Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 18, 1990 TAG: 9006180068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WELCH, W.VA. LENGTH: Medium
Unbeknownst to anyone, the 70-year-old trial records had been stored in a dungeonlike room in the courthouse basement that had been set aside as a nuclear fallout shelter.
In May, an exterminator's hunt for termites led to the discovery of court papers dating from the Civil War.
"We found 2,000 or 3,000 criminal files down there," said Paul Lambert, clerk of the 8th Judicial Circuit Court of West Virginia. "The third file I pulled out, to my surprise, was the Ed Chambers murder file that all historians have been looking for."
Ed Chambers and "Smilin' Sid" Hatfield, police officers who were supporters of efforts to unionize the coal mines of West Virginia in the 1920s, were killed on the McDowell County Courthouse steps in Welch by three private detectives working for mine owners.
The killings led to a vicious battle in August 1921 as 6,000 striking coal miners marched to Blair Mountain and fought with 3,000 coal company detectives, state militiamen and federal troops.
Prof. James R. Green, a labor historian at the University of Massachusetts, said there were relatively few casualties. But the biggest was the United Mine Workers of America: 500 union leaders were indicted for crimes in connection with the fight. The UMW withered for 13 years until the New Deal came along and supported the union movement.
The three detectives were acquitted on the ground that they acted in self-defense. Over the years, historians and labor specialists have searched for the records of the Chambers case.
As it turned out, documents in the file tend to support the view that the coal companies largely controlled the justice system in this region and probably played a role in the acquittal of Chambers' killers.
The file on Hatfield has not been found.
Hatfield was the 26-year-old chief of police in nearby Matewan. The 22-year-old Chambers was his deputy. The men who killed them were detectives with the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, which companies hired to protect the mines, to evict striking miners from company-owned houses and, it was said, to incite violence and then quash it brutally.
The two were killed on Aug. 1, 1921, on the courthouse steps here in front of a crowd of witnesses, including the victims' wives.
Buddy Herzbrun, who is 85 and lives in Welch, said in an interview that he remembered the killings well. "I saw the two men from Matewan walk up the steps, and when they got to the landing, the shots rang out," he said. "I could see the men fall and one of the wives trying to whack a couple of the killers on the head with an umbrella."
Rudolph J. Murensky II, a local history buff, said the file had two important documents indicating that coal companies controlled the trial. In one, Chambers' wife wrote to the prosecutor that many people were too afraid to testify at the trial. The second document has a list of jurors and their occupations. Nearly every one worked for a nonunion coal company.
But juries were afraid to convict anybody at that time. A year earlier, on May 19, 1920, Hatfield, Chambers and a group of striking miners killed seven Baldwin detectives in what became known as the Matewan Massacre. A jury acquitted them all on the ground of self-defense.
A fictional version of the massacre was made into a movie, "Matewan," which was released in 1987.
by CNB