Yeah, there's a lot of myth-making about Appalachia, the place just seems made for telling stories. We can start with Hillbilly Paradise, with contented long-bearded mountaineers making moonshine, playing crooked fiddle tunes, whittling dulcimers, gleefully feuding with muzzle-loading rifles, their happy toothless wives spinning flax and smoking corncob pipes. Then there's the Downtrodden Appalachia, brutalized by coal and timber barons, left starving and ignorant in shacks. And then there's the Which Side Are You On Appalachia, where the United Mine Worker's Union arrived and after a bitter struggle with the forces of darkness brought dignity and the good life to the miners.

It was after the Civil War that northern money came pouring into the region to develop ( or loot) coal and timber. By that time, the place was poor and over-populated: the best land for farming had long been taken, and with families often being large there was a ready source of labor available, young men with few other prospects. As mines were dug and railroads pushed into the hills, in the 1880's, there had to be some place to put the workforce. That initially seems to have been little more than shacks dumped near a railroad siding, and some kind of store set up to sell them food...and alcohol. There was also some place to drink and gamble, because fights and engagement by law enforcement were common. Mining was dangerous, and there must have been injuries and deaths from that. But in the early days, demand for coal was high and competition from other mines not great, so profits were initially good.

But business will expand to meet demand, so more mines were dug, and they soon ran out of local help. There was a general labor shortage in the US in the late 1800's, and mine owners found they had to recruit workers like everyone else. Those workers- often immigrants- often came with wives, children. And to get them to stay, there had to be housing for them. So, by the 1890's, you see more planning of coal towns. But it's not as though there was an industry-wide standard. Some of this building of better housing, etc. was motivated by mine owners taking a paternal interest in their workers, some by fear of labor unions, some by just needing to attract and keep miners. Some mine owners , like Justus Collins, hated unions and cared little for their workers, lived at a distance from them and had to be pushed into improving their coal towns. Some, like Edward Stone, felt that it was important to take an interest in the miners welfare and wanted them to have decent houses, water, schools, churches....so, coal towns began to have churches, schools, social clubs. ( They also had segregation- Black miners and their families had their own part of town, their schools, churches, and no, they weren't as good.) In the 1920's, many coal towns began to look like a lot of other US small towns. But life in one in part depended on the owners. There was quite a lot of power in owning the jobs, the houses, and the store, and that power could be abused. There could be a private police force of Baldwin Felts guards, wandering around, looking for union organizers. Collins lived apart from his mine, was ( frankly) a mean bastard and hired equally mean managers, who would want to fire a miner just because his wife didn't spend their money at the company store. It's also in Collins' Whipple mine that the the story has recently emerged of "Esau", the practice of having a miner's widow pay off their debts with sex for the Baldwin Felts guards. On the other hand, W.P. Tams lived in the same town as his miners, the town he'd built, and though he was not what you'd call delighted with unions, he tried to treat his workers with respect.

But regardless of owners' intentions, coal was a commodity: demand rose and fell, prices rose and fell, and as more mines were dug the prices tended to fall. The 1890’s were also time of periodic financial panics , that caused deflation- and that would lower prices as well. Owners often went out of business, sold out to bigger companies, so a relatively well-disposed owner living nearby might be replaced by a manager who reported only to his boss back in Philadelphia. If that boss told him to raise the rent on the company houses, he’d do it. But that boom-and-bust cycle also meant that suddenly unemployed miners would often go elsewhere, find a better job. And mining was hard , dangerous work- it was easy to be tempted to leave it. Especially when there was competition from steel mills in Pennsylvanian, the auto industry in Detroit. So, it's risky to make broad statements about life in coal towns and coal mines- it really depended on the town and the time.

The peak production years were right around 1920: WWI boosted commodity prices generally. But as the UMW gained contracts with the northern and midwestern mine owners, they told the union that it had to get the Appalachian mines unionized as well- it was not fair to expect them to compete with the non-union mines in West Virginia, Kentucky. That push to unionize in Appalachia met great resistance from the mine owners- and their allies in state government, which resulted in the famous mine wars , which were a major defeat for the UMW. That was soon followed by both a sagging coal market that closed mines and laid off workers. And that was followed by the Great Depression. It also coincided with the collapse of the timber industry ( it had cut all the trees) . Almost as though they wanted it to be even worse, WV had previously cut property taxes, so the state was swamped with the unemployed and starving and homeless with no funds to deal with them. Coal towns suffered accordingly.

WWII brought back the economy, commodity prices improved, and the UMW was able to get more unionized mines, and there were soon better wages. Miners could buy cars and drive, didn’t need the company store. And perhaps more crucially, manual loading was displaced by the long-wall miner, so mining got somewhat safer, and less exhausting. That meant fewer men were needed: but they produced more and were paid better. So, it's in the 1940's into the 1950's that you see coal towns looking their best- there'd be a local baseball league. Movie theaters. Miners would be paid enough to be able to send their kids to college.

The UMW was one reason for all this. Just how much is quite a tricky, political question: you can get into pretty fierce arguments over the UMW, here, but in the 1950's coal demand really dropped and the union kept wages up. Hydro power and the oil industry boomed, steam locomotives were replaced by diesel ones. So, wages were high , while the union jobs lasted...but the jobs got fewer and fewer, so miners got fewer and coal towns got fewer. Sometimes the renters bought their houses: sometimes they were just abandoned, torn down.

A pretty good book on the topic is Crandall A Shifflett's Coal Towns (1991). It can be criticized a little I think for its sources: with the many mergers and buyouts in the industry, Shifflett just wasn't able to get records from lots and lots of mines, especially the earlier ones. And Shifflett used a lot of interviews with people who'd grown up in the coal towns, and as people often will remember mostly the good things about their early lives , that might have painted a rosy, less realistic picture of coal town life. But Shifflett does make a good case that company housing and coal town life was often better than the dismal shacks and shanties many people had to inhabit in pre-industrial Appalachia; for many the place was not a pastoral paradise.

A good book on the development/looting of Appalachia is Ronald D. Eller's Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930.

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