The Widen Film Project - A West Virginia Coal Mining Town Documentary

[Music] formed on march 29 1858 from sections of nicholas and braxton counties clay county is located in the central part of west virginia this area was comprised of approximately 350 square miles of wilderness early settlers were sparse as there are no roads into this section of the state as the coal institute grew in the mid-18th century small coal towns began springing up along the appalachian landscape these early towns usually followed the rail lines and were wild lawless camps comprised mostly of men the the coal miners had come into western virginia maybe as early 1870 or in the 70s when the railroads actually came in and coal got to be a big thing in west virginia and something as it did bring some money into west virginia my people and other people who lived in our hills and who had immigrated to west virginia from various other countries in my case mostly united kingdom uh they had at that time it wasn't there but nevertheless it is now from united kingdom they had been sent up by choice or otherwise to west virginia and lived in these mines and dug out a little living up there with uh as best they could as small farmers in these hills living on game and whatever they could make a living on but there was no actual money coming in to speak of they needed the money when when the coal people came in and of course they they welcomed it then for a time because they thought it'd be nice to have some money to spend that kind of thing these early settlements usually did not offer a sense of community soon co-operators begin the process of cleaning up their rugged coal settlements in time many families fill the homes and streets in these early coal towns because of their paternalistic dominance most co-operators became synonymous with their towns such was the case with j.g bradley in the town of wyden west virginia [Music] do [Music] president abraham lincoln granted a large parcel of clay county to his then secretary of war simon d cameron his son james cameron a partner of the elk river coal and lumber association began building a coal mine in timber mill there in the late 19th century james cameron was j.g bradley's grandfather the story is that the cameron was kind of forced on lincoln as a secretary of war out of the 1860 convention because going into that convention lincoln was not the he was not the leading candidate for the republican nomination so in order to get lincoln the nomination several deals were made by some of lincoln's campaign workers and part of that was to get the support of the pennsylvania delegation which senator cameron controlled senator cameron was promised a prominent place in a new cabinet so he became secretary of war lincoln was not happy with this lincoln said the only thing cameron wouldn't steal was a red-hot stove he didn't last long in that job lincoln soon found a way to make him minister russia and of course edwin stanton became lincoln's most famous secretary of war and was the secretary of war throughout throughout the civil war and played a large part in the union victory uh senator cameron came in the possession of 102 000 acres in what's today clay and nicholas county now whether he has a less than ethical reputation playing part in acquiring that property i'm not sure but regardless after uh senator cameron or secretary cameron's death his grandson joseph g bradley inherited that property um mr bradley was was his quite remarkable fellow himself obviously raised with with a lot of i think options in life because of wealth and prestige graduate harvard law school and shortly after his graduation from harvard law school stage 22 uh came to clay county and decided to develop the property that he'd that he inherited i came in in 1903 he looked looked at the property surveyed it and figured the first thing he needed was a railroad to get to get back into it so the buffalo creek and golly railroad was chartered in 1904 was built from dundeen across the oak river clay uh to widen and i think it's about 18 miles from dundon to wyden it was completed 1905 and when i got the end of the line he named the town of wyden after one of the contractors on the railroad um and that pretty much that started the whole operation and when they first started that railroad there's passenger train run three times a day and from dundon to wyden and he said that his dad worked you know and it's always filled that's pretty good you know was a passenger train three times a day and done the widening back everything had to go in out on that train and uh and all the people that worked there i know when uh my mom and my dad when they went for once for work of swandale they get up in the morning that track would be lined with people you know hobos and stuff wanting a job you know and uh and they'd hire so many at the time you know [Music] dunden the oldest of four company towns and is located across the elk river from the town of clay [Music] the office of the elk river coal and lubber company was located here along with the railroad repair shops of course the the three major communities of of the elk river called llama company redundant which the buffalo creek gully shops were located widened of course which had the was the main town had the coal operation that's where the company office was at and then swandale which is where the meal was and we just thought it was the best place in the world partly because the railroad ran through the vacuum and you could just climb on the train our idea was you can climb on the train whenever you want to and moon mullins was on the train and we thought that was the most fabulous thing in the world because of his name and a cartoon character called moon mowings and we loved working on the railroad we just thought that was neat i guess we thought you could walk anywhere in the world and he probably can i mean from one short to the other if you keep walking on the railroad today the ruins of the bc and g railroad still remain but through the efforts of the bcg railroad co-op the train runs again passengers experience the scenic attractions of buffalo creek and the natural beauty of clay county west virginia but now we're trying to rebuild it by putting this camp ground together at dundin and railroad excursion back at buffalo and we hope to accomplish that and complete it and not too long a period there's uh well there's a list that will will have 14 a half miles of running track there were able to put the engines and hopefully motor cars on within uh the near future the last six years over 6 000 people named after stockholder captain thomas swann swandale was the lumber town of the company and is located on the lower part of the buffalo creek the elk river coal and lumber company's dairy farm was situated in the town of crestmont in the early decades of the 20th century production rose at the rich run mine and so did the number of houses located in wyden the first houses constructed were single-story dwellings of three to five rooms widened houses were well constructed but did not in the early days provide the luxuries of indoor plumbing uh no when i got out of one i met some of uh some of them were older people too i remember that that i talked with them who lived in those houses those houses were company houses however they were not as much coal shacks as some of the other coal miners had to live in in various various coal towns or near coal towns uh you know why didn't at the time that i left i visited or was allowed to visit the thing in there it was a fairly decent little town you know kind of thing now i don't say they they were not luxurious or anything like that and i doubt that it was a flush toilet in the whole town you know a flush toilet i don't think so but that would have been a little unusual and uh we had all the conveniences of uh the outside world we had to come out of wide really yeah we had uh awareness retail uh facilities so we had banks we had a medical facility there's a doctor on call 24 hours a day seven days a week life is anything serious they had the ambulance service to take it to upgraded facilities so i mean we had everything that we needed there and uh we didn't make a whole lot of money was we made better money than most people surrounding uh clay but in today's world it wasn't uh much but like to say nobody made very much money back in the 40s and the 50s when i worked for mr bradley he always paid what the union minds were paying and sometimes more didn't have no business anywhere else because they finished it off yeah we had everything had your you had your own doctor and he made house calls and if you had to go to the hospital lamb would come and got you and you your grocery store was there and your post office was there and he didn't have to worry about the bank cause you had no money to put in or take out some people try to say this was a kingdom and compared to a feudal situation but it was really a very forward-looking social engineering experiment a you know virtual utopia because for 50 years for the period of time that he built bradley built this community they had everything provided for them the teachers had the best wages they had the best schools uh they had churches built so it wasn't just company housing and a company store they had all that they had everything else provided recreation facilities their life was much better than anybody in the surrounding area inside this rural remote little territory it was completely different from what you could find outside of it it was very self-contained utopia and this is a period of time that in europe fascism was rising up and one of the characteristics was in in a fascist society the government and capital and labor were all integrated together in a single organizational structure and bradley did this essentially so it was a utopia but it was a totalitarian utopia that everything was taken care of cradled the grave you know it must have seemed like something out of science fiction of the people that lived there our rent was uh nine dollars a month uh when i was a young boy uh the company generated their own electricity they had their own power plant there and uh our electric bill was a dollar a month uh they provided the coal you heated everybody heated by coal and nothing everybody had a coal house everybody had a dollar house they delivered a load of coal when you called them or sent word you needed you didn't have telephones cost you 50 cents a month yeah and uh they had a company store well had script issued script and and you would go uh to a script office and you would you had a script card you would uh tell them how much you wanted and uh you they either gave it to you what you already worked out or what you were going to work out in the very near future and you'd get your script and then you can spend that at the at the company store face value but now if you went out of wide and tried to spend it or some of the surrounding areas uh they charge you 10 10 cents on the dollar you took a dollar script you got 90 cents worth of goods for it but but that was convenient you know people would draw a script and buy whatever they needed and really wasn't a lot different from today uh in that people always using these credit cards uh to buy things and but then we just uh we use their old script card the house at dundin was kind of unique i remember it had screen porch i think downstairs when you came in but my grandmother had had it staying dark brown because of the cold dust you know she didn't want white walls there would be black all the time because of this soot and it had little yellow curtains with cherries on them and i was amazed to see that in grandpa's living room down here he was allowed to stack his newspapers like those crazy old people you hear about where you have to sort of tunnel your way through the memorabilia well he said everything uh the town was clean if if he was there you know they had a board fence around each house they were white wars twice and if you had a board come down off of the fence if you went to the office they would send men out and repair them but if you didn't the superintendent when he made his round that was ed kearns if he come around and found the board off the fence and you didn't turn it in they would send the repair crew down and put that board back on but it would cost you two dollars out of your pay if you didn't mow your grass and keep it nice and neat they would send the repair crew down they'd mow your grass and they'd take two dollars out of your pay and two dollars back at that time was a pretty good bit of money so everybody kept their places clean when back when they had the contest for the best yards in the town the ladies auctioneer what they called herself they went around judged people's yards and they had a had a wooden duck had yards a month wrote on them yeah and uh if your yard was the best you got the duck setting yours this uh this one woman she uh oh she worked like a trooper to get her yard cleaned up and everything so she could get the yard of the month duck and she did she didn't get it and she was telling hard to hook him he's kind of a joking right there and talk kind of slow like and she's telling him about not getting a duck for the best yard and he told her he said use these terms he said they're gonna make you one i'm gonna write of town said you'll get it every month one interesting fact i think you have to remember that this was private property if law enforcement came in they'd have a warrant but everything i've always heard there was not much of a need for law enforcement because bradley pleased his own towns if if somebody got out of line or there was some unruly behavior usually it just took a letter from bradley saying fix the situation or you're out of a job and usually that was enough was that some you may ask was that you know was that wrong with an iron hand well it may have been but but it was effective one of the things i will say too as far as behavior expectations as long as i said as you did your job and you worked and so forth you had a job if you had children that should have gone way astray your job could be in jeopardy i think he was the benevolent dictator that he did really good things for them materially speaking economically speaking socially he provided for needs that weren't being met elsewhere as far as as oppressive he controlled their lives and if you stepped out of line you probably really regretted it and the company also uh was in control of the town you didn't get too far out of line or your parents job was on the line so that that was something that you had to consider and kids they realized that you know they had to there wasn't a lot going on in there there was a few episodes here and there you know but like i say the company was in control i think that they're really his life and that when he came down here as a young man he came from harvard and uh from a kind of a cosmo not a cosmopolitan background but i mean washington new york boston he roomed with franklin delano roosevelt at college forgetting his pennsylvania connection he was quite rural brought up in mount joy pennsylvania where my great-grandmother lived and that was rural and he seemed to have an appreciation for rural people and rural life and i think what he considered real you know genuine people and he genuinely liked people um in terms of philosophy he was open in old comanche i mean and prejudiced but if you sat him next to somebody i don't care what color they were or what their um political persuasion might be you would genuinely like them for themselves you know and and that was very clear but somehow he really kind of fell in love with the job and with the people it must have been very early on way before my time because he really uh he believed in this place he wanted people to succeed he wanted people to have a chance and he was very distressed when miners would get paid and blow it all on alcohol on saturday night or i mean i heard him say that why can't they just put their money in the bank and save it you know and so he was really very concerned for the towns the welfare of the towns and that people should lead a good and decent life [Music] like many of the early coal mining towns in appalachia the residents of wyden had very strong ties to religion minors who constantly live with the threat of death had religion as a solace if death were to come in the mind knowing that salvation was in store for them gave miners comfort in their long hours of toil [Music] my dad my dad was a preacher and he was an ordained preacher and there's a little church says he grew up dog run called pleasantville and that's where we started going to church at and that's where he was ordained at and uh uh he he he held the church proof that the church hadn't uh never did never did never was a pastor in uh in wyden but he's all the others around he was i don't know why but uh there's a little bit of politics going on was at who the preacher was in wyden the company had a little bit to do with that you know you had to be approved whether you were going to be a preacher or not and there was there was politics mixed up in that my dad's a republican my mom's a democrat my dad was a methodist my mom was a baptist and i said back then we had drugs because i was drugged to church every sunday every wednesday night they always have a communion meeting and feet washing and i remember a such a little girl but i remember my grandmother whaling a grandmother's sizeboard was washing her daughter's feet by grandma whalings and she shook her hair down and dried her hair frozen shouting all at the same time that agnes davis this week i've done a little work for her she was telling me that uh when she was kid she was raised in nicholas county uh that that they weren't allowed to go to the any other churches at night like uh you know we call them holy rollers or whatever but uh they were always afraid of snake handlers and they would let him go well her brother's her brothers slipped off one night and they go to the this meeting and they did have snakes and they hadn't brought them out yet they said the crowd was really excited and they were just singing and jumping jumping around and uh the church they had they had a a high roll in the back and these boys were sitting up early uh log seats and one of the boys pulled off his belt and he throw it up front right at the feet of the crowd and he said that they come out of there scared to death run and knock the pot belly stove over and and burnt the whole floor out of the church almost destroyed the church j.g bradley was active in west virginia politics as state republican party leader and president of the west virginia co-owners association bradley was in the unique position of being able to influence both government and capital throughout the state of west virginia mr bradley he was listed on the uh on the royal lawyers for several years although he never actually actively practiced law he he was elected to multiple republican national conventions being a republican that was his family lineage they were republicans but bradley uh he moved in high circles you know he came from a very wealthy background and he knew his way around so there's no question that he tried to change the tenor of the political landscape not just in west virginia but united states in general they they were very set on in order to keep what they had they had to buck against what was happening all the way from down from d.c which was the national recovery business the new deal the wagner act in 1935 made company unions illegal for example it worked against that well they they still had one for 20 years after that i mean what that the kind of control that he exercised there is almost exceptional in american history i'm sure that he believed in things coming from the top down that's the way it was done then and he would not be any different i just think he did it better than most people did because i think he truly was a very altruistic person i was an exciting time when election year like i'd say dad was always involved in it and then my brother he grew older he was involved in it and i can remember mother had an old trunk that had a lock on it and i can remember election time when the bottom of that truck it had a it had a tray over it but they take that trail and the bottom of that trunk would be full of these little bottles of whiskey and they were small balls i don't think they make them like i don't know they were like what were they navy i paint bottles maybe half pint i don't know but they used those on election day you know they gave them out to people and they would keep those in that trunk people didn't know they were there you know and then they'd go in and get however how many they needed at the time and they and the dollar bills you know they would just be stacks of those dollar bills and we were raised to think that's the way you ran elections i mean they were after the election was over they were telling these stories about the people they had inside the polls and how they gave signals after the wind of the schoolhouse they voted to school houses now and you can't pile take whatever 300 feet of the poles and then they'd right up the door and they had somebody in the polling place they wouldn't pay you till you voted they had somebody in there what they've watched to see if you vote the way you told them you're going to and if you didn't you didn't get no money when you come back out it was illegal what they were doing but that's where it was and they weren't supposed to be nobody in there watching somebody else vote but the way they worked they were because they could tell then they'd signal some power outside and had the money and where to pay them or not or to give them a whiskey or what you want to let them take a whiskey [Music] this way people never thought about that [Music] production in wyden continued to rise to an all-time high by 1950 but the men became increasingly dissatisfied with bradley's rule and company domination over their bargaining agent the widened league of miners the miners at wyden walked out on strike in september of 1952 complaining of a lack of health and retirement benefits such as the contract brokered in 1947 by then head of the umwa john l lewis we read a lot about the violence of southern west virginia in the 20s you know we hear about blair mountain and and uh the mate juan massacre and things like that but uh you know wyden had his own war in in 52 and 53 there were shootings bombings you know a couple trestles were blown up it was a bad time widen was pretty much cut off from the outside world in fact it wasn't in a sense you know the state police were called in on occasions and there there was a an attempt from the governor down to try to get a hold of the situation it's just it was so intense and as you you know you indicate brother against brother that it was almost impossible to contain the conflict the whole widening thing started it started to start to percolate a little bit or boil just a little bit down in there and the the coal miners were working down in wyden and there was a lot of rumbling going on down there and so ultimately i mean i was assigned actually by labor's daily uh to report on the strike actually um this thing started they had what they called their own union there at that time and that consisted of i think about three million employees at the company and some of the boys who got dissatisfied with the way they was acting or you know it didn't satisfy them so they decided they would we would uh protest the company not not go to the united mine workers but of course every time anything went wrong wide that the united workers thought they could take to their advantage they would try it apparently it wasn't a matter of the umw trying to get in but but some of the miners got a hold of bill blizzard and that's the real interesting part of the story here is bilden responded as was his nature he never in all the research i've done he never turned down in a union minor that wanted some help so they asked for help and he agreed to help them and became involved in the widened strike we found out that on top of the mountain right above was where you you start to go down into wyden area on top of the hill there and so the matters my fa they had gotten in touch with my father and he told him well why don't you go ahead and have some organizational meeting or something like that on top of that hill and he says uh my they asked my father for some help and he said oh yeah he says i'll help you you know that was my father's meat that kind of thing but it was his people and all mr bradley i knew him pretty well he was uh owner of the company and uh one of the owners and uh i heard him say one time that before he would operate under a union he would pull the steel of that 20 miles of railroad there were armed guards also of course on the railroad going in this was the habitual and the man the man guards there some people down in there uh that knew who my father was uh dipped in mine guards and my father it was my father there so they stopped the train and they here they were armed and all that so they kicked my father off a train and he had to walk all the way back out of that pretty long hollow down there and that gave him a kind of a personal interest in jg bradley and in the white and cold writing because he'd been treated pretty badly he showed a fellow the name of wilson was a jp yesterday piece at that time you know i forget now whenever the trouble started he got a whole bunch of us together and deputized us if it was legal i don't really know if it was legal or not historically it always been a big drive to unionize southern west virginia because unless they could get the coal fields in west virginia organized then having them organized in pennsylvania or indiana or somewhere else that could be undercut in their in their conditions the wages they asked for so any exception to unionization would work against all the other union miners and wyden became the sole holdout in southern west virginia after the new deal after the new deal brought unionization to the whole of southern coal fields widen was the exception and they could undercut them they could they could ruin the market for them so they were they were under great deal pressure the john l lewis j.g bradley uh struggle should probably be a book or a movie i'm sure it has been by different people but sometimes it was brother against brother in my family's situation my grandfather gets my dad my grandfather wanted to go union my father wanted to stay non-union so it was split down the middle he split up family some boys go with the union and some people go with they was loyal to the company a strike is a little like a little a minor civil war in which you have that in other words perfectly in west virginia perfectly well we know perfectly well not everybody was on a part on the side of abraham lincoln in the united states not indeed they were on the confederacy side and had their own candidate for president and all that kind of thing so in that sense it's not surprising that does happen on occasion [Music] on october 14th state police charged 11 striking men with the assaults on railroad workers just 10 days earlier [Music] the violence increased in magnitude on october 23rd when dynamite destroyed two bridges on buffalo creek the blasts not only violated state law but were also federal fences as well because the trains running on the bcng rail line carried u.s mail [Music] the one bridge that they blew up was just a short distance below the town of wyden maybe a mile or a mile and a half maybe two miles and it was a short bridge probably about as long as from here down to the road all steel bridge you know and uh they put enough dynamite under one end of that to turn that thing completely flip-flop and somebody knew what he was doing and they sure put a lot of dynamite under that thing they blowed up the bridges two bridges sand pork going down buffalo then there's another bridge that blowed up sub stations they blowed up sub two or three substations they shot the insulators off the high powered lines going into widening i remember being my cousin packing my uncle lunch to him he doubled over they had actually coal miners would go out i mean go to the substations they had made little shacks or little buildings for them to live in out across ties and they would har you know one of the people that worked wide and they would wouldn't strike and they would hire them to uh or double over to guard the substations now i remember seeing michael curtis 30 30 sitting over in the corner of the old little shack he was in uh later years i heard her talking about they would put on some explosives and that kept the guys on guard duty a lot they made a lot of money on that guard duty so they had to have something going there to to keep that up and they they was going to lose them pension jobs see the only thing they had to do was run down there and sit in their car all day and run around here and there but they had to go back to work they might blow up something to get older job a while longer i know that could be a fact they'll go shoot up somewhere or do something i don't think there's a bit of truth in it no he was doing the best we could to try to keep things under control and mr bradley was too as far as i know [Music] the violence in the area finally resulted in the death of a company man on may 7th 1953 around 4 30 a.m a convoy of company guards drove past the cook shack headquarters of the striking miners as gunfire broke out a bullet hit a non-striking minor charles frame killing him instantly well he told me that they were in the woods over what a place they called around the they called the crooksha the cook shack where uh this uh answer happened where my brother was killed and they were in the woods and they was i don't know what happened but anyhow there was a shooting went on and my brother was killed they had to move out of white and they just allowed one car up at the junction the police just lied one car up at the junction where the road come out of wide and they hit the county road they only allowed one picket up there so the union established what they called a cook check over deal in property that belonged to a fellow the name of triplett i got a at 5 30 to bring all the ambulances we had available and come to the cook shack cook shack was a large block building at dale west virginia located on the left of the road going north they sent guys up there to uh different guys up on the picket line just to sit up there and just keep trying to move them out and move them out on out and i was one one of them and an apron is whiskey and you could drink all your morning that the company had organized them a convoy and they were going to go over and tell the the unions what they called the cook shack down and run them off well somewhere along the line the union men had got word of it and they had set up the union men was waiting on them charles come here and was drinking whiskey with us and he said he's going down there and shoot it up at the cook shack but you know you couldn't tell nothing about him you know he just his mouth was just going like that somebody got uh a convoy there started out and there we went down through there and i was just drinking i just got out of the car and got in with the jack doggo i was with jack and we was about seven seventh car back charles was number one charles frame was in the league car and he was fatally wounded by brother children wilson and his friend mckinney were in the second one and they were both shocked not seriously charles had that pistol and took it out outside just but she shot up in there and the next day just they were sitting waiting and they just started riddling that whole bunch the first four cars was really bad and then our car got right the windshield went but right between me and jack dodger they throwed stuff in my stomach i had to go doctor and get them down charles he was hit and running this big deep ditch that left right there about halfway between our house and the first house down here blood it was a pretty long waist pulled a mild brother well we met jack and me went back up that creek and carried him out and carried him down our eagle lived there in that house then and we took him in there but he was shot in the head and uh but that he was definitely shocked by them well roscoe bales got charged for it but yeah what come out in the investigation he was shot with a a 35 remington rifle uh i don't know how much you know about 35 remembers the rifle to put a potent gun if he caught him in the head it took his head off if um you had some uh things you didn't like about your neighbor or somebody else that was a good time to get rid of him you could just shoot him and somebody say well that was a union no that was the company man bales was a little bit related to me and i knew him well he's a kind of a odd character he didn't seem to want any for injury not friendly with anybody you know i didn't care very much for him i talked with him a very great deal because he was on going to be on trial and the the state police had gotten a rifle and uh they used that as the main evidence actually against him at that time in other words somebody was was shot the state police said with uh ammunition from that particular rifle and that they thought he was the only one down here that had one so that was the principal evidence against him so i talked with him that kind of thing a good deal testimony in the case of the state versus roscoe bale records that the first car was just past the cook shack where the victim was shot and that the car traveled another 300 yards before running into the creek well past this curve in the road the evidence in the case seemed to point to only one man but could it stand up to modern crime scene forensics for this we consulted an expert my name is detective dana rousey i'm a detective of the charleston police department criminal investigations division and i'm a crime scene investigator when i first examined the nine photographs uh in a couple of the pictures there was a deceased person shown from the head and shoulder shot basically and then i looked at the exterior and interior of the motor vehicle he was said to be driving there's a strong indication that that man's head wound did not come from that volley of fire firing from the driver's side to the rear of that vehicle because that type of injury is going to come from his front or slightly to the right and i don't see how a person standing shooting the vehicle could make that shot also to me it was rather simple because there wasn't any bullet holes on the right of the car or really on the left of the car the bullet struck frame came through an open window which was the driver's side i think that he was sitting in the driver's seat turned any seat looking to the left and to the back when he was struck i really don't think a head and a body can turn that far around especially when driving you're gonna look out the side view mirror you may look slightly to the left but to expose that right temple from the left side of the car i just don't see that as very likely well the wounded frame had entered his forehead approximately here on the right forehead and exploded at the back of his head when i first examined the pictures of him i noticed a in his right temple a uh small circular defect which could possibly be a bullet entrance or an exit depending what the inside of the skull looks like basically i looked at the second photograph and uh found there to be a larger hole in the back of his head below right at ear level on the opposite side of his head and that's usually an indication of a uh an exit wound in comparison to what would be an possibly an entrance wound to the right temple on his head they had taken him out of the car before i got there and taken him across the road into mr eagle's house and laid him on i believe on the porch but he was he was dying immediately from the moon and i think that well the book almost had to come through the left uh on the driver's side because uh there was no broken windows anywhere and it came through an open window which was i think really what happened from what i've seen in my experience in 17 years as a policeman that the person the victim charles fraim saw that his vehicle was being shot at or actually taking fire he may have sped up and possibly lost control over corrected and landed in a ditch he stiff-armed the steering wheel and prepared for a crash and broke the steering wheel that to me is a strong indication that he was alive and preparing for a crash and it looks as if the bullet if that is an entrance wound and the one in the back of his head is an exit wound and i've seen quite a few of them and it looks like a person actually came in or fired from the passenger side of that vehicle into his head but anyway i guess the strike lasted from september 52 up until december november of 53 i have some history and stuff about the striking in my history stuff there but it was pretty nasty it was a nasty strike i'm serious then but uh it never did go union until clinchfield and piston and clinchfield coal company took over in 19 and 59 it was 20. 58. yeah mr bradley sold at the pits and coal company in 1958 and finally you know july no january of 59 that's when clinchfield took over run the company and they laid 200 of us off in january the 1st finchfield laid 200 of you know elk river colonel company workers off and i was one of the 200 that got laid off the years pass time heals all wounds today the former residents of these three company towns gather at many reunions held each summer to remember the simple life and the good times of days long past i've been coming every year for about the last year i maybe missed two years out of ten but he wasn't every year not that far from mason county about a hundred or so miles about there were you guys raised in this community down the road in taylor all three of y'all are sisters and what there's ten of you guys what's your family name but just the the love you can see these people today still love each other just like the town was a a town that trusted and honored each other they all seem to be united together tightly like a family it was more like a family just have a lot of wonderful memories of uh coming back and and doing things over there we have a lot of pictures that every picture we had taken has a train in the background well we'll just finish this up by saying we had some good days we did and more good times than bad i swear 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Channel: Chris Stockwell

Views: 18,566

Rating: 4.9053254 out of 5

Keywords: Widen West Virginia, Coal Mine Documentary, Coal, Mining, West Virginia History, Clay County West Virginia, Miner Strike, Matewan, Buffalo Creek, Union Mining

Id: wDIK80PwuUE

Length: 91min 10sec (5470 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020