military authorities operating under the governor’s martial law declaration. Her military trial conducted by the state militia was a proceeding whose legal legitimacy was doubted even at the time.
The United States Senate eventually investigated the entire episode. Nothing substantive changed. The operators retained their control. The miners remained in the script system. The most consequential single event in the history of Appalachian labor organizing is an episode that every American should know and almost none do.
It is called the Battle of Blair Mountain and it remains the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War. In the summer of 1921, approximately 10,000 armed miners from the southern West Virginia coal fields marched toward Logan County, which was controlled by a particularly brutal coal operator power structure presided over by Sheriff Don Chaffen, a man who was paid a direct salary by the coal operators in addition to his government wage and who ran the county as a private thief for the industry. The miners were
marching to support union organizing in Logan and Mingo counties where Baldwinfelt’s agents had been conducting a campaign of violence against unionized miners and their families that included the infamous Mawan massacre of May 1920 in which the agency’s agents had come to Mawan, West Virginia to evict striking miners from company homes and had been confronted by the town’s police chief Sid Hatfield, resulting in a gunfight that killed the Baldorwinfelts agents, the mayor, and several other men.
Sid Hatfield became a hero to the miners of southern West Virginia. He was a walking symbol of the idea that the power of the state could be used against the coal companies rather than for them. In August 1921, Baldwin Felts agents murdered Hatfield on the steps of the Mcdow County Courthouse in front of his wife and dozens of witnesses in broad daylight.
The agents were tried and acquitted. The miners marched. The Battle of Blair Mountain involved an estimated 10,000 miners on one side, armed with hunting rifles, military weapons left over from World War I, and whatever else they could find against a defending force that included Logan County deputies, Baldwin Felts men, and ultimately federal troops and military aircraft dispatched by President Warren Harding after the governor of West Virginia requested federal intervention.
The aircraft dropped bombs and tear gas on the miners. It was the first time the federal government had used aircraft in a domestic military operation against American citizens. The miners were defeated and dispersed. Around 100 people were killed, though the true number has never been established because the bodies of miners who fell in the hollows were not all recovered or counted.
Several hundred miners were indicted for treason and murder. Union membership in the West Virginia coal collapsed. It would not recover meaningfully until the New Deal era. The Battle of Blair Mountain was front page news for the week it occurred. Within a decade, it had been effectively erased from the mainstream American historical consciousness.
No Hollywood film was made about it. No national monument commemorates it. It does not appear in most American history textbooks. The 10,000 workingclass people who took up arms against corporate violence and the state power that protected it have been rendered invisible by a historioggraphical tradition that has never been comfortable acknowledging the scale of the war that capital waged against labor in the American coal fields.
The New Deal era brought genuine changes to the Appalachian coal fields. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and then the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established the legal right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. The United Mine Workers under the leadership of John L. Lewis rebuilt its membership in the West Virginia and Kentucky coal fields.
Within years, wages rose, conditions improved, the script system was outlawed, company stores gradually lost their monopoly position as workers gained the cash wages and physical mobility to shop elsewhere. But the structural economic problem of Appalachia, the absentee ownership of the mineral wealth that the region’s economy depended on was not addressed by New Deal labor law.
The broad form deeds remained valid. The coal companies continued to own the subsurface rights while the surface remained in the hands of families who had no meaningful control over what was done to their land. The wages that miners earned in the Union era went to buy food, clothing, and houses. But the wealth generated by the coal itself, the hundreds of billions of dollars of value that was extracted from Appalachian mountain seams over a century of industrial mining flowed almost entirely to absentee corporate interests headquartered in New York, Philadelphia,
and London. The economists who studied Appalachian poverty in the post-war decades had a name for this phenomenon. They called it internal colonialism. The sociologist Helen Lewis and her colleagues argued in the 1970s that Appalachia should be understood not as a region that had failed to develop, but as one that had been deliberately developed for the benefit of external interests, structurally similar to the relationship between a colonial power and its colony.
Resources were extracted, profits left, environmental and social costs of extraction remained. The evidence is not subtle. Counties sitting at top some of the richest coal reserves in the world were among the poorest in the United States. Coal companies paid property taxes assessed at a tiny fraction of their mineral rights actual value.
The tax revenue that should have funded schools, roads, and water systems was not collected because local political systems were too inshed with coal company interests to seriously assess what the industry actually owed. A landmark study called Who Owns Appalachia, published in 1983, documented ownership patterns in 80 counties across six Appalachian states.
A small number of absentee corporate owners held the majority of land and mineral rights. They paid taxes, the study estimated, at a tiny fraction of actual value. The local population paid taxes bearing no relationship to the disparity in actual wealth. The study was widely cited in academic literature and completely ignored in mainstream policy discussion.
The mechanization of coal mining beginning in the 1950s eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs within a single generation. What had required 50 miners in 1940 could be done by five in 1970. The union contracts that had made coal field life tolerable were rendered irrelevant by technological displacement.
communities built entirely around mining employment with no alternative economic base because absentee ownership had prevented the diversification that locallyowned economies naturally develop found themselves with no way forward. The story of Appalachian coal miners is not a story about isolated mountain people who were passed by as the modern world developed.
It is a story about how the modern world was built by extracting value from places and people who were systematically denied their share of what they produced. The steel that built American cities came from blast furnaces fed by Appalachian coal. The railroads that connected the continent ran on Appalachian coal.
The electric grids that powered American industry were built on the foundation of Appalachian coal. The American industrial economy of the 20th century, one of the most productive economic systems in human history, was substantially powered by a fuel that was dug out of the earth by men who lived in company towns, were paid in script, were shot when they organized, and whose descendants inherited poverty rather than the wealth their labor had created.
The men who dug that coal were giants in the most meaningful sense of that word. They were the people whose work made the modern world possible. They were physically formidable, culturally rich, politically conscious, and organizationally sophisticated. They built a union that at its peak was the most powerful labor organization in the Western Hemisphere.
They fought a war against corporate power with rifles and determination. They elected senators and influenced presidents. They sang songs and told stories and maintained a regional culture of extraordinary depth and beauty. They were erased not by accident and not by the neutral workings of economic history, but by a deliberate process of historical minimization that served the interests of the corporations that had profited from their labor.
The history of Blair Mountain was buried. The internal colonialism analysis was marginalized. The structural causes of Appalachian poverty were replaced in mainstream discourse with cultural explanations that blamed the victims of extraction for their own poverty. The revisionist economic history of Appalachia is not a fringe academic project.
It is documented in government archives, in coal company records, in land deed books in county courouses across six states, in the files of the United Mine workers, in the congressional testimony of miners who described their conditions to senators who listened and then did nothing. The evidence has always been there. What has been lacking is the political will to follow it to its conclusion, which is that the poverty of Appalachia is not a natural condition or a cultural failure, but the balance sheet of a century of deliberate economic extraction, and that
the people of the region are owed not charity or development programs, but a reckoning with what was taken from them and how. And that is the story of the giants they erased. The miners of Appalachia who dug the coal that built industrial America, who were paid in script and controlled by company towns, who fought a private army at Blair Mountain and were bombed by their own government, who organized the most powerful union in the Western Hemisphere and watched it be dismantled by the same forces that had always owned the
mountains. Their poverty was not inevitable. It was manufactured. And the wealth that should have been theirs is the foundation of an economy that has never acknowledged the debt it owes them. Thanks for watching and we will see you in the next