Posted on 05/18/2013 8:13:07 AM PDT by virgil283
"In a coal camp, the company owned all the properties, the houses and everything associated with the camp. Miners who worked there, just worked for wages and the pay they received was not enough to provide decent living for their families. The houses were mostly four rooms without indoor plumbing, there were no streets, just dirt lanes filled with coal ashes from the "warm morning' stoves that were used to heat the home. Some houses only had a single fireplace for heat in the cold winters....." ...Dozens of color photos....
"A general store owned by the company, allowed the miners to trade for necessities. The miners used company monies called script which could only be redeemed, at the company store. Tennessee Ernie Ford had it right with the song lyrics "I owe my soul to the company store".
(Excerpt) Read more at coal-miners-in-kentucky.com ...
I am sure these hard working guys were worth a hail of lot more than the liberal wine swishers you mentioned.
It was a commie plot then and it still is
why would you want to get out of the hollow? Seems like an ok life compared to the liberal urban hellhole
>>How did they survive before the mines opened? Were they dropped there by spacecraft from another world?
Really? Are you that uninformed and ignorant of how the world worked before Starbucks, cell phones, and Interstate highways? Many of them were subsistence farmers before the mines opened. The rest were recent immigrants who were given an opportunity to escape the poverty, crime, and filth of their Port of Entry city. And even though mine work sucked, it was far better than what the average immigrant had back in NYC or Boston.
America was a much more dangerous place then than it is now and people took dangerous jobs to feed their family. Sometimes those jobs were more of a curse than a blessing, but they did put food on the table every night.
I could see how easy it would be to move away when you saved up so much of the script you were being paid in.
Most of the coal miners these days have college degrees.
just go, how much money did the pioneers have, you are displaying your liberal attitude, you do not need a car and a moving van, bull crap all you need is put the family on the first bus outta there, or leave on the first bus and send for them when you put the money together, sheesh
he hates the folking unions and so do I crooked corrupt bunch of basturds
I think those generations which proceeded us took pride in doing hard honest work.
I can also tell you from personal experience the schools in the southern part of WV were not very good. My dad worked two jobs to send us to catholic boarding school in Paintsville KY along with about 30 other kids from Logan Co.
As I said earlier, hard to seek opportunity when you have a bad 8th grade education and can’t use script to relocate.
America was a much more dangerous place then than it is now and people took dangerous jobs to feed their family. Sometimes those jobs were more of a curse than a blessing, but they did put food on the table every night.
What motivated them? Why didn't they keep on surviving as subsistence farmers? If the mines were so terrible, why not just keep the lifestyle they were used to?
Can you answer these questions?
And you buy the bus ticket in script?
I also said earlier that WV lost population for several decades. And my family was among them.
What are you yapping about?
I was mine manager of a two pit surface mine and related wash plant in the Midwest 1979-83. Each dragline (Manitowoc 4600) would produce 120-140,000 tons per year. We ran the draglines more or less continuously.
Cat 637 scrapers peeled off the top soil and first three feet of clay for stockpiling. This was an eyeball job for our operators. We were inspected by state and federal surface mine inspectors every three-four weeks and by MSHA every month or so.
The draglines each had a D-9 working nearby to knock down spoil piles and level the bench. The drags had 140 feet of boom with eight cu. yard buckets. The cuts were 90-100 feet wide. We had a 980 loader at the wash plant and an identical machine to load coal in the pit.
We had a Chicago Pneumatic blast hole drill on a off road truck chassis. Blast holes were 7 1/2 inches in diameter. Usually five or six 50 pound bags of ANFO in each hole.
Then we would proceed to move your mortgage !
>>My dad moved us out in 1959 and for two decades after WV lost population. So many people did leave for a better life.
My grandfather left his WV mining family in 1918 when he signed up “for the duration” in WW1 (and fortunately for me and a multitude of his descendants, he never even got on a ship to France before the Armistice was signed). His older brother left a few years before, but he was murdered when he had lived in Baltimore for less than a year.
You are very correct that the welfare and whining safety nets have destroyed that kind of hard-working spirit.
Yes, an education is valuable in any time.
There are millions of uneducated A-A's in the large cities of the United States who subsist on welfare, the income they derive from drug dealing and prostitution, and on prison fare. Is that an improvement over life in Paintsville KY?
Wow he was early. I don’t know what my grandfather did during world war I. I know he was working the mines then. He had two children by then. My dad, aunts, and uncles, are gone now. No one to ask.
My dad signed-up in 1940 and was set to be discharged Dec 18, 1941. You can guess what happened.
>> What motivated them? Why didn’t they keep on surviving as subsistence farmers? If the mines were so terrible, why not just keep the lifestyle they were used to?
>>Can you answer these questions?
I think I already did. Subsistence farming is a hit-or-miss way of life. A bad year means a winter of starvation. I’m sure that they didn’t all rush off to the mines on the day they opened. Each man had to have a personal crisis that was big enough to convince him to go take that job in the mines. After all, no one who is used to farming the earth under a blue sky will go into a mine unless he has too.
The Irish, German, and Italian immigrants had a similar problem. The cities of the early 20th century were sh!tholes. These people came to America looking for open land and freedom and they found themselves in a city of open sewers and gang violence.
I got a good eduction and fondly remember Paintsville. The school is still there but no boarders, Our Lady of the Mountains Academy.
I go through Logan and Paintsville now and then and have cousins still in Logan. They all work, two are self-employed but no one in the mines.
It’s a place I could live in. I like the people and small towns, but every one in Cal except my sister in Max Meadows VA.
A lot more people on welfare. I remember a few years ago driving through Logan on a nice day. A lot of young women with kids and on welfare and food stamps. The young men all gone to the military or just elsewhere.
My sister was a librarian in Oceana. She sent me a book called “Everything in It’s Path.”
It’s about the Buffalo Creek flood when a damn of slag and coal broke and killed a lot of folks and wipes out the little community on the side of the hallows and down below.
It describes how the government came in and “took care” of everything. People living in Katrina trailors for years. The author descibed it as the death of independence in in WV, thus the tile of the book.
>>Wow he was early. I don’t know what my grandfather did during world war I. I know he was working the mines then. He had two children by then. My dad, aunts, and uncles, are gone now. No one to ask.
He was born in 1896 and was 48 when my mother was born and 66 when I was born. As a child, I spent my summers with my grandparents, so I spent a lot of time with him. He died when I was 20. His life story was one of a man who did what he had to do to provide for his family and there wasn’t a selfish bone in his body. He wasn’t a saint and he could be a real SOB when he needed to, but I’ve never met a greater man.
My favorite story of self-betterment (and lack thereof) is seeing several homeless types dozing in the newspaper reading area of the Shreveport, LA downtown library on a frosty January morning some twenty years ago.
I had gone there to do some research on a company for which I was contemplating a stock purchase.
Arguably, that library was at the time, the greatest concentration of knowledge in the ArkLaTex, and the first place anyone should go if they want to better their lot in life. Contained within those walls was the combined knowledge of thousands of years of human experience.
But to the homeless types, it was only a warm place to sleep.
ANYONE can better themselves if they make an effort.
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