Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 22, 1992 TAG: 9203220268
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ANN ALEXANDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
No image of Appalachia has been more vivid - or more depressing - than that of the company-owned coal town.
With its wooden houses strung out in rows, its noisy machinery, its barefoot children and its layers of soot, the coal town has come to represent much that has gone wrong in the Southern mountain region. More than 500 of these towns were constructed in Appalachia between 1880 and 1930.
In an important new book, Virginia Tech historian Crandall Shifflett takes a fresh look at coal towns, and in the process, at Appalachia itself. Relying on government documents, company records and oral histories, he draws a picture of coal towns that is less grim and less bleak than the stereotype. He argues that most miners did not owe their souls to the company store, despite what Tennessee Ernie Ford sang. Instead, they retained their dignity and much of their culture as they moved from hillside farms into company housing.
Shifflett's new interpretation draws its inspiration from at least three sources.
First, he downplays the importance of labor disputes and, instead, emphasizes the workaday world of the miners and their families - the baseball games, the "visiting" among neighbors, the socializing at the commissary. Although he does not exonerate the owners - he is especially critical of their disregard for miners' safety - he brings to the study a skepticism about union claims.
Second, he takes seriously the testimony of miners themselves. Middle-class visitors were often disheartened by what they saw, but Shifflett refuses to discount the miners' own insistence that life in coal towns was not all that bad. "I really liked it in the coal-mining camps," said one miner. "All the houses were close together. Everybody knew each other. We all had the same things in common."
Third, and perhaps most important, he argues that historians have tended to view coal towns from a skewed perspective. Believing industrialism to be the "serpent in the Appalachian garden of Eden," they have seen coal towns as blights on the rural landscape. Shifflett demonstrates convincingly that the region was already desperately poor before the coalfields opened. Miners did not look back with nostalgia to the "good old days" of subsistence farming. Rather, they remembered eking out miserable livings on farms too small to support their families.
"Coal Towns" will become a standard source for serious students of Appalachian life and culture, although some historians may find Shifflett's picture a bit rosy. The book should also interest general readers who want to learn more about the region.
Ann Alexander teaches in Mary Baldwin College's adult degree program.
by CNB