18

String-Town Appalachia

String-town Appalachia was a barrage of small white signposts that popped up on the left side of the road before I was conscious of crossing a town line. I was on my way to Sylvester, the first stop in my journey to the sites that had made headlines in the fight against mountaintop removal. Seth, Kirbyton, Fosterville, Orgas, and Keith charged by in ten miles on West Virginia Route 3, Coal River Road. The smaller of these towns indicated they were unincorporated, meaning there was either too little interest in forming a township or too few citizens to lead it. The residents paid their taxes to the state and identified themselves according to the county they lived in. Few side streets cut into these towns, which were hardly more than an interruption between the road and the sheer rise of forest stacked on forest above. This growth nudged its way back into civilization, as evidenced by telephone poles covered with vines that graced the road like leaf-wound crosses.

Earlier that morning, traveling from Beckley to Racine, I had counted one store, seven gas stations, twenty-four churches, four coal operations, and ten flea markets. The latter outcrops of industry were laid out on cars and lawns: old shoes and clothes, empty Coke and beer bottles, ceramic figurines, knives, and rusted ax heads. In a strip of towns with so few mercantile institutions, some of these products had likely made many stops up and down the highway, bought and sold in rummage sales throughout the years. Each time a flea market peeked out of the trees, I craned my neck from the driver’s side to snatch a glance, but the river-cut path hurled me around its contours. No time for pausing, insisted the locals, tailing me although I was doing 50 mph.

Erin Thomas, 2008

Silver dome at Elk Run preparation plant

Coal River Valley, an area so seemingly untouched by modernism and development, is the battleground for much of the recent debate over coal mining and its most destructive practices: water and air pollution, sludge lagoons, mountaintop removal, and flooding caused by diverted streams. Appalachian townspeople miles removed from grocery stores have recently found themselves in the forefront of the conflict, broadcasting their stories to a national audience. Sylvester is one such town, and I knew I’d arrived when I caught the almost metallic glint of an enormous white dome behind the trees. I pulled off into the neighborhood just under its shadow. A woman walking her two dogs asked me if I was looking for something.

The dome covers the pile of coal adjacent to the Elk Run preparation plant, a facility installed in 1998 by Massey without regard to direct requests from the town mayor, the town council, and a petition signed by 75 percent of the residents to locate it elsewhere. There is a second step between the mine and the power plant. Before coal is burned, it must be cleaned to remove the toxic chemicals. Many times these toxins are leached into the surrounding groundwater. Aside from the water pollution, there is also the sound of the coal’s delivery, the hum of the facility, and the danger to locals from coal trucks steered by red-eyed operators at corner cutting speeds. The townspeople of Sylvester were most concerned about the winds that traveled east in the area, sure to deposit residue on their homes, providing both a health and an aesthetic hazard. Within a month of plant’s operation, the fears of residents proved true as coal dust accumulated on their windows, their porches, and the exterior of their houses. Their complaints went unheeded for two years by the coal regulatory organizations until Bill Cook, a member of the Department of Environmental Protection, decided to stick his neck out and issue violations to the plant, a gesture in West Virginia that gets somebody reassigned fast. In response, the Elk Run facility made superficial efforts to reduce its impacts on the town. The most effectual, a sprinkling system, was only operated when inspectors were in town.

Pauline Canterberry, Mary Miller, and other town members realized it was going to take more than just complaints to force Massey to cave. They filmed the coal dust that covered their cars, clogged the screens on their windows, and billowed in black clouds over their homes. They then presented this to the Surface Mining Board, which unanimously voted that the plant was violating its permit and ordered the company to correct the problem. Massey appealed. Residents realized that more would have to be done, so they filed a lawsuit against the company for damages to property. For two and half years, Pauline and Mary gathered dust samples, earning themselves the title of the Dustbuster Sisters. They reached out to the media and local environmental organizations to bolster their cause. In the end, Massey erected the white dome, the triumph of an Appalachian town.

The woman with the dogs told me she was the environmental protection engineer at Massey, and I asked her opinion of the company’s dealings with the town of Sylvester.

“I don’t agree with everything that Massey does, but eventually they’ll put it back the way it was. Eventually, they’ll get there.”

“I used to think the last place I’d work was the coal industry, but there’s nothin’ like the pay with Massey,” she admitted.

She claimed that the dust levels were an exaggeration, and that Massey had installed dust meters on every street. As an example, she pointed to her home located right under the shadow of the dome. “You can see how close we are. My house would be black.”

The local pastor of Sylvester Baptist Church, David K. Minturn, begged to differ. “Massey says we don’t have a coal dust problem. It’s better than it was, but we do have a coal dust problem. I swept my porch this mornin’ and it’s black. Road dust in’t black. We have a town meetin’ every month, but not much is done.”

The town’s fight for justice caused rifts in his congregation when Massey threatened the job of a church member who worked for the company. Minturn understood the importance of the industry to the area. Both his daughter and son-in-law work for coal companies. “If it weren’t for coal, the young wouldn’t stay and buy houses here. These towns would disappear when the retired people died.” But there is more than one way to run a company, and Massey, in Minturn’s opinion, violates the second law of Christianity: “The Bible says there are two laws. Love God and love your neighbor. If an employer obeys these laws, he treats his employees well. You got a company like Massey and the union won’ have anything to do with it, so it’s like a law unto itself. If you don’t fight them, they don’t change.”

After their victory against coal dust, the town pushed for more reforms—lowering speed limits in order to prevent roadway deaths caused by overloaded coal trucks, removing an illegal dam in the Big Coal River that runs through the valleys alongside Route 3, and preventing an additional plant from being built at the Elk Run facility. The townspeople of Sylvester realized that reform ultimately meant getting involved on a larger scale, so they took their story to news conferences in Washington, D.C. and on road tours through Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. They joined in support of neighboring communities in their battles against King Coal and raised money for local environmental organizations. In West Virginia townspeople must petition regulatory organizations to follow the laws already on the books. Sylvester went one step further, campaigning for new protective laws and for politicians who were not bought by the coal companies.

West Virginia’s coal barons accuse “crazies” and “greeniacs” of providing the momentum behind the grassroots movement for environmental justice, while it would be more instructive to examine the backlash of their own practices. An example of this is Chuck Nelson, a retired miner who worked for thirty years in the mines, whom I met at an anti-mountaintop removal gathering. He had worked for Massey Coal for five years after they bought out the previous owner. Not long after the company moved into town, Massey decided to build the Elk Run preparation plant. Chuck began to mobilize the residents of the city, even though it would probably mean losing his job. He later quit to avoid tarnishing his work record. For his activism, Chuck was blacklisted by Massey and has been unable to find work with any other company. Frustrated with his resistance efforts, company executives finally approached him: “What is it going to take to get rid of you?” Chuck is a graying man with a mesh faced ball cap on—midheight, mid-weight, in no way an imposing figure. “You could have settled this a long time ago if you’d been willing to sit down with me,” he told them. Now he works alongside the local environmental organizations.

One of his key concerns is Massey’s waste impoundment that looms four hundred yards behind the Marsh Fork Elementary School near the town of Sundial. The earthen dam is 385 feet tall and holds back 2.3 billion gallons of murky liquid. Dust is not the only concern surrounding a coal cleaning plant, as the chemicals used in the process are known carcinogens. Heavy metals such as mercury, chromium, cadmium, boron, selenium, and nickel are some of the impurities washed out of the coal and dammed up in what has come to be known as a slurry pond, or sludge lagoon.

Chuck’s concern is not unwarranted. In 1972, a slurry pond built by the Pittston Coal Company collapsed after two days of heavy rain. In minutes, 130 million gallons of sludge poured into West Virginia’s Buffalo Creek, sweeping away homes of Logan County residents, with the residents still inside. The final toll amounted to 125 dead, one thousand injured, and four thousand homeless. No indictments were made. The disaster, according the company, was “an act of God.”

In 2000, an impoundment owned by Massey burst near the city of Inez in Kentucky. 250 tons of slurry spilled into nearby streams, creating a twenty-mile dead zone and polluting the water systems of ten counties. Massey, like Pittston, blamed it on the rain.

More recently, in December 2008 the containment wall at the Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston breached, spilling five hundred million gallons of waste over four hundred acres of land. Fifteen homes were damaged by the spill, but the residents escaped unharmed.

Although there are few outside of the coal industry who would assert that the incident near Inez was an act of God, it could be interpreted as a warning. Miraculously, there was no loss of life in this spill, but children at Marsh Fork Elementary in Sundial may not be so lucky. The landslide in Aberfan, Wales, is an obvious parallel: children and teachers pressing their faces against windows, a double line of white arches, a silence in which you couldn’t hear a bird or a child. When experts estimated that those at the Marsh Fork Elementary would only have three minutes to evacuate, Massey responded by installing a blow horn.

The sludge lagoon in Sundial is the wastewater depository for the Goals Coal Processing Plant, a Massey subsidiary, and dust from the operations, proven to cover every surface in the elementary school, is being inhaled into the students’ lungs. In 2009, 250 children attended Marsh Fork, and many missed school for problems with asthma and stomachaches that were a likely result of the waste impoundment nearby. Petitions to government officials went unheeded, so local citizens banded together in the Pennies for Promise campaign to raise the funds to build a new elementary school. In 2006 Ed Wiley, whose granddaughter attended Marsh Fork Elementary, walked 455 miles from Charleston, West Virginia, to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of the cause and convince local politicians to act on behalf of the children. After walking forty-three days, he reached the capital, where he met with West Virginian Senator Robert Byrd, who later sent him a personal letter acknowledging that Marsh Fork Elementary presented “a dangerous situation.” Ed Wiley and his cohorts continued their Pennies for Promise campaign, earning funds slowly while the children continued their studies under the shadow of a sludge lagoon.

The town of Blair is another hotspot in the fight against MTR and the historical site of coal mining’s most significant debacle. Located in Logan County, which neighbors Boone County where Sylvester lies, Blair is twenty miles into mountain country past a number of unincorporated string towns. Along Route 17, the flow of residences is steady until one approaches the Blair city limits, where homes begin to thin, separated by large patches of lawn spread between. Past two white chapels and across from an abandoned store, I found what I was looking for. Alongside the road, posted with no more ceremony than the town signs before it, was a cast bronze plaque marked The Battle of Blair Mountain, commemorating the culminating event in the ten-year-long Mine Wars:

In August 1921, 7000 striking miners led by Bill Blizzard met at Marmet for a march on Logan to organize the southern coalfields for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Reaching Blair Mountain on August 31, they were repelled by deputies and mine guards under Sheriff Don Chafin, waiting in fortified position. The five-day battle ended with the arrival of the US Army and the Air Corps. UMWA organizing efforts in southern West Virginia were halted until 1933.

Mining wages had plummeted after the end of the First World War, and miners struggled to unionize the coalfields of West Virginia to ensure their wages. These attempts were countered by the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency’s private agents, hired thugs who operated under the sanction and funds of the mining companies, that in turn operated under the sanction of many leading officials of the state’s government. A showdown was sparked between Baldwin-Felts agents and local law enforcement in the city of Matewan in southern West Virginia, when the agents unlawfully turned unionized miners out of their homes. The ensuing gunfire felled seven detectives, two miners, and Cabell Testerman, the mayor of Matewan.

During the fight, Sid Hatfield, the chief of police, shot Albert Felts, the brother of Thomas Felts, who founded the agency. Months later, while Hatfield and his wife were approaching the McDowell County Courthouse, Hatfield was gunned down by Baldwin-Felts agents before he reached the steps. His assassination was the impetus for the Blair Mountain uprising. After months of living in the squalor of tent colonies, the evicted miners were only too eager to rally against an establishment that offered them no fair recourse.

With red bandanas tied around their necks (by some accounts, this coined the term redneck), miners marched toward Logan County, singing: “Every little river must go down to the sea / All the slaving miners and our union will be free / Going to march to Blair Mountain / Going to whip the company / And I don’t want you to weep after me.” Sheriff Chafin and his men had cleared forest and dug trenches at the peak of Blair Mountain; miners approached through the underbrush, dodging bullets from the machine guns and rifles above, but making little progress due to the thickness of the cover and the constant stream of ammunition. A day later, the federal government gave in to Chafin’s plea for help and sent infantry troops and twenty-two planes from the Army’s Air Service. When the federal army began to arrive by train, Bill Blizzard called off the assault.

The miners believed the intervention by the national government would bring needed attention to the conflict and an answer to their concerns. Caching their guns against future conflict, the striking miners returned home, waving their flags and expressing confidence in Uncle Sam. Immediately after the Blair Mountain battle, however, membership in the UMWA dwindled by the thousands across the United States. It was not until twelve years later that the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 granted all miners the privilege of joining unions without retribution. In terms of casualties, the impact of this battle in the Mine Wars is difficult to determine. Estimates of the number killed at Blair Mountain range from twenty to fifty; no official count was taken because the miners packed out their dead.

The roadside sign is the only visual memorial of the Battle of Blair Mountain, an event that marks American history as the largest citizen uprising since the Civil War, and the only time the US government sent the air force out against its own people. Beyond, Route 17 climbs to the summit of Blair Mountain, which rises gently upward. Here among the ferns, pods, and rot that accumulates thickly, providing fertile ground for wild ginseng, there are bullets and signs of conflict still preserved from eighty-six years ago.

Now local citizens, historians, and environmentalists are engaged in the second “Battle for Blair Mountain.” Arch Coal and Massey Energy hold or lease land in the area near Blair. From 1980 until 1999, the union branch of Arch Coal strip-mined five thousand acres along Spruce Fork Ridge (the mountain chain that includes the town of Blair), obliterating a portion of the historic site until equipment complications halted operations. A subsidiary of Arch Coal has recently reactivated their digging here and plans to mine over 1,800 acres of the ridge; Massey holds a permit for over 1,200 acres.

In 2005, the West Virginia Archives and History Commission recommended that the National Park Service designate 1,600 acres of Blair Mountain as a preservation area. This is the fourth or fifth attempt to declare the mountain a historical site since 1980, and each time the proposal has been rejected as a result of technicalities or of lawsuits by the mining companies. Currently, the National Trust for Historic Preservation lists Blair Mountain as one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places, and locals have lobbied the state to protect the area. Amateur historian and city resident Kenny King was the first to trace the steps of the striking miners, searching for clues along paths where his grandfather may have marched. A coal miner himself, King supports underground mining and thinks that the coal under Blair can be retrieved in a manner respectful of the historic site. In 2006, he led an archeological team headed by Harvard Ayers from Appalachian State University. Together, they documented four battle sites, collecting over a thousand artifacts in a ten-mile stretch that they believe has not been disturbed since 1921.

Courtesy of Kenny King

Pistol discovered from Battle of Blair Mountain

In the period of the Mine Wars, Blair was a sizable community. At one point, there was a motion picture house down by the creek, next to the bronze commemorative sign. Until the early nineties, Blair consisted of two hundred residences, large for a string-town occupying twenty miles along a two-lane road in mountain country. After the coal companies moved in, the population dwindled to three hundred people. In 2008, there were seventy-five.

When I visited Blair, one of the remaining residents, Melvin Cook, chatted with his cousin Ralph in his driveway, where their pickup trucks were parked side by side, content like the men to spend the afternoon under the tin overhang. They were both tall—6’2” to 6’3”—and gray-haired but athletic looking. Ralph wore shorts to his knees, socks reaching midshin, and a tucked-in polo shirt. His moustache sat neatly trimmed over his upper lip. A retired schoolteacher, he had left Blair for college and spent the majority of his life in another community. Melvin had slightly more stomach under a white shirt and over a pair of jeans. A coarse beard bristled just over the end of his chin. A veteran miner, he had spent thirty years of his life in the bellies of the surrounding hills.

When Arch Coal first began mining along Spruce Fork Ridge, it bought out two-thirds of the residents to prevent what companies call “nuisance suits.” “Some felt lucky to get $30,000 out of a house they’d lived in all their life that retailed $10,000 in the books,” Melvin told me.

After looking for homes in lower-lying communities nearer the cities, many residents of Blair found they couldn’t even buy an open lot for the amount they’d cleared on their house and ended up deeply in debt. Back in Blair, in the early nineties their abandoned homes were set on fire during the night. The company never accepted responsibility for the conflagrations, although there was little doubt among the residents as to who was responsible. The message the flames sent to the remaining residents was clear. The company wanted them to get out—they were no longer welcome on their own land.

Arch Coal, in its first strip mining permit, extracted seven seams of coal, removing three hundred feet from the top of Ma and Pa Hollow, where Melvin and Ralph’s grandpa used to “hunt ‘coon”. Explosions from the mining operation sent stray rocks into people’s yards, coating everything nearby with black dust.

“You could hear the blasting like it was right there. You can set out here at like 4 o’clock and it’s somethin’ like night. The wife is sweeping off the porch, and then like a half an hour later she’s doin’ it again,” Melvin remembered.

In 2008, the Arch Coal and Massey Energy companies were gearing up to resume operations on the ridge in front of Melvin’s house and along the ridge behind, containing a thirty-one foot seam of some of the best low sulfur coal in the country, worth billions of dollars. Since Arch executed its first permit, ‘coon hunting in Ma and Pa Hollow is no longer possible for local residents. In the 1950s, deer moved into the area, and the terrain behind Melvin’s house is covered with walnut, hickory, beech, chestnut, buckeye, and white oak trees, all of which are especially good for deer. Hunting with guns is forbidden in the area, so Melvin tracks game through the woods with his bow and arrow. Some hunters have felled bucks with eight-point racks. After Arch and Massey are finished with the ridge, there will be no trees or deer left, and Melvin will be surrounded by gutted land and the few animals that can be supported by a fringe of forest on either side.

Concerning the efforts to reclaim the portion of Spruce Fork Ridge already decimated by strip mining, Ralph expressed his frustration: “They put the grass out there, but what’s it good for? I call it tumbleweed. It just keeps the ground intact. It can’t support any wildlife. They defend it by sayin’ they got a golf course out in Mingo, but how’s that supposed to make me feel better? You gotta have a rich guy to come out and play on it.”

He was referring to the Twisted Gun Golf Course that was constructed over the top of the Mingo Logan Low Gap surface mine, which is touted on the website of the Mineral Information Institute as being one of reclamation’s poster children: “Until this reclamation program, the counties of Mingo, McDowell and Logan did not have an 18-hole golf course due to the great expense of course development in the region’s mountainous terrain.” On the introduction page for the “Coal Mining Reclamation” section of the website, the Institute makes this disclaimer: “Mining inevitably disturbs land. Modern mines reclaim the surface during and after mining is completed, returning the land to useful purposes … The reclaimed mine lands are often more attractive to wildlife and human uses than before mining started.”

Similar propaganda is taught in elementary schools across coal country even as the children’s families are being forced out of their homes. Mining inevitably disturbs more than just land. Before Arch Coal came into town, there was a post office and two grocery stores in Blair. Even churches—the mainstay of mountain country—are closing down. Melvin told me that the preacher that ran the Blair Baptist Church across the street discontinued services just one month earlier. Melvin would not only have to go fifteen miles to get a candy bar, but to get some preaching, too.

There used to be a convenience store next to Melvin’s home. After it closed, he began cutting grass on the empty lot. When he told me this, I realized for the first time why the wide spaces between the homes in Blair were so striking. The lawns were mowed, apparently by the remaining residents of Blair.

Like many of the mountain lands of West Virginia, Spruce Fork Ridge used to belong to the people who lived there. Melvin and Ralph’s “two time” great-grandfather, John R. Mullins, crossed the mountains into Boone County before the forty counties that now make up West Virginia refused to secede from the Union with Virginia and formed their own government. John Mullins once owned all the property currently being mined by the Arch and Massey coal companies and parted with the land for a nickel an acre. With his pockets stuffed with five hundred dollars, Mullins walked away feeling like a rich man. “If we woulda kept it,” Melvin joked, “we’d be coal barons just like the Rockefellers.”

A trail at the peak of Blair Mountain leads to the strip mining operation on the other side, an area so massive that it constitutes one of the largest permits for strip mining ever issued. Leaving Melvin and Ralph with my best regards, I set out for the road. At the first trail I saw, I parked my car on the shoulder and headed into the woods.

Patrick Thomas, 2008

Author hiking trail up Blair Mountain

The forest, like impenetrable walls of green on either side of the trail, threatened to close in with every respiring breath. Puddles of water bubbling with frogs blocked my path. Leaning into the growth, I collected several ticks on my pants. I realized what an uphill march it must have been for those old-time miners during the Battle of Blair Mountain, pushing through branches obscuring their view, stepping over the rotting logs, and dodging the machine gun fire above. Not far from the road, I was surprised to find a portion of the wall of a home collapsed in a limp pile like wet cardboard. I glanced down into the ravine along the side of the trail, where the a curious number of domestic items were splayed out—carpet slung on the side of the riverbed; a mattress down in the gulley; a couch turned upside down, with its springs in the air. Piles of smaller objects spread along both sides: a tire, a hairbrush, shoes, socks, an ice cream carton, a coiled hose, and a child’s Fisher Price keyboard. On the other side of the bank, a toilet was smashed, shards of white ceramic mixed in with the tree bark and the green leaves of ground creepers. A jar of peanut butter had settled high up in the woods. My eye caught a sheet torn from a photo album. I brushed away flaked mud from a Polaroid snapshot of a small blonde girl bending over a birthday cake blowing out her candles. A man, presumably her father, stood behind.

Courtesy of Kenny King

Big Branch Strip Mine

Emotion flushed into my blood, pushing so hard up under my ribcage that I could hardly breathe. I stepped carefully down the side of the gulley looking for clues: a pink princess lunch box, a red toy monster truck. Above the houses that line the highways in string-town Appalachia are homes tucked up into the woods, where residents lived for generations before coal companies came into town, prompting development lower down. I wondered if these were the contents of one such home, and if so, who had lived there, and why they had left so many of their belongings.

Several miles up from this gorge, the trees begin to thin, partly due to altitude, but mostly because they are a facade for what lies beyond them—a ridge that drops down into hydro-seeded pasture, rolling on, dipping, and then, after thousands of acres, climbing to another line of forest that makes a dark stripe on the top of this incredible expanse of pale green—Ralph’s “tumbleweed”—the remains of what was once historic ground.

Even the visual impact of this sort of surface mining calls into question its ethics, but the makings of a home and family strewn across a ravine may have been evidence of the dire impacts of diverting those thousands of miles of streams.

“It’s not a stream unless it runs 365 days a year,” Ralph had said earlier, shaking his head in irony. President of West Virginia Coal Association, William Raney, once claimed that coal companies were filling in “dry hollows.” The ravine below the trail was dry now, but the spoiled carpet and the couch had evidence of water damage; the objects flung on either side of the gorge indicated a significant amount of runoff had barreled through.

Amid the piles of research I’ve compiled for this book, I keep the photograph of the girl and her father in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. The father is lean and mustached; his brown hair falls over his eyes as he reaches around a blond toddler to help her cut a chocolate birthday cake. In the lower left corner is another hand, pushing the cake forward. I assume this hand belongs to her mother. The mud is still caked over the piece of album page protecting the Polaroid; a dried piece of wall adheres to the back. Like my miner’s lamp, this photograph is a piece of mining history that has a story to tell that I will never know. Every so often, when sorting through my papers, I find it again, and I’ll pause as my heart speeds up for a moment. Fingering this photo of this child and her father, I hear the motors of two-story earth-movers still engaged in stripping away another layer of mountain. I think of the Goals Coal Processing Plant conducting business as usual in a high flood year, just waiting for an act of God to unleash the sludge lagoon above Marsh Fork Elementary, spilling disaster and heartache through the downwash of that Appalachian valley.