Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303260497
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WENDI GIBSON RICHERT STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: APPALACHIA LENGTH: Long
- It would be dark many a night when Lewis Henegar came in from the coal mines, peeled off his crusty work boots and laid his weary body to bed, just as his father and grandfather had done before him.
In those days, before the now-retired coal miner had married and raised children of his own, thousands of miners did the same thing all over these coal-rich mountains. Six days a week they carried their augers and dynamite to and from their company homes, built side-by-side in the hollows surrounding this community.
Back then, the town of Appalachia was a mecca of sorts, made great by the steam engine trains that chugged through it and by the thousands of folks who visited it from the neighboring coal camps. Coal companies, such as Stonega Coal & Coke Co. or Virginia Iron and Coal Co., began building the camps in the late 1800s to house miners and their families.
Now, the coal camps are gone. And the town's scattered camp houses, abandoned railroad tracks and aging population of 1,994 are a sad reminder of what happened when the coal boom busted.
The miners have dwindled to a few hundred. And, to Henegar, the shiny black gold is no longer Appalachia's greatest export.
It's "our young people," he says.
As chairman of the Committee for Tourism in Appalachia, Henegar and his fellow townsfolk hope to revive the town's sagging economy and reopen the stores that once had folks double-parked on both sides of Main Street.
With the help of Virginia Tech's Community Design Assistance Center and Radford University's department of sociology and anthropology, they have embarked on a plan to make tourism Appalachia's new industry. Henegar wants to give kids a reason to stay in town or a job to accept after returning from college.
They envision reconstructing the Inman coal camp - one of 14 around Appalachia - which was home to Henegar and other Wise County miners, their wives and children. They want to turn the camp into a living-history museum, complete with an open mine for tours, a scenic byway through the surrounding Jefferson National Forest and hiking trails in the mountains.
The cost still is uncertain, but there has been some movement to turn the vision into reality. In July, the U.S. Forest Service awarded Appalachia a $42,000 grant to pay for a feasibility study.
In November, Henegar and other members of the project action committee met to sort through the applications that came in for the job. In February, they picked their consultant and set to work.
Once under way, it could take a year to complete the study, Henegar acknowledges, with no guarantees that the project ever will become reality.
Henegar is anxious.
"It's taking too long," he says. "We're a culture of people getting ready to die. A generation from now . . . it'll be gone."
Henegar is positive the Inman project will preserve the lifestyle that was his for most of his days. And, of more importance to the area's economic developers, Henegar is sure it will increase tourism in Wise County and bring needed jobs to the region.
"If there is a better idea for this place, I'd like to hear it," he says. "And I think everybody else would, too. And if there is a better idea, why hasn't somebody done something?"
For Henegar, a certain amount of impatience isn't surprising when he talks about the Inman plans. He is among the last generation of former coal town citizens. If his story is to be remembered, it will have to be told and retold soon.
It will take a lot of money and a maybe dose of luck to get this project off paper and into Appalachia. Glenn Skinner, a regional planner with the Lenowisco Planning District and himself an Appalachian, says the project has seen some amount of "second-guessing" by area economic developers and government leaders.
But that's "common nature," and most folks are willing to give the study a chance. If the Inman project is determined unfeasible, Skinner says, Appalachia then will ask tourism developers what is.
At 64, though, Henegar is used to fighting for what he wants.
"It wouldn't be no fun unless it was a few problems along the way. You get a lot more satisfaction if you had a few obstacles that you have to hurdle."
No coal, no pay
Henegar grew up in Lynch, Ky., a coal town of 10,000 just across the Virginia line. "It was like family," he says of the camp that claimed 32 ethnic groups. "Everyone lived alike."
He and friends would play ball with a tin can in the dirt roads between rows of company houses. His mother would keep a watchful eye on her boy while ironing on the front porch and chatting with neighbors doing the same on their porches. "Ladies could do housework, watch kids and visit at the same time," he marvels. All without the benefits of electricity and running water.
Baseball was the sport of choice. "Every coal company had a baseball team," Henegar says. "If you could play baseball, you could have a job in any coal company." Good baseball players often lived in the best houses and worked the easiest jobs.
Henegar, though, played high school football and wore an eight-tooth bridge from a gridiron injury before graduating in May 1948. There was never any question that he would stay in Lynch and mine for U.S. Steel, like his dad.
"I come out of high school and thought I was tough," he remembers. But during his first eight hours underground shoveling coal into a one-ton wooden cart, "I worked 28 tons. I thought I was dying."
He was paid 72 cents for each ton of coal he hauled out. If after his shift he emerged empty-handed, he earned nothing. The no-coal, no-pay experience was shared by many miners all over the region.
When payday came along, miners who didn't pocket pay envelopes took home "snakes" - miners' talk for the pay slips with so many deductions for the doctoring, rent, blasting powder, tools, coal, insurance and water, that the total owed was more than the miner had earned.
In November 1948, newly married, Henegar moved to Inman, a camp just a mile or so from downtown Appalachia. He mined there for Virginia Iron and Coal Co. for 18 1/2 years, before becoming mine inspector for another 13 1/2.
Like most other camps in the region, Inman consisted of rows of neatly aligned houses built only feet apart and sectioned off by race and class - "Good Husband Row," for the storekeepers and company men; "Hunk Town," for Hungarians, Greeks, Poles, Italians and other European immigrants (anyone speaking broken English was referred to as a "Hunkie"); "Nigger Town" for black miners who traveled there in freight trains from the South.
Many camps, including Inman, also provided segregated schools for the miners' children up to the eighth grade. In Inman and other coal camps surrounding Appalachia, white students transferred to the all-white Appalachia High School. For years, black students could go only to the black high school in the county, in neighboring Big Stone Gap.
For Henry Fields, a 77-year-old retired miner who put in 42 years with the Stonega company - now Westmoreland Coal Co. - going to the Big Stone Gap school was an impossibility.
Fields spent most of his days at the Arno camp, just over a hill from Inman. Raised by his grandmother, he left Arno's black elementary school only to realize that his family couldn't afford to get him to the black high school 3 miles away.
At that time, Fields wasn't old enough to work in the mines, an age the company set at 20. So he earned money doing odd jobs around the camp.
When Fields turned 18, however, he was convinced he was ready for mining. His grandmother told the company he was 20, and in 1933 Fields stepped into his first coal mine.
Fields' memories of growing up in a segregated school and living in segregated sections of a camp aren't filled with bitterness toward a racist society. On the contrary, the only time racism in Appalachia became an issue for Fields was when high school became out of his reach.
The only difference between blacks and whites "was we didn't go to school together," he recalls. "We even went to church together. We worked in the mines together. See, the color didn't make no difference."
After all, by a shift's end, all miners were black.
The company store was the central part of most coal camps, including Inman and Arno. Virginia Tech Professor Crandall Shifflett noted in his book "Coal Towns: Life, Work and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960" that "no other place brought as many people together in one location."
Here, miners and their families traded scrip - company money redeemable only at the company store - for dry goods and groceries. They also met on the store's front porch to trade tales, exchange gossip, whittle, sing and dance.
"We'd get around and sitting, sometimes you wouldn't be working about two days a week," Fields says. "Well, to pass time off, we'd get out there and pitch horseshoes, play dominoes, checkers, play cards. Sometimes we'd be playing cards for matches - we didn't have no money!"
And there was music. "I knew one guy who used to play the man-do-LINE. And buddy, he could play . . .."
Folks from all over the camp - blacks and whites, Greeks and Italians, Poles and Hungarians - gathered at the company store or on someone's front porch and plucked their fiddles and banjoes to a foot-stomping, danceable beat.
Henegar remembers the music, too. "This B.B. King and things like that . . .. " he says. "The coalfields was full of them."
Earning `show fare'
When miners weren't paid in scrip, they often traded in downtown Appalachia, where men could congregate in the many saloons while their families shopped or caught a movie. Earning `show fare'
Sam Church, former international president of the United Mine Workers of America, spent much of his childhood in coal camps in West Virginia. He and his family moved to Appalachia in 1945 when he was 9. Today at 56, he calls this small town - what's left of it - home.
Church, a UMWA coordinator of political action in Virginia, lost the 1982 election to current president Richard Trumka.
Sitting in his Main Street Appalachia office, he remembers going to the movies when there were two theaters here and two in Big Stone Gap. Today, there are no movie theaters in either town. But then, he could catch a flick for two dimes and get a big bag of popcorn for 30 cents more.
To earn his "show fare," he and a friend used to sell batches of coal from 100-pound potato sacks for a quarter, door to door, to folks in one of the coal camps. "Contracting," he called it then. "On Saturday morning we'd go over and get 75 cents a piece. We could go to both movies, double features."
Church spent his early years in South Matewan, W.Va., the namesake of the 1987 movie about the labor struggle in West Virginia's coal country. His father was a miner, having entered the mines at 12. But he was disabled at age 23 when his brother, a mine brakeman, pulled an empty coal car over his foot, nearly cutting it off.
The company paid his dad $12-a-month compensation and sent him to barber school. He later worked in a unionized barbershop in the company store, getting only a percentage of what he made cutting hair.
Even though Church's father wasn't a miner, his livelihood still depended on the mining industry. "If people were working good, people got a haircut every two or three weeks," Church says. "If they weren't, they got one every month and a half."
While not richly decorated, most every home Church remembers had pictures on the wall of the coal miner's trinity: John L. Lewis, the UMWA's longest serving president and staunch fighter for union rights; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Jesus.
"Our folks always felt if it hadn't been for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John L. Lewis, we'd have never had the union," Church says.
As for Jesus, camp folks often mentioned their Christianity, though according to Shifflett's research they were sidetracked from regular church attendance by the other social demands of a day off from work. Still, coal-town hollows were filled with the strains of gospel music and weekly preachings, both in churches and on the radio.
Most of the camp homes were heated with coal stoves, which also served as the cookstove in the kitchen. Leftover corn bread and biscuits were tossed into the warming pan on the top of the stove while a pot of beans was kept simmering on the back of the stove.
"Everyone in a coal camp ate pinto beans - except on Sunday," a day when Church always went to Sunday school and dropped a nickel in the offering plate when times were good. "We'd eat fried chicken on Sundays during the summer."
Coal town folks lived off the land as much as possible. "I guess the groundhog population decreased quite a bit," Church says. Stewed groundhog, heavily peppered and cooked with sweet potatoes, was "pretty good."
`Daddy's home-brew'
Mary Santelli of Appalachia recalls harvesting her family's gardens, many of which were hidden from the coal company in the hills surrounding Inman. They made it through many cold winters with little money, she says, because they grew so much food and preserved it.
Santelli, 62, was born and reared in the same house in the Inman camp. When she was 11, her mother died when her gallstones "spread poison through her body," and Santelli was left to care for her eight brothers and sisters and her father.
Santelli's father brought home about $8 a day as a miner. Because he "was the type of a man that kept us clothed and fed real good," her family rarely suffered through hard times.
Life for the young Santelli also meant helping prepare supper, can fruit, pick berries and do the laundry. When her mother was living, Santelli used to watch her wash clothes on the washboard. She reckons that washing clothes was the hardest thing anybody had to do.
A lot of miners made and drank alcohol, Santelli recalls. "They did stuff like that. . . . I was Daddy's home-brew maker." Two cakes of yeast, five pounds of sugar and a can of Red Top Malt from the company store would yield five gallons of home brew. Some folks say it's still better than anything you can buy in a can today.
During the summers, Santelli's family would hike to the slate dumps of abandoned mines to collect loose coal. They carried it in buckets to the coal house in their front yard before her daddy bought a mule to haul it in a sled.
"What we were trying to do, see, was fill the coal house up with coal before winter set in." They could have ordered coal from the company, but that, like everything, cost money.
Santelli and her siblings did these chores "to help our daddy." By her own choice, she quit school in the sixth grade to help at home. She did, however, earn a general equivalency diploma shortly after she married Jack Santelli, a neighbor boy in the camp.
"As I look back on it," she says of her life in Inman, "I don't have any regrets, don't have any at all. I think I might have been the type of a person, the way we lived, I probably just thought everybody else lived that way, too."
Keywords:
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by CNB