Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 2, 1994 TAG: 9312300128
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MCCOY LENGTH: Long
But that just shows how quickly times change.
Fact is, the industry was a part of life here for more than 200 years. Montgomery County had all the characteristics of more famous coalfields - cavernous mines, hard-working people, company towns, strikes and deadly accidents.
Only within the past 40 years has coal mining passed from the local scene.
These days, if you stand in the woods above a caved-in mine shaft, near crumpled machinery and rusted coal hoppers, the moan of a distant train whistle sounds ghostly.
Still, rich lodes of memory are stored in the minds of people who toiled deep in the earth, eked out a living and survived to tell about the experience.
H. Lee Linkous is one of these. A 75-year-old who lives in a small, tidy frame house within a mile of his birthplace near Merrimac, Linkous left school and entered the mines as a teen-ager to support his widowed mother and two sisters.
Coal mining was a family tradition, and Linkous worked beside uncles and cousins until a 1934 strike closed the Merrimac mines permanently.
There's an old photograph of a grimy-faced Linkous at age 16, grasping mule bridles in both fists. Handling the mules - who hauled the coal hoppers out of the mines - was Linkous' job.
"I like to tell people those mules had more sense than a lot of the miners I worked with," he laughs.
After Merrimac shut down, Linkous caught on at the Great Valley Anthracite Mine across the county in McCoy. That's where he worked until 1946, when he reported to work one spring morning and found a scene of disaster.
During the day's first shift, an explosion far below - about a half-mile beneath the New River - killed 12 men, leaving 50 children fatherless.
Linkous recalls his foreman asking him to help retrieve the victims. "Are they dead or alive?" he asked.
"Dead," the boss replied.
"Better let the rescue squad handle it," Linkous said, and walked away from mining forever.
Linkous can still take you on a walking tour of the Merrimac mine site, through the scrub brush and weeds. There's not much to see. Old photographs show quite an operation - buildings and railroad tracks commanded by a tall breaker and gangway leading from the mine shaft.
Now everything's gone except the breaker's cement foundations. They pried the track up about 40 years ago and left the huge piles of discarded coal debris, known as slag, to sprout weeds.
The locals have turned the mine shaft's mouth into one of those Appalachian back-it-up, shove-it-downhill dumps. It's clogged with old household appliances, furniture and tires, all castaways from 20th century life.
The county's mining history is too important to be similarly discarded, says Oakley Lilly.
Lilly, 83, also worked for years as a miner at McCoy, his family's homeplace. He, like others, recalls the mines with stoic pride - but little sentimentality.
"It was a hard life. A lot of things about it you'd like to forget. But you raised your family there," he says.
Lots of families have been raised - and many homes warmed - by the yield of Montgomery County coal mines. The county's first European settlers recognized outcroppings of coal along Brush and Price mountains and began pit mining by 1790.
Those early mines - actually trenches - were usually operated by blacksmiths, who learned that slow-burning, hot-firing coal tempered metal better than wood. They would locate their forge near a coal vein and move on when the seam played out.
County mines in the first half of the 19th century didn't expand much beyond those individual "farmer's diggings" that served a local market. More economic opportunity came with the Civil War, when Southern armament industries needed local coal.
An oft-repeated legend says that Montgomery coal fueled the boilers of the Merrimac, the renowned Confederate ironclad. That folk tale can't be proven, but the name "Merrimac" for the area near Price Mountain stuck.
After the war, county coal mines remained small and isolated. Part of the restriction on development had to do with the coal veins, which were thin and difficult to locate underground.
Transportation of mined coal to market was a bigger obstacle. In the early days, coal was hauled by wagon from Montgomery County over the mountains to the James River for shipment downstream. But that was a tough way to earn a dollar.
With the late 19th century came the Industrial Revolution, and railroad lines reached Montgomery County. Even so, not much coal hauled by the newly formed Norfolk & Western Railway originated locally. Most of the railroad's coal came from Southwest Virginia and West Virginia fields.
Boom times - such as they were - didn't come to Montgomery County until after 1900. During violent labor unrest in the Pennsylvania coalfields, the neglected local mines began to attract serious investors.
In 1904, a new business, the Virginia Anthracite Coal Co., finally connected the two ingredients of success by building a railroad spur from the Norfolk & Western rail station in Cambria to the Price Mountain mines and beyond to Blacksburg.
This nine-mile spur became the locally famous Huckleberry Line, so named because passengers could climb off the stalled or slow-moving train to gather berries.
The train continued running between Cambria and Blacksburg until the 1950s, but the Merrimac coal operation was sporadic. Financial troubles forced the mine in and out of bankruptcy and operation.
The Virginian Railway was more of a boost to county mines when it built a second line through Montgomery in 1909. Its route allowed mines near McCoy the transportation they needed to prosper.
Yet conditions and techniques remained primitive even as county mines grew and expanded. Hand loading was standard procedure in the chilly, dank mines - a place fit only for a man with muscle, skill, courage and endurance.
"It was all done the hard way," Lilly says.
Dressed in rough coveralls and rubber boots and wearing headlamps, miners would walk or ride a coal hopper down the shaft thousands of feet to the coal face. There the coal would be drilled, exploded and loaded.
Miners, paid by the hour or by the ton of coal they dug, earned a pittance. A 1933 survey of county miners found that 80 percent earned less than $500 annually. "If I earned 50-60 dollar wages for a week's work, I was doing good," Lilly recalls.
Many miners supplemented their income and cupboards by keeping livestock. Some lived in mining towns and "camp houses" that grew up near the Merrimac and McCoy operations. Mining towns are depicted as dreary and oppressive places to live, yet McCoy grew to be a close-knit community, with a movie theater, a schoolhouse, baseball teams and churches.
Unions and strikes were a factor of life during the Depression, but the Montgomery mines avoided the strife and violence characteristic of labor unrest in other coalfields. During a four-month strike in 1934, management allowed miners to live in company houses in Merrimac and to use the company mules for garden tilling.
"We never did have the problems like they had in West Virginia," Lilly says. "Everybody got along."
Yet miners never had it easy. Working conditions were particularly challenging to the county's few black miners, many of whom lived in the Wake Forest community near McCoy. Homer Sherman, who worked in the McCoy mines with his father, uncles and eight brothers, recalls the mine as a "slave house" where white miners received preferential treatment.
Overall, however, everyone involved in mining coal in Montgomery County had an investment in a losing proposition. The poor-grade coal was hard to recover, which made the mines less attractive to investors, unprofitable for operators and low-paying for miners. Also, use of coal as a domestic and industrial energy source steadily declined during the 20th century.
Only the inflated economic demands of wartime kept the Montgomery County mines solvent. During World War II, the county set an all-time high for coal production. But output and employment declined rapidly after peace was declared, and many ex-miners like Linkous and Lilly went to work at the Radford arsenal, Virginia Tech or elsewhere.
On the darkest day in Montgomery County coal mining history, April 18, 1946, the feeble industry received its death knell. A spark ignited a pocket of methane gas - always a dangerous presence in county mines. The dozen miners were more than a mile into the mine when the explosion and fire killed them.
That was the incident that drove Linkous away from mining.
Lilly was also at the mine that day and recalls seeing the miners' charred bodies brought to the surface. "I knew all of them. It was as bad a thing as I've ever been through," Lilly says. "You don't forget something like that."
Roanoke Times reporter Melville Carico and photographer E. Howard Hammersley watched the grim process of recovery. "As each body was brought out and carried on the improvised stretchers to the nearby machine shop, neighbors tenderly turned back the burlap and took a grim look to identify the miner," Carico wrote.
Several days later, four miners' caskets were placed in a yard of a small country church. The minister - himself an ex-miner - preached the funeral from the church steps, noting that the men died earning an honest living as God intended.
Within 10 years, all the county's larger mines were closed. Equipment and company housing were removed and shafts were sealed, leaving few traces of the industry.
Smaller mines remained in business into the 1960s. A local company hauled slag away from old coal mining sites until just a few years ago.
Some of those slag piles remain - like the large heap above the New River near the old Great Valley mine - but the land healed. Thus far, the county has avoided environmental problems common to some former coalfields such as sinking surface land or ground water contamination.
Now the era of local coal mining belongs to the ages. "There's so little coal left, it wouldn't be economical to mine," said Johanna Jones of Virginia Tech's Center for Coal and Energy Research. "It's gone."
The only human vestiges of mining are memories and this: According to the Labor Department, as of September 1993, about 200 ex-miners or dependents living in Montgomery County were receiving black-lung disability benefits.
"There are a lot of things my children don't realize," Lilly says. "All of it was a bad life. But it was the only livelihood we had."
by CNB