When explosions rattled cups and saucers in their homes, or when their wells dried up, or when a creek turned a foaming red, people saw the company's hand. They knew the company was blasting rock just over the ridge for a strip mine, or reckoned that its deep mines had interrupted the ground water or tainted streams with iron deposits.
When a faithful hunting dog disappeared, people wondered if it had fallen into a "mine break," a crack in the Earth caused by one of the company's mines below.
And when they cashed their pension checks or used their health cards, people had the company (and the United Mine Workers of America) to thank. Some families can claim 100 years service with the company, from grandfather to father to son.
"You can't really separate our lives from the company," Gayle Fuller Stanley says. "It was the money I was raised on and lived on for 21 years after I was married."
Her grandfather, her father and her husband all worked in the mines. She and her husband, Junior, live on a ridge top outside Clinchco - a town named for the Clinchfield Coal Corp.
Their frame home has gleaming wood floors, picture windows, a sun deck and an above-ground pool, all paid for with money Junior Stanley earned from Clinchfield Coal and its corporate parent, Pittston Coal.
Junior stays inside much of the time. He's just 46 and he's always liked hard work. But now breathing is hard for him, and he can't take more than a few steps on a sweaty day - or a cold one for that matter - before his lungs rebel.
He believes his health was ruined working underground for the company, breathing coal and rock dust, mold and mildew, diesel fumes, rat urine. He puffs on four different prescription inhalers every day for emphysema and other lung ailments.
Lately, he has another reason to stay indoors. Some days the outside of their home is frosted with dust. Down in the hollow, an independent contractor is working on land leased from Pittston, blasting layers of dirt and rock with explosives and then skinning away the seams of coal.
Once it was pasture land where her grandfather's cattle grazed, and it pains Gayle Stanley to watch the hollow being turned inside out. But she knows that's the way things are in Dickenson County.
"You just take it all for granted," she says. "Clinchfield owns everything around you and that's the way it is."
Above ground and below
That's the way it's been since the century began. Through Clinchfield and other subsidiaries, Pittston owns 38 percent of the land in Dickenson County -- 80,770 of the county's 212,480 acres.
And even where it doesn't control the surface, there's a good chance it owns the coal and gas below. The company owns the minerals underneath 73 percent of the county, a total of 155,000 acres.
Pittston's corporate forebears bought much of the county soon after the turn of the century, paying a few dollars an acre to absentee speculators, and as little as 50 cents an acre for coal rights from farmers and other local landowners.
Back then, that was a lot of money for cash-starved farmers, county revenue commissioner Ronnie Robbins says, but they had no way of knowing how much the land and minerals would be worth in the long run.
Below the surface was one of the richest stores of coal in the world -- estimated at 6.9 billion tons in 1919. The county also boasted expanses of timber and methane and natural gases.
Even today, its natural resources and natural beauty are enormous.
"Dickenson County should be the richest county in Virginia," says Mary Hylton, president of the local historical society.
But it's not. By many measures, it's one of the poorest.
Dickenson County had the highest unemployment rate in Virginia from 1996 through 1998. The rate dipped under 12 percent this summer thanks to jobs provided by a new state prison. That's still well above the statewide rate of 2.9 percent and it's the second-highest jobless rate of any county in Virginia.
Dickenson County's only factory closed last year. The county does not have a four-lane highway, which makes it difficult to attract new employers and diversify the local economy.
One local official jokes that the Board of Supervisors has even tried to fool industrial prospects by flying them in via helicopter, rather than driving them in on curving two-lane roads where they inevitably get stuck behind lumbering coal trucks.
The company has been an economic engine that has provided jobs, houses, schools and health care. At the same time, it has a history of environmental, safety and labor law violations. It's been blamed for two of the worst Appalachian mining disasters in recent decades - the deaths of 125 people in a 1972 West Virginia dam break and the deaths of seven miners in a 1983 Dickenson County explosion.
Since 1990, Virginia mining regulators have cited the company for more than 800 violations of environmental laws.
Company officials maintain they have a good record on safety and the environment, especially in recent years. "I think a majority of the public understands the business and understands the company," says Walter Crickmer, a longtime Pittston executive. "They know we create good jobs."
Many people have been reluctant to challenge the company's power. When they have, it's mainly been through the United Mine Workers. Miners fought to establish the union in the county in the 1930s and '40s and defended it a decade ago in a nine-month strike that grabbed international attention.
Now, as a new century approaches, some people are questioning the human and environmental consequences of the county's economic dependence. A protest movement emerged this year when the company opened a chip mill capable of grinding large tracts of its forest holdings into raw material for paper. People are talking about what the company has given the county -- and what it has taken.
County supervisor Scott Moore says property rights are precious, but Pittston should realize that whatever it does affects its neighbors: "They got the coal. They got the gas. They got the timber. What's left?"
'We are strong people'
On a Sunday afternoon in July, about 100 people gathered under a picnic shelter in Clintwood, the county seat.
Sheriff Frank Childress stepped to a microphone and told the crowd he wanted to see the county's forests protected: "I'm all for jobs here in Dickenson County, and also for a clean and safe environment."
He ended with a benediction: "Stand up for Dickenson County."
A group of county residents had gathered more than 5,000 signatures on a petition asking Gov. Jim Gilmore for help. For months, they had been pushing Pittston to agree in writing to follow Virginia's voluntary anti-erosion guidelines when it cuts timber and to limit logging within view of Breaks Interstate Park at the county's northern tip.
Pittston says it already follows accepted forestry techniques and the chip mill won't increase clear-cutting. Crickmer, who oversees Pittston's timber holdings, says it's insulting to ask the company to put anything in writing.
"We've been catching flak from this one group, 30 people basically, beating this drum," Crickmer says.
"I've dealt with these same people for the last 20 years. ... They protest against everything that's come into Dickenson County. It doesn't matter if it's mining, oil and gas, factories. It's the same people."
His philosophy about the protest movement: "Let it run its course."
But the chip mill's critics had other ideas. Just after 1 on this July afternoon, 16 people climbed onto a rented bus ready to carry a message to the rest of the state about the future of Virginia's mountains.
The group included longtime activists. Barney and Vina Reilly have been harrying Pittston for years over the environmental impact of gas wells. Gerald Gray, a lawyer and former county prosecutor, has been a frequent Pittston adversary, filing lawsuits accusing it of damaging homes, wells and springs with its underground mining. Once, during a hearing involving a gas company tied to Pittston, Gray introduced the opposing lawyers -- who included a company counsel and a private practitioner on the gas firm's retainer -- as the "in-house attorney" and the "outhouse attorney."
The bus riders also included folks who hadn't been previously identified as Pittston critics. Harold McCowan and Kenneth Mullins are retired Pittston miners. Mary Hylton is a schoolteacher. Harold Bowman is a former car dealer and coal operator from Haysi.
The bus rumbled out of the parking lot. To get to Richmond, 400 miles to the east, it headed west for 11 miles, then south, then doubled-back east. Given the rugged mountains that surround the county, that circuitous path was the best one for an aging tour bus.
Dickenson County is closer to five other state capitals than it is to Richmond, and many residents feel isolated from their state and national governments.
A couple of nights before, Barney Reilly had been watching "The Capital Gang" on CNN. The pundits turned to President Clinton's Appalachian "poverty tour," and columnist Robert Novak announced he was tired of hearing about the region's miseries. "Well, I'll tell you this," Novak said, "the people who are still there are the losers of America. The winners have moved out a long time ago."
Reilly shared this with the people on the bus. Mary Hylton rose in anger.
She loves her home. Her dad surveyed the county and ran a coal company store for a time, and she started teaching in a little schoolhouse here in 1952, when she was 17 years old. She hates to hear outsiders tear the region down.
"He's got that all wrong," she said. "We are strong people." People in Dickenson County have endured floods and fires, mine explosions and economic busts. "We stay and we fight. We're trying to preserve what we got."
Empire builders
A picture from the past: Ten men on horseback, dressed in ties, suitcoats and hats, gaze confidently into the camera. A barefoot boy stands in the foreground. The year is 1904.
The men in the photograph are touring the mountains of Southwest Virginia, laying plans that will change Dickenson County forever.
W.M. Ritter of Ohio is owner of America's largest lumber company; Norman B. Ream of Chicago is a director of U.S. Steel; and James A. Blair represents the New York banking house of Blair & Co.
Two of the men, George L. Carter and Thomas Fortune Ryan, have roots in Virginia.
Carter was a Carroll County farm boy who left home at age 16 and built an empire of iron furnaces that stretched from Roanoke to Pulaski and beyond.
After his interests went belly up in 1901, he escaped bankruptcy unscathed and began hatching big plans for Virginia's coalfields.
He turned to Ryan for help.
Ryan was also a farm boy, from Nelson County. He became one of the richest, most politically connected men in America, making millions in streetcar lines and buying a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
"If Ryan lives long enough," one Wall Street admirer said, "he'll have all the money in the world."
Ryan pulled together the investors willing to spend more than $50 million for a railroad that would eventually stretch from Kentucky to South Carolina and open rich coal lands in Virginia.
By 1905, Carter and his backers had bought more than 300,000 acres of land and coal in Dickenson, Russell and Buchanan counties. They purchased big tracts from speculators who'd bought up property during earlier land booms and dispatched third-party land agents to buy from the subsistence farmers and moonshiners who still owned and worked the ground. When they couldn't buy the surface, they settled for mineral rights.
In 1914, Clinchfield Coal executed a land swap with a Dickenson County farmer named Thomas Bise. He got 1,001 ridge-top acres and $480 in cash.
Clinchfield got 1,048 acres of bottom land.
More importantly, the company got mineral rights on its new land and on the 1,001 acres it gave to Bise - reserving all coal, oil, gas, salt, mineral waters, zinc and potter's clay, along with the right to use the timber for mine props and build "all necessary and convenient" roads and rail lines over the land.
Dickenson County had been isolated by its sharp-topped ridges and twisting river valleys. Rather than skirting around the mountains, Carter's railroad blasted through them with tunnels and traversed chasms with trestles. The Scientific American called it a monument to Carter's genius, the costliest railroad in America.
The Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railroad was completed in 1915 with its final link slicing through Dickenson County. The longest tunnel on the CC&O started in Russell County, cut 1.9 miles through Big Sandy Ridge and opened into Dickenson County.
By then, Carter and Ryan had moved on to other ventures -- Carter would go to West Virginia to build Coalwood, a "model" coal camp later made famous by the movie "October Sky."
Carter returned to hammer the final spike in the line. Along with the railroad, he left behind the Clinchfield Coal Corp., the company that would be the county's main employer, landlord and storekeeper for decades to come.
Dickenson County had entered the industrial age.
Boom town
The men walked into holes in the ground and entered a world of black-darkness dimly broken by the flicker of carbide-fueled lanterns hung from cloth miners' caps.
They worked in pairs, drilling holes 6 feet deep into walls of rock and coal, then stuffing the holes with handmade explosives - powder wrapped in paper like handmade cigarettes.
They packed their charges tightly with clay or coal grit, lit their fuses and ran like hell.
It was dangerous work, and many died. Training was on the job.
"After about the first or second day, you done a man's work," says Clarence Phillips, 73, a retired Clinchfield miner.
In the beginning, Clinchfield built two big coal camps. One was at Dante just over the Russell County line.
The other was at a place called Moss along the McClure River in Dickenson County. Jonah Sykes, an ancestor of Gayle Stanley, had run a grist mill there until a flood swept it away in 1913. The community had 18 homes, a school, and a few cows cooling themselves amid a soggy patch of bulrush.
Clinchfield Coal filled in the bog and built a town. The company called it Clinchco and named the streets after mine superintendents. It recruited local people along with blacks from the Deep South and Greek, Hungarian and Italian immigrants. The population jumped to 1,800 in 1919 and reached 3,500 in 1935.
Clarence Phillips' father, Rufus, came home to Dickenson County from the World War I battlefields of France to take a job with Clinchfield in the Dante mines.
Fred Sykes, Gayle Stanley's grandfather, went into the Clinchco mines in 1922. He was 15.
Sykes earned 40 cents an hour when he started, but many men in the '20s and '30s struggled to make as much as $2 a day. In early times, they were paid by the ton, and they bought their own tools and blasting powder from the company store.
If you didn't work for Clinchfield, about the only other place to work in the county was Ritter Lumber. Ritter worked hand-in-hand with Clinchfield, clearing away the trees on coal company property. Loggers cut almost every usable tree in the county. One poplar cut on Red Onion Mountain in the 1930s was so big - 8 feet in diameter - that men used dynamite to splinter it into pieces.
Ed Reedy was 18 when he came off Reedy Ridge to work for Ritter. His uncle had been killed in 1931 after being pulled into a wood chipper at a Ritter sawmill. But that didn't stop Reedy. He needed the job.
"It was the only chance I had for survival."
'I am the boss'
In the 1920s and '30s, Clinchfield controlled everything in Dante and Clinchco. The doctors and undertakers and policemen and, for many years, the region's congressman, John Flannagan, worked for the coal company. It owned the houses, the schools, the stores, the churches.
"They dominated your life from start to go," says Phillips, who was born in 1926. "You had to go to their church. They wouldn't let just anybody come in and set up a church. See, they didn't want people to come in here and rouse these people up."
Prices were higher at the company store, Phillips says, but you risked your job if you didn't take your business there. When an independent store opened on Sandy Ridge, he recalls, families would go there to buy, then hide their goods in the woods and try to slip them home after dark.
Clinchfield printed its own currency -- company scrip -- that it issued to miners who needed advances against their earnings. Some miners made sure they stayed in debt -- figuring the company would be less likely to lay them off if it was still waiting to get repaid.
Most people felt lucky to have jobs.
"The company give me work to feed my family, put my children through school," recalls Emory Cook, 80.
Kathy Shearer, a researcher with People Inc., a coalfields community action agency, interviewed Cook and 43 others for its Dante Oral History Project. Most recalled the company warmly. It extended them credit when they needed it and kept them working, if only a day or two a week, during the Depression.
But enough people were upset about wages and conditions that the United Mine Workers of America gained a toehold.
Clinchfield general manager Lee Long said the company took care of its workers and didn't need a "foreign union" to come in and tell it how to run things.
In the summer of 1933, Clinchfield closed its Crane's Nest mine less than 24 hours after employees there voted in the UMW. Long vowed he'd do the same thing if the UMW won at Clinchco.
Clinchfield formed its own union, the Employees' Association. UMW backers dubbed it the "Yellow Dog Union." The National Labor Relations Board would later conclude workers had been coerced into joining the association.
According to the labor board, Long was nonetheless angered when men tried to take a half-hour lunch included in the association's contract: "To hell with the contract, I am the boss here and if I don't like it I can move you out of the camp that quick."
Signing a UMW card in those days could be a firing offense, Phillips recalls. His father, Rufus, lost his job for a year.
Sykes, who was a foreman but sympathetic to the UMW, recalls men seeking the privacy of a church outhouse to swear their oaths of allegiance to the union.
The labor board said the company fired one miner, who was also a Holiness minister, after telling him he was preaching "too much union" in his sermons.
The UMW kept the pressure on. In 1939, almost 2,000 people came to Clinchco for a union rally. Seventy of Virginia's 150 state troopers came, too, and set up machine gun nests in the hills above town.
When miners stopped work with a wildcat strike in 1942, the company accused them of being "saboteurs" who were aiding Hitler in World War II. The labor board concluded the company had precipitated the strike to create an excuse to fire UMW leaders.
In the end, the federal agency found the company guilty of labor-law violations, helping to turn the tide for the union. The UMW and Clinchfield signed their first contract in 1945, soon after Pittston Coal gained majority control of Clinchfield's stock.
The future looked bright. The coal business boomed after World War II, providing fuel for the nation's military machine, and modern machinery was starting to change the way men dug coal.
Ed Reedy came home from the war and found work on the county's first strip mines.
Sometimes, as he ran a diesel shovel at Clinchfield's Lick Fork operations, he had trouble believing his eyes. In places, the coal seams reached 22 feet high. The miners uncovered fossilized ferns and tree trunks - reminders of the coal's prehistoric origins. Once, he recalls, he saw a fossilized tree standing 60-feet tall, embedded into a hillside that the miner would soon demolish.
'Act of God'
It's been almost a lifetime, but Bertsy and Ann Stanley can't forget the day the dam burst.
March 12, 1955: A coal-black wall of water, perhaps 40 feet tall at its highest, roared down the narrow bed of Lick Fork Creek in southern Dickenson County. An earthen coal-refuse dam at Clinchfield's Lick Fork mine had given way.
Ann Stanley barely had time to get her three children into the house. Then the wave of debris-choked water swept the house downstream. They stood on the couch, clinging to one another as chunks of ceiling fell around them.
The house thudded to a stop against a tall oak more than 100 yards downstream. They survived, shaken but alive.
"It was hard for us to believe that it happened," recalls Ed Reedy, who was working at the mine. "It just swept everything out as it went -- trees and everything."
The Stanleys lost their home, their refrigerator, their radio and other new furnishings.
"It liked to knock me out," says Bertsy Stanley, now 76. "It put a lot of stress on me. I had my life savings in that place ... I was always used to coming home. There was no home to come to."
Within a few months, Ann Stanley gave birth to twins, and her husband had filed a $30,000 lawsuit against Clinchfield Coal.
Later in life, Bertsy Stanley would be a minister with his own church. But in 1955 he was a young man with mouths to feed at home, and he was taking on the region's most powerful corporation -- and his employer.
Stanley kept his job running a bulldozer at the strip mine, but Clinchfield played tough. Its lawyers wrote the judge, reminding him of the number of people it employed.
The company told the judge that the dam was properly constructed and only an "act of God" -- weeks of unprecedented rain -- could have caused the calamity.
It also countersued, claiming it owned one-ninth interest on the patch of ground where the Stanleys' home had been built, and that they owed the company $500 for rent.
The case dragged on, and Ann Stanley couldn't bring herself to testify. Her husband agreed to settle for $10,000. It wasn't right, he says, but he didn't have much choice.
The case was forgotten by almost everyone but the Stanleys.
Then in 1972 a blackwater dam in Logan County, W.Va., collapsed and sent a wave of dreck-filled water hurtling down Buffalo Creek at nearly 30 miles an hour. The flood destroyed 1,000 homes and killed 125 people. This time, Pittston faced a class-action lawsuit pushed by a big law firm in Washington, D.C. The company again asserted the dam break had been an act of God. But an ex-Pittston employee tipped off the plaintiffs' attorneys about the 1955 flood in Dickenson County. The lawyers contacted the Stanleys and used their case as evidence that Pittston knew about the dangers of its dams.
The company settled for $13.5 million, and the Buffalo Creek disaster helped prompt the 1977 federal law that first regulated strip mining.
Looking back at how his own case turned out, Bertsy Stanley says simply: "I've got no hard feelings. Really. Because things are over and done."
Minutes later, he adds: "It wouldn't happen like that today. Laws have changed -- and a lot of these companies have been 'umbled. Which I'm glad to see." |
