Mingo County War

You heard in the valley us coal miners is hard people?

You don’t know the half of it.

Before the union come to Mingo, the company sent up a bunch of hooligans from Baldwin-Felts, rough men toting guns and blackjacks.

They aimed to keep out the union.

See, they wanted to leave the coal price down at eighty cent a long ton, half of what’s paid to Pennsylvania miners.

They tried to put us out of our houses, but our sheriff Sid Hatfield stood tall.

Said they couldn’t do it.

Shot two of them Baldwin-Felts men dead as fried chicken.

Friday Fictioneers

Since the late 1800s, the coalfields of the state’s Mingo, Logan, and McDowell Counties had operated under a repressive company town system. Workers mined using leased tools and were paid low wages in company currency, or “scrip,” which could only be used at company stores. Safety conditions were often deplorable, yet despite the efforts of groups such as the United Mine Workers (UMW), the mine operators had kept unions out of the region through intimidation and violence. Companies compelled their workers to sign so-called “yellow dog contracts” pledging not to organize, and they used armies of private detectives to harass striking miners and evict them from their company-owned homes.  On May 19, 1920,  members of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency arrived in the town of Matewan to evict union miners from houses owned by the Stone Mountain Coal Company. After catching wind of the detectives’ activities, Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman and a pro-union sheriff named Sid Hatfield raised a small posse and confronted them near the local train station. A verbal argument quickly escalated into a gunfight, and when the smoke cleared, seven Baldwin-Felts agents had been killed along with Mayor Testerman and two local miners.