It was a quiet, rainy afternoon in Matewan, West Virginia, a town tucked deep into the lush, rolling hills of Mingo County. On his way home from school, a young boy spotted his mother and baby sister crying on the front porch of his home. Three men in black suits were throwing his mattress and his mom's laundry into the muddy streets.
The boy turned and ran to the police station. Gasping, he told the chief, Sid Hatfield, "A bunch of Baldwin-Felts men are kicking us out of our house!"

Sid Hatfield knew all about those Baldwin-Felts men. They were detectives privately hired by the Stone Mountain Coal Company to fight the union of mine workers. The detectives would scare the mine workers so much that they would not join the United Mine Workers union. He also knew that when the company got word that some of its workers were talking about the union, it would send these Baldwin-Felts detectives to town to kick mineworkers and families out of their company owned houses.

Celebrating Sugar...Raisenettes, Bit-o-honey, and Dr. Pepper...

Sid marched over to the boy's house and asked the detectives for their warrants. Sid knew that these warrants were not official legal documents. He ordered the men to leave town, and then hurried back to his office to obtain his own warrants to arrest the detectives.

Sid, along with the Matewan mayor and a handful of mineworkers, met the men at the train station. The mayor reviewed the detective's warrants, and saw that they were not real. As the mayor, Sid, and the detectives glared at each other next to the railroad tracks, someone fired a shot! And so the Matewan Massacre began. It would be one of the greatest gunfights in American history. Over one hundred shots were fired. Ten men died in the street: six of them Baldwin-Felts detectives, three of them Matewan workers, and the tenth one was the mayor.

For decades, no one in Matewan has talked about the massacre. The town's residents ashamed to talk about their 'bloody' past. They speak in thick accents and live in an area rich with coal that has been exploited by rich mining companies for years and years. What the people of Mingo County, the surrounding areas, and most of the United States do not know though, is that the workers' rights movement began here.

On May 19, 1920, the day of the Matewan Massacre, there was already a lot of trouble in the town. Big mining companies like the Stone Mountain Mining Company were doing their best to prevent unions from getting strong. Before being hired by the Stone Mountain Mining Company, miners had to sign documents (aka "yellow-dog contracts") pledging never to join the mineworkers union nor to associate with union members. In exchange for signing the contract and being committed to buying food and clothes from company owned stores, mine workers and their families received jobs and homes to live in.

As the coal industry began to boom, however, greedy companies began to pay less money to mine workers. There were times when company men would lower their payments to workers the same day they would raise the price of food and clothes in the stores where the workers shopped. The people in the town, whether they were blacks, immigrants, or West Virginia natives, had moved to the area to make a life for themselves. Life was hard and getting harder.

Union men began to talk about worker's rights and equal pay. When workers began to associate more with union men, stories of Baldwin-Felts detectives throwing miners' families out of their homes at gunpoint became common. matemap.gif

When the workers got kicked out of their homes, the union would support them with tents and a basic relief fund. Fired miners did not have much but they lived in the tent colonies for years. They were constantly threatened by Baldwin-Felts detectives and sometimes had their water supply poisoned with kerosene. What they did have, though, was support. In the tent colonies, black, immigrant, and white workers lived together, as a united front.

After the Matewan Massacre, Sid Hatfield was murdered by his enemies. When they heard the new, almost 10,000 united miners marched across the state of West Virginia. Outside of the town, the miners met the Baldwin-Felts people and fought what would be become one of the largest armed labor battles in US history. It was a lot like a war. The Baldwin-Felts people actually dropped bombs on the miners. The National Guard had to be called in to stop the fighting. The miners surrendered immediately. They were fighting the company not the government.

After the battle in Mingo County, support for the labor movement was low. But later the Matewan Massacre and other labor incidents would influence legislation that made 'yellow-dog contracts' illegal. It also led to laws that outlawed detective agencies like Baldwin-Felts.

Current Matewan resident, Joyce Dyar, believes West Virginians should not be ashamed of their history nor should they view Matewan's violent past as the "hillbilly legacy of 'Bloody Mingo'". Other industries like the garment workers in the South, the steelworkers in Pennsylvania also experienced violent confrontations in their development too. "When we don't talk about our history", Joyce said, "we end up studying someone else's":

The silence that surrounds the story of Matewan is surprising, but the drama of its past is truly unforgettable. While we could argue about who was right and who was wrong, it is perhaps more valuable for us just to remember the union battles and the passion which they were fought.

Teddy