The years 1900-1920 were the boom times for the coal industry in the southern Appalachians. Railroad lines had been built, coal towns had become more than a few boarding houses and shacks thrown down in a valley. Like in the rest of the US, there was a great demand for labor. But coal mining is hard work, it seems that most mines lost about 25% of their workforce every year as miners would go to other mines or leave to find better work elsewhere. Coal mine owners had to recruit miners. They would employ recruiters, to go to ports of entry like New York, or they would pay recruiting companies like The Industrial Corporation, Incorporated. Some of these were immigrants: .The years 1890-1910 saw a big surge in immigration from southern Europe into the US, so a lot of Italians, Hungarians, came into the mines, Once established,. they would sometimes bring more of their families over from Europe, and would very commonly send money home. In 1910, the WV Commissioner of Immigration reported that on one day $12,000 of money orders had been mailed to Europe. However, even though you may have seen photos of black and white miners together, the camps were segregated, with a different section of houses for black miners. The white owners and workers were typically Southern , and segregation was expected. Black workers also tended to get the harder jobs, like making coal into coke.

Wages could be relatively good- perhaps even $2.50 per day, but the miner would have to pay for his own tools and blasting powder out of that money. Some of the coal towns were well-planned and had better housing than the workers had know previously. But as the economy expanded, especially during WWI, immigrants began to leave. Justus Collins' Winding Gulf mine in 1915 had 35% immigrant miners , but in 1916 only 10%. The Borderland Coal Company saw 90% of its immigrants leave The rising expectations of the miners and the hard work in the mines resulted in workers leaving the coal mines, but also created a lot of labor unrest , especially in the 1920's. But working conditions and wages did improve, and the United Mine Workers Union became well established. Then the demand for coal began to drop, in the 1950's, and the industry began to employ fewer and fewer miners...but that's another story.

The history of life in the coal camps has been controversial. Within WV, perhaps the dominant narrative is that the camps were almost prisons with guards, low wages, and abused miners until the advent of the United Mine Workers. There's no doubt that coal mining was hard, owners sometimes brutal, and incidents like the Battle of Blair Mountain did happen. But some historians ( like Crandall A Shiflett) have criticized this narrative as too simple, pointing out that the living conditions in the coal camps were much better than for many poor hillbillies farming on tiny plots of poor land with large families stuffed into small cabins. And that some owners were themselves providing better conditions in order to attract and keep miners without the prodding of the Union: and some tried to accommodate Union demands.

I think that most historians would agree that the life of a miner in a coal town in 1950 was much, much better than it had been in 1910. But although loading machinery made their jobs much less strenuous, the long-wall mining machines created a lot more coal dust than hand-loading had done. That resulted in many, many miners getting black lung disease.

Though immigrants tended to form their own communities within the camps, I'm not sure if there was ever a distinction drawn by owners and other miners between the Sicilians and the Northern Italians- though I'm sure the Italians themselves were quite aware of it. In 1980, the Rockefeller Report on Community and Living Conditions in the Coalfields indicated that mine owners had always preferred Italians for miners - but it's not clear why. Unlike your great-grandfather, some Italians stayed, and their descendants. Jimmy Costa is a fine traditional musician, Denise Giardina a fine writer. Giardina has written a book based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, The Unquiet Earth . She is pretty committed to the narrative of the miners as poor and at the mercy of the owners, but it's a great book.

Also, not far away from where your grandmother was born is Clifftop, where there has been an excellent traditional music festival every year.