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The Miners Life:

A Story of Life In The Mines As Told
By A Coal Miners Children

By: Rev. Bobby Adkins

Transcribed by: Chris A.

(Mock-up)

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In the early years of coal mining, many miners and their families lived in coal camps.
Coal camps were communities owned by a coal company. The company owned houses
that they rented to the miner and operated a company store. Many camps had schools,
movie theatres, doctors offices, baseball teams and even opera houses.
They were most often found in the region of the Appalachian Mountains, particularly in
West Virginia. In fact, in 1910, 90% of West Virginia miners lived in coal camps.Life in
a coal camp was hard. Miners toiled underground and their wives worked just as hard in
the houses above. Furthermore, the company had total control over the coal camp.
The company store charged more money than those outside the coal camp and miners
were paid in scrip, coins made by the company that was only good in the coal camp. But,
what most Appalachian families remember is not the difficulties of living in coal camp,
but the close-knit community.

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Neighbors banded together to create an extended family that supported each other. The
coal camps were quite diverse, too. People of many different nationalities and races lived
and worked together, creating a strong and vibrant community.
By the 1950s, coal camps began to die out. The 1950s saw an important change in
mining technology. Prior to that time, coal was mined and loaded by hand, dug out by a
large workforce of coal miners. But, with the invention of long wall mining in the 50s,
the workforce was reduced.
It is interesting to note that the industry that fueled the Industrial Revolution was the last
to be industrialized. At any rate, as fewer miners were needed, coal camps were no longer
profitable for the companies and began to fade away. Today, coal camps are just a
memory of another time.

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In the late 1800s and well into the mid-1900, many Appalachian miners lived in
company towns called coal camps. Often there was no alternative to company housing
because land for miles around was owned by coal companies. Thus, a large percentage of
the coal miners wages was returned to the coal company for housing, tools, food and
other expenses.
Typical mining camps were located in lower slopes, between two high ridges. These
locations created a confined, crowded look. The homes nearest the tipple, the structure
where the coal was brought to from the mine, received daily showers of coal dust which
turned everything gray.
The largest house in town was the Superintendents house. Middle management, people
who had jobs such as company store manager or foreman, had houses that were smaller
than the Superintendents, but still fairly nice. These were the houses that made up
Bosss Row. The other rows of houses, indicated by letters of the alphabet were the
smallest houses in town.These were the coal camp houses rented by the miners and their
families.

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The most common type of housing for the miners family was the Jenny Lind style
house. Thiswas a one-story, box-like house built on a post foundation. The three or four
rooms in the house were heated by a pot-bellied stove in the center of the house and fired
with company coal. Many miners took in boarders to help pay the rent. Most miners had
electric lights hung from the ceiling in the center of the room, but few homes had running
water. Outside privies were the standard means of sewage disposal.
Community life centered around the company store, which was usually located in the
center of town. A barber shop, post office and company business offices were often
housed in the same building with the store. Merchandise from food to home furnishings
could be purchased on credit, using company scrip.

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Scrip was coins or paper printed by the company. It would only be good in the company
store or for services provided by the company, such as the company doctor. Company
stores consistently charged higher prices than stores outside of the coal company. As
result, it wasnt long before most miners were in debt to company.
The companies often employed mine guards to keep watch over the coal miners. Mine
guards and miners often had violent encounters. Another important place in the coal camp
community was the baseball diamond. Games were played on Sundays, which was the
only day in the week that the coal miners didnt work.
Teams from one coal camp would often travel to play another and there were even some
minersemployed by the company just so they could play baseball for the coal camp team.
Major league teams, such as the Cincinnati Reds or Chicago Cubs, even traveled to the
coal fields to play coal camp teams.

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There is a story, which may or may not be true, about these games. A big league team was
traveling by train to West Virginia and one of the players asked the manager who they
were going to play. The manager responded, Oh, just a miner league team. He meant
coal miners, of course. But, tradition has it that was how the terms major league and
minor league came to be.
Coal miners were mostly white men. "By the year 1913, of the more than 70,000 miners
in the state, 14,506 of them were Negroes...32,612 were white Americans." (Reports of
Mine Inspectors, 1913, pg. 15). Their wages, as of 1913, were 48 cents per ton of coal.
The annual wage for a pick miner was $737.62.

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Since most of the mines were located too far from towns, the coal companies built their
own homes, Company Store, a church, and a post office. The miners family was to get
what they needed by shopping at the Company Store. He was paid in not in real money
but in money called "scrip" which could be spent only at the Company Store.
The earliest coal scrip [tokens] dates back to about 1883. Each mine had its own scrip
symbols on the tokens and one Company Store wouldnt take scrip from a different
company store, nor could you spend scrip in the city of Logan where the stores only took
cash. The company own everything and deducted from the miners pay; electric, housing,
food, furniture, doctor, and clothing.
They would give the miner three dollars in cash every Wednesday which was deducted
from his pay as well. If you needed cash before Wednesday, I recall a store in Logan that
would give you seventy-five cent on a dollar for your scrip money.

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The best way to describe Hutchinson company store is that it is like a super Wal-Mart,
but a lot smaller, with gas pumps in front. The Orville Company Store was different
inside - everything was lined up against the walls with a counter in front and you had to
hand a list to counter person or ask and she would get you what you wanted. You couldnt
touch anything unless you brought it first.
At Orville Company Store their post office was also inside the store. I had only been in
two stores in both Orville and Hutchinson so maybe our store in Hutchinson was the one
that was different. I do know that the Hutchinson store had the only post office that had

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it's own building away from the store. The post office was at the mouth of the hollow.

Each miner was given a card that he gave to his family to use in the store, for food or
anything else that the family wanted to buy. You had to go to a window in the store, hand
the card over to the office clerk, and tell them how much scrip that you wanted to draw
from the miners pay.
They would write that amount on the card, this way the miner could keep count of how
much of his pay was being spent. It usually was how much that you were going to spend
on food that day. This card was known as a scrip card and was about 4"x 8" long. Every
payday the Company would issue a new card.
If the scrip card showed that the miner spent more than he made then it was carried over
to the next two weeks pay. That's why the miner was always in debt to the Company
Store. The Company Store would never refuse to give a miner scrip for food but they
would limit him to three dollars scrip a day and still give him three dollars cash on
Wednesday until he caught up to his pay.
All this meant was he would get no paycheck on payday. But if the miners family didnt
use the scrip card at the Company Store, or draw out any of his pay, or used very little of
his pay then he would get in his pay envelope cash instead of scrip. I've seen my Dads
pay stub once: his salary was sixty dollars, don't know if that was for one week or two,
which was a good pay check in the early fiftys.
I told my father that was a lot of money, Dad said that it was a shame that he got very
little of the check on payday. More than one miner, would get next to no pay in his
envelope because his family had taken all he had earned during the two-week pay period
to live on. My Dad always manage to get a paycheck. He would start to holler at all of us
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if his pay was getting low, he made Mom stop buying at the company store.

The Government disallowed the Mines to pay the miners in scrip coins after 1960's. This
meant was that for some miners, like my parent's who were always depended upon the
coal company for everything, it was the first time they were responsible for their own
housing, food, and any other bills. My parents didn't know how to handle their life after
the mines closed; they didn't know how to pay bills until they were forced to learn much
later after we moved to Ohio.
The coal companies built homes for their miners out of lumber with sheet-rock inside and
wood siding on the outside, then painted them all white. The house had no indoor
plumbing. Each home was set on cinder blocks about 2 1/2 feet off of the ground so that
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the water, which ran off of the mountain and into the creek, would not flood the homes.
There were three different types of houses in a coal camp; two, three, or four rooms.

Some homes had two floors with two rooms on the first floor and two on the second
floor. Dehue had we called double homes which had a family living on each side of the
house, this is close to the row homes in the cities today. In each house there was a
fireplace in every room for heat except the kitchen which had a coal-cooking stove. In
two of the rooms (bedrooms) there was a clothes closet, we called them presses.
The only reason you could tell which room was used for the kitchen was that it had a coal
stove with table and chairs. Usually there was an upright kitchen cabinet, a bucket of
water with a dipper, and a dishpan sitting on another table which was in a corner or up
against the wall. In the latter part of the 1950s some families had an electric stove and a
refrigerator.
We did have a refrigerator but it had nothing in it but the babys milk (my youngest
sister's) and Mom's pop. Before the refrigerator we did have an ice box that set out on the
front porch, the ice man would come once a week and put a block of ice in it for a price.
The ice didn't cost much, however, I don't remember exactly how much. In the summer
months we use to run behind the ice truck and grab the small pieces of ice or when he

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stopped the truck he would chip us all off a piece so that we would leave him alone and
quite following him.
There wasn't always a house available for some of the miners and some of the camps had

a boarding house where single men, who didnt have families, lived. If you were a new
hired you had to put your name on a list to get a house and wait for the next available
home. The company would send men around every couple of years, usually when it got as
black as coal dust, to spray paint your house white - all the Company homes were white.
The company took good care of their houses; if you had a broken window all the the
miner had to do is to stop on his way to work, report it, and someone would be out to fix
it that same day. The same thing went on for inside the house. The Company hired
carpenters just to fix the homes.
Dehue school went from the first grade to the eight grade and took scrip from all the
mines for lunches and school pictures. Lunches only cost fifteen cent then and when I
first started school, at the age of six, Mom would give my sister and I the scrip card and
tell us to stop at the Company Store as we pass by to take fifty cent out of Dad's pay for
lunch and a snack to eat on the way to school.
We would leave the card with the clerk and she would pick it up later. We always share

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with our friends who didn't have anything to eat but that soon stopped when we had
moved up Macbeth hollow and didn't pass the company store anymore plus the mines
slow down. I think I was about eight when I started getting lunch free. The mines was
only working two or three days a week then and we were living on three dollars a day and
we couldn't afford to buy our lunch at school. Dad didn't want us to take any money from

his check so he would get a pay check.

If the miner was married and had a growing family, he probably was in debt with the
Company Store to provide for them. To supplement for food, most married miners were
allowed to clear and plant a garden on the side of the mountain if they wanted. My father
planted one - not every spring, mind you. It was too much work to cut down trees and
clear a space large enough for a garden.
The Company also built a club house where the miners gathered for their union meetings
and vote. When election day came the miners would treat it like a holiday, everybody
would gather at the club house while men would stand outside by the door and give every
adult a pint of Old Kentucky whiskey while asking them to vote for their candidate. I
heard Mom say once that she took the whiskey, went in, and voted for whom she wanted.
No one was going to bribe her! By the end of the day everybody was happy and drunk.
At Hutchinson, the doctors office was located on the second floor of the clubhouse. The
coal camps were independent of each other, some of the coal mines up the hollow had
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already close down and gone out of business, but there were still five mines up Rum
Creek hollow open, I think Orville was the last mines to shut down. Each mine employed
between two hundred and three hundred miners and they had their own company doctor.
You were not allowed to go visit a doctor for help if your father didnt work for those
mines. The doctor would refuse to see you.

The doctors office looked like a drugstore where he had all the drugs on hand that he
would need to take care of anyone. If he needed to come your house, he carried a black
bag full of drugs and needles to give you a shot. If a miner or a member of his immediate
family took ill and died, the Company paid to have them bury on their land that they had
set aside for a graveyard. Later I'll tell you about several times the doctor came to our
house. It seems like he always came to see me.
The miner would have the doctor expense deducted from his wages. Dad threaten me and
told me that I had better stop going to see the doctor so much, I always stop to see the
doctor when I wanted to get out of school that day. I didn't know that they were writing it
down and my Dad had to pay for it, I thought it was free. I always had a good excuse; I'd
cut my arm, or had an infection, or a sore throat - that was always a good one.
The miners walk to work, there was no place set aside for parking cars at the mine, if a
miner did own a car they left it at home. My uncle Noah worked at Orville and lived in
Logan, so he always drove to work and took a bath before he went home. If they didnt
live in the coal camp and had to drive to work they had to leave the car at the bathhouse.
Not many of the miners lived outside of the coal camps, I only know of my uncle Noah
and that was because my aunt Belva didn't like living in the coal camp. There was only
about three cars at our end of Hutchinson and two telephones. Some of the men like to
have cars so they could visit their families that lived off of the hollow or go shopping in
Logan instead of at the company store. Our neighbor, JB, who lived four houses above us
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had a car and if we had an emergency Dad always ask him to take him where he had to
go.

It was hard for a miner to get all the coal dust off of his skin, the only part about him that
wasnt cover in coal dust was the whites of his eyes and some miners would pay two
dollars a week to take a shower before they went home. Counting our house there were
two homes where miners could pay to take a bath in Macbeth that I knew about. I will get
into how we got a bathhouse and running water in our house later as it's a long story. We
never help the miner take a bath,only a miner's wife help him, or he was on his own.
He would come at 6:30 am and change from his day clothes into his miner's uniform and
then be back at 3:00 pm to take a shower. Before we had a bathhouse, my mother always
had hot water ready for my father when he got home from the mines. She would have the
tub sitting in the kitchen and when he came in she would help him take off his mining
clothes and give him a bath.
The mines always blew a whistle at the start of work, at lunch time, and quitting time but
if it blew any other time the families knew that there was trouble.To get a clear picture of
what a coal camp looks like picture the sea shore with the sand everywhere, well that is
the same for a coal camp, except coal dust is everywhere and everything is black.

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The summer time in a coal camp was loads of fun for kids. We played from morning to
bedtime when our parents call us in to wash up with water which had been heated on the
coal stove and we always listened to the radio shows before we went to bed. We never
complained to our parents that there was nothing to do, we always found something to do
nor did we ever find ourselves bored. I dont ever remember seeing an overweight kid in
camp. We played games or climbed the mountains; we exercise the fat right off of our
bodies.
The first thing that Mom would say in the morning, when she let us outside to play, was
to watch out for the rattlesnakes. Snakes was the only life threatening thing for us but
there was a lot of other mishaps that we could get into like falling into sink holes or
breaking a bone from swinging on a grape vine from tree to tree. We couldnt afford
insect spray in those days, or there was none to buy because it hadnt been invented yet,
so Mom made her own insect repellent which worked just as good. She would set a rag
on fire, smother it, and just let the rag smoke - that seemed to keep the bugs away.

Cont. -

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