Over the last hundred years, coal has created three major upheavals for Appalachians The first was when coal began to be exploited by outsiders. Its presence in Appalachia had been known for basically the whole of the 19th century, but exploited only locally. Many small-farm Appalachians, if they lived in coal country, had outcrops of coal on their land, and supplemented or replaced wood with coal for heating and cooking. If they needed coal, they went to their own coal bank, and dug out what they needed at the time. A few of them took advantage of the available coal to stoke local furnaces to smelt iron or for similar purposes. 

 It was not until aruond1900 that rich outsiders began to exploit coal. Industrial titans like the Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and Deloanos began to send representatives into Appalachia to buy thousands of acres of land and of mineral rights - the latter often at fifty cents an acre - and began to open coal mines on a large scale.

When these caol magnates established a coal mine in the Appalachians, theygenerally  built a town to go with it, including all the dwellings and businesses. The town would be established to a pattern, and everything in it, from the stores to the recreation facilities, and from the scrip that served as currency to the houses the miners occupied, belonged to the coal company.

If the town had a medical clinic, it belonged to the company. If it had a constable or a mayor, that person, if not actually appointed and paid by the company, served at the sufferance of the company, company-owned in a different way. An official who stepped out of line would find himself no longer constable or mayor. Until the union wars of the twenties and thirties wrested some independence for coal miners who essentially had been serfs, the companies often also controlled how the miners voted. If it was known that a miner had voted “wrong,” he was likely to lose his job.  That meant he also lost his house. The houses were there for coal miners; if you were no longer employed by the company, you could no longer live in the town.

The company-housing model that coal towns brought to Appalachia was a departure from traditional Appalachia in a deeply fundamental way. The small-farmer Appalachian family had always had its own house. My husband Dean’s family lived that traditional Appalachian life. His father was an accomplished farmer who carpentered on the side for cash income. His family, for generations back and as wide as the family tree spread, had always lived on their own land, and anyone who had land and trees had a house. If not, the family threw up a log cabin to live and raise a family in. Dean’s sister Martha once described to me her first exposure to the concept of renting a house: “I was flabbergasted. In my world, you had your house. It was just there. I could not grasp the concept that someone else owned the roof over your head.” To those of us brought up in coal camps, though, renting was the norm, and a house was tied to a job.

That house-sufferance applied to more than voting wrong. If a miner was injured and could no longer mine coal, he not only lost his health and his income, he also lost his shelter. A widow whose husband was killed in the mine could find herself, her children, and her household possessions deposited by the side of the road well before the ground had settled over her husband’s burial mound, or even before the grave flowers wilted. Companies usually owned all the land the town perched upon, and they brooked no competition with their rule. In our coal camp, the only non-coal-company structures I ever saw were the post office and the school, and I can’t swear to the school.

Coal camps worked under a different economic system as well. The economy in a coal camp was not the subsistence economy of traditional Appalachia, but it wasn’t a cash economy either. It was an economy  based on scrip. For those who don’t know about scrip, scrip is exonumia. That is, it’s coinage minted outside the legal tender of the United States, It was the lingua franca of financial transactions in our coal camp as in most of them. In the beginning, scrip’s purported purpose was to alleviate shortages of U.S. legal tender (coins and bills) occurring in coal camps because of the camps’ alleged remoteness. Coal companies were quick to see the monopoly value offered by controlling a town’s currency, though, so in actual use scrip gave the coal companies a virtual stranglehold on miners. Company stores were able to add huge mark-ups to the goods they sold miners, and the miners could pay those inflated prices or travel substantial distances to buy the goods they needed, and few miners then had cars.

            In addition to the impeditments that blocks the miners from leaving the coal camp to shop, another factor kept miners shopping with the company. If a miner was paid in scrip, no place besides company facilities was obliged to accept it. Some nearby towns might, but never at 100 cents on the dollar. Generally, a miner or his family traded scrip for cash or for goods bought outside the company store at seventy or eighty cents on the dollar, and the price might be as low as fifty cents.

Scrip began to lose its power in the post-war years. After the success of some of the union wars of the thirties, followed by the boom times of World War II, miners both gained more power to negotiate with coal companies and found themselves more flush with money. They could begin to afford cars, and that mobility to shop outside the company town began to affect the success of the scrip-and-company-store regime.

            Traditional Appalachian culture differs from mainstream American culture and even from historic Anglo-Saxon culture in significant ways. Language is one. Mobility has always been another.. Many traditional southern Appalachians have lived in the same small area--in the same county, for instance, or even on the same creek – for all their lives and the lives of their ancestors before them. In many areas of southern Appalachia, there are people who live on the same plot of land their ancestors took up two hundred years before. The old joke about Kentucky, “Two million people and sixteen last names,” has a basis in fact. Families came and stayed. In traditional Southern Appalachia, still today, any conversation between strangers is likely to start with, “Whose boy are you?” Placing people into a family is as natural as speech to an Appalachian. But that depended on the came-and-stayed factor. In coal country, you didn’t hear that. It made no sense to ask whose boy you were, because the response would have had no meaning. Everybody in a coal camp was from somewhere else.

            Coal camps also differed in the makeup of the population. Traditional Appalachian was almost solidly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant – English, Scottish, Irish. But coal camps attracted a lot of the Ellis Island immigrants coming into the country in the early years of coal, so there were Italians,  Hungarians, Slavs, many middle Europeans. In a coal camp, you might come on a road called Hunk Hollow, now full of  assimilated Americans, but originally named for the influx of job-seeking Hungarians, or perhaps other people from Mittel Europa lumped under that general name. Coal camps also attracted blacks, who, while they still were segregated from whites, worked in the same mines at the same jobs, and were part of the culture.

            Another cultural difference related to the land and to primogeniture. In spite of a strong Anglo-Saxon heritage, the principle of primogeniture never took hold in the mountains. There, the custom frequently was that the older children, as they reached adulthood, established new households, usually close by and often on land deeded by the parents. As my father described it, it was the youngest child whostayed at home, took care of the parents as they aged, and inherited the house and land when they died. that heritage and that expectation still survive today among some. Rcently, the wife of the elder of two brothers complained bitterly to me that the younger son had got the family homestead, which she felt should have gone to the older son, her husband. But those parents were following well -established custom.  but there is a third twist to this story. How land was passed on in families was another dividing line between traditional Appalachia and coal Appalachia. Attachment to the land was irrelevant in coal Appalachia because people living in coal camps had no land. And therefore primogeniture, whether in the traditional or upside-down version, was rendered irrelevant.

            Another difference between traditional and coal Appalachia was land use. Touring traditional Appalachian roads, you find that a high proportion of houses are built on steep hillsides. The main floor will often be level with the hillside in back, while the front of the house, facing the road, will be story or higher off the ground. Many graveyards lie on steep hills as well. There was a reason for that. Good arable land in the Appalachians – good bottomland in Appalachian parlance – had to go to the highest and most economic use, and that was for producing food. So the flatter land along the creeks often held the gardens and fields, and the houses sat above them on steep hillsides. In coal camps, which were designed from the beginning for coal extraction as opposed to farming, there was no reason not to take the less expensive and less complicated path and build the houses on the flat land along the river bottoms. We raised a garden when I was growing up, but we went up on the side of the mountain to do it, because the flat land and the best soil was covered with houses, including ours.

            Coal Appalachia was different, too, in population density and social structure. Coal camps were dense with cheek-by-jowl-houses, unlike the scattered small farms of traditional Appalachia. They were also full of children. One-room schools, like the one Dean started in, and later taught in, were still found in traditional Appalachia, but had never been a factor in coal camps. We went to a big brick edifice that needed three stories just to accommodate the first six grades. After that, we were bussed to another big brick school for the next three grades, and then a third one in a third town for the three grades of high school.

            But that population density was about to change. Around 1950, the coal mines began to mechanize and slash jobs with the brutality of a machete felling cane, casting tens of thousands of miners adrift. In 1970, the nation produced 17% more coal than it had produced in 1950, but with only one-third of the work force. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand mining jobs had disappeared. Considering that families then might commonly have four or more children, millions of people were affected.

Those changes hit Appalachia particularly hard because, except for resource extraction industries like coal mining, there were few industries in Southern Appalachia. Even when the nation as a whole was booming, Appalachia was a one-trick pony and that trick was coal extraction. When mining jobs disappeared, there were no others to seek, nor likely to be anytime soon. The difficult terrain and lack of decent transportation almost assured that.

By the time John Kennedy made a campaign stop in Welch, West Virginia while seeking the 1960Democratic nomination, businesses were struggling all over my county,  McDowell County, West Virginia. Kennedy later that summer said of the cataclysm hitting the coal fields and southern West Virginia, “McDowell County mines more coal than it ever has in its history, probably more coal than any county in the United States, and yet there are more people getting surplus food packages than any county in the United States. The reason is that machines are doing the jobs of men and we have not yet been able to find jobs for those men.” In 1961, the first food stamps ever issued went to a family in McDowell County.

Kennedy was right. In West Virginia, which had led the nation in coal production for decades, McDowell County had not only led West Virginia but had decade after decade produced more coal than any other county in the United States. In 1960, it still led, but for the people who lived there the world had changed in unimaginable ways. The county seat, Welch, which had 6600 people in 1950, lost a fifth in the ensuing decade, and another fifth in the next ten years, a trend which continued until, in 2000, the population was maybe a third of its heyday in the fifties.

War, where we shopped, fared worse. In 1950, nearly 4000 people lived in War. Between 1950 and 1960, it lost 25% of its population, and in the next ten years another third. Business activity fell even more, because much of that business had come from the coal camps, and they too were suffering. The drop was felt in a variety of ways. With its 1950 population of 4000, War had supported numerous churches, restaurants, pool halls, and stores, and even two movie theatres. By 1970, the customers for those businesses had transferred themselves to Detroit or Cincinnati or Baltimore, and War was dying. By 2010, at the end of sixty years, War’s population stood at roughly 20% of its high-water mark.

McDowell County’s overall population also kept on dropping. By 2011, a county which had fed and sheltered almost 100,000 people sixty years before, had lost population until it was almost down to its level in 1900, before coal became a factor. This drop-off -the-cliff change occurred at a time when the nation as a whole was growing four-fold, from seventy-five million to more than three-hundred million.

Comparing that coal-country out-migration to what is generally considered our greatest national displacement--the Dust Bowl of the 1930s—the numbers are stark. As McDowell County was the epicentre of coal mining, the federal government had defined Cimarron County, Oklahoma as the geographic center of the Dust Bowl. Both suffered a decline in population, but to a very different extent. Cimarron County dropped 32% between 1930 and 1940. That was seven percent more than the 1950-1960 drop in the population of McDowell County, West Virginia, but it falls short of telling the whole story. Another ten years on from 1940, the Cimarron County population had rebounded by 25%. McDowell County, in contrast, lost another 32% of its people in its second ten years. As Cimarron county continued to recover, McDowell County continued to bleed. Sixty years out from the onset of the dust bowl, Cimarron County population was a fairly robust 61% of its 1930 level, whereas, sixty years out from 1950, McDowell County’s numbers stood at 20% of its apex. The coal fields’ scale of loss, unheralded, almost unrecognized, occurred on a magnitude that makes a piker of the well-documented and often-studied Dust Bowl migration.

In McDowell County, my siblings and I, like almost every other young person, left after high school or college. All those big brick consolidated schools began to empty and close, as the towns and coal camps had. The scale of the outmigration was stupendous, and the impact on those left behind more stupendous still, both economically and socially. Like the chestnut blight, the coal companies had begun the destruction of traditional Appalachia when they bought the land and minerals, built the coal camps, and lured so many formerly independent Appalachians to mine “their” coal by the promise of a better life. Now they drove another upending of the Appalachian world and culture by taking away the jobs that, for miners, had replaced the land as their source of survival.

                Now, what you see is towns not dying but virtually dead. Welch, county seat of the richest county in West Virginia, coal's counterpart to Virginia City, Nevada and the Comstock silver lode, but longer lasting, now has street after street of empty brick-and-glass storefronts, studded here and there with the type of businesses that support the moribund or nearly moribund: funeral parlors, florists, drugstores, and medical supply stores.

I’m not sure where Appalachia is going from here. A lot of people believe coal will come back in Appalachia, but I would not put my money on that. The problem with coal-country Appalachia, at least, is not mechanization, or EPA rules, or the so-called Administration’s War on Coal. The problem is markets and supply. Coal is not a renewable resource. And coal is nearly mined out in much of Appalachia. What’s left is found in small seams in hard-to-get-to places. Extraction costs are very high. High-cost coal cannot compete with western coal. The CEO of Arch Minerals, the largest mining company in the US, says that regulations, while cumbersome, are not the problem. The problem is the market. Arch cannot find buyers who will pay as much as it costs to get the coal out. The CEO of Alpha Resources, another big coal company, has said the same. No change in political leadership is going to change that factor.

So Appalachia, especially coal-country Appalachia, is in flux again, as it was in the early nineteen hundreds and in the 1950s to 70s. The likelihood of replacing coal with something else that will support as many jobs as coal did is unlikely.  My coal camp probably had a population of 3,000, and there were coal camps like that all over McDowell County. It’s hard to believe that population density will ever again be seen in the Appalachians. So my bet would be a fifteen or twenty year period of extreme difficulty, and then perhaps a slow growth again. But that’s something else, like coal coming back, that I wouldn’t risk my money on.