Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 25, 1995 TAG: 9504250091
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MCCOY LENGTH: Medium
Established last year, Montgomery County Coal Miners' Day recognized the miners who made their living underneath the earth while the industry flourished locally until a few decades ago.
Saturday's second annual celebration, held all day at the McCoy Community Ballfield, took a step toward becoming as ingrained in the county's culture as the miners are in their families' memories.
Perhaps that explains the premiere of a documentary - "Hard Times and Rich Memories: Coal Mining in Montgomery County" - that was shown hour-upon-hour, revealing through pictures and interviews what coal mining meant to the families who were part of this tradition.
Perhaps that explains the T-shirts emblazoned with the names of the county's coal mines and a depiction of the monument unveiled a year ago. That monument marks the names of miners who lost their lives in local explosions and accidents.
Perhaps, too, that explains the attention given to the "other" half of the coal mining team: the wives of miners who toiled at home and lived in dread of the danger that could all too quickly take their husbands' and their children's fathers' lives.
"Our wives and mothers were liberated long before" the idea of "liberated women," said Jimmie Lee Price, president of the Coal Mining Heritage Association of Montgomery County. He later asked all the wives and widows of miners to stand.
"We felt that we didn't say enough last year," Price said later. "The miners and their wives were a working team."
"If it weren't for mama, there wouldn't be no garden made," his brother, Bernard Price, said. "Don't forget the women. They're the backbone of any good man."
June Price, tending the T-shirt stand, said the celebration had "opened people's minds" to the heritage of coal mining. Price's husband worked in the Poverty Creek mines around the time of World War II. The couple now lives in Vinton.
This year fewer people attended the celebration of Coal Miners Day - which is actually April 18, the anniversary of the Great Valley Anthracite Mine explosion in McCoy that killed 12 in 1946. But "coal miner's grub" of pinto beans, coleslaw and corn bread; bluegrass and gospel music; and the nostalgia of poring over old photographs or looking upon the miners' tools of the trade, have combined with the hundreds of surviving miners and their families to establish the day as one of the county's annual events.
"When I was a teen-ager, I didn't think that anything that happened before I was born was all that important," Larry Linkous told a crowd gathered underneath the main tent. "Because of what happened here, I began to care about these things."
"The name Linkous and miner mean about the same thing," Jimmie Lee Price said in introducing the chairman of the county's Board of Supervisors, who also lent his services in auctioning quilts to benefit the association.
Linkous, whose father was a miner in the Merrimac Mine, told the crowd how he wished he had found the time to get his father to take him into the mine before the elder Linkous died. Later he asked his uncle to show him where the men dug coal for a living. And he told of hunting and finding artifacts his father and grandfather used - many of them like those displayed underneath tents at the ball field.
He found coal mining caps, dinner buckets and an augur. He found an unemployment slip from when his 18-year-old father was laid off. A discovered breastplate bore his granddad's initials chiseled into it. He urged those in the audience to search out pieces of their families' mining history.
Said Linkous: "Don't let our history die. It's too important to die."
by CNB