My Family: Chapter 5

On the weekends we used the coal mine as a playground. Kids my age would play in the sand house. We were ignorant about the danger, but we could have been killed. It was a small room made out of cinders blocks. A coal car would empty sand through a chute in a window at the top of the sand  house and it filled up. We couldn't play in the house when it was full of  sand there was no room to crawl in. There was a window at the bottom of the sand house about two feet off the ground. A miner shoveled the sand out of the window into a chute which lead to the coal temple to wash the coal before it went into the coal cars. We climbed through the bottom window and play in the sand. Sometimes there was just enough room to get in the house where the miner had shovel the sand out, and other times the sand house would be half full. We are so lucky the sand didn't cave in on top of us and bury us alive or block the window so we couldn't get out.
The twelve-year old boys and girls played in the lumberyard and once built a tower out 2x4s that had three floors; we were lucky that this didn’t fall down on top of us. The lumberyard men tore it down on Monday when they started work. We only played around the mines on the weekends when the mine was not working. One time they left the fort standing for awhile, I don’t remember how long though.
Across the road from the lumber yard was circular steps that the men used as a exscape  in case of an accident.   We went over and looked down the circular steps with water at the bottom. Shirley went down and touched the water before climbing back up. I was too scare to go down the first step because the steps were only wide enough for one man at a time. There was also a big fan, as big as a house, which pumped air out of the cave so the men could breath. We would stand in front of it and let it blow on us. Sometimes it would lift us up off the ground and push us a little.
Another time, the older teenagers built a merry-go-round out of two railroad ties. They put one in the ground and the other on top with a railroad spike. One child got on each end and the others pushed them around. Everyone, who could hang on, got a turn. That merry-go-round gave us a lot of fun and lasted until we got tired of playing on it

Ronnie age 5 Bonnie age 3

Different salesman would come up the hollow to sell people stuff like ice cream - not one bar or cone but five gallons in a tub. People didn’t have refrigerators they had Iceboxes. When my parents brought ice cream it was usually on the 4th of July, we would have to hurry up and eat it before it melted all away.We ate ice cream cones all day long.
The iceman would come up the hollow once a week and all of us kids would follow behind his truck and grab the loose ice; sometimes he would chip us off a piece with his ice pick. I remember this one time a salesman came to the house and to sell Mom a set of dishes that wouldn’t break; they were called Malta Mack. He was throwing dishes across the room as proof that they would not break.

Poodie age 12  Lucille age  9

        There was a man who would bring his pony to every house, and parents would pay to get their children’s pictures taken on the pony. This one time my cousin, who was six years old, was at our house and she would put her big toe out in front of the pony’s hoof daring it step on it. She wouldn’t let up, and every time she did this the pony looked at her, it's owner finally told her to stop as she was upsetting the pony. But she went ahead and did it anyway. Well you can guess, the pony did step on her toe and the owner had a hard time getting that pony off her. It was bleeding pretty bad when he got the pony away from her. She was screaming. I know that incident made a lasting impression on her because now we've reached an older age, she asked me if I remembered the time when the pony stepped on her toe. The picture to the left was taken about three years later. 

      

Rum Creek Hollow

Rum Creek Hollow is about 15 miles long, it's off of Rt. 10 and as you travel up the holler the coal camps are as follows: Dabney, Dehue, Hutchinson, Orville, Chambers, Argyle, Yolyn, and Slagle. I was born in Macbeth where the owner of the mines was named Macbeth, and then my father changed jobs after I was born. We moved to Orville and lived there until I was five years old but then my father change jobs again and we moved back to Macbeth but by this time a man with the last name Hutchinson had brought the mines, so that's why the place is known by both names, Macbeth-Hutchinson, however, Macbeth just seems to stick with the old timers. It's on the West Virginia map as Hutchinson.

The Dehue school went from first to eighth grade; after eighth grade everyone had to catch the school bus and go to Logan for high school. First time I ever used a inside bathroom toilet was when I was six years old and at the Dehue school which boasted a boy's bathroom and a girl's bathroom. I don't know if the other schools had inside bathrooms, however, the school at Cham had an outhouse. There were six commodes in a line and one for the teachers with a wall around it for private use. The older girls would slip in and use the private one.  There was no sewage system so the pipes from the bathrooms emptied out into a creek which ran along the school.  If you stood on the creek bed, you could see where it was draining out into the creek.  Dehue school also had drinking fountains>which was new to me, so I was always making an excuse to get a drink.  This one time, I was getting a drink and the principle came down the stairs which was beside the fountain.
                   "Girl! What are you doing out here in the hallway?" He scared me so bad that I stood there and wet on myself.  I don't remember what happen much after that.

The black children that lived up Rum Creek Hollow had to catch a school bus where they had to cross a bridge and go out of the city - we called this section of Logan Black Bottom but its real name was Guyana Dot.  As far as I know all the black children in Logan County went to this school and it's now a collage.

Dehue has nothing on the land now - the approximate one hundred homes, school, soda fountain, cemetery, post office, church, doctor's office, movie house, and club house where they held meetings for the girl and boy scouts - are all gone.

There were also about fifteen homes in Chambers. They had a two-room schoolhouse that went to fourth grade and no indoor plumbing, if you had to go to the bathroom you used an outhouse in all weather. To get a drink of water you had to go outside where there was a pump.  You had to pump up and down before the water would come out, this usually it took two children to get a drink of water, one to pump and one to catch the water with the cup that hung from the pump. Everyone shared the same cup and the same germs. 

Argyle had about seventy-five homes, Hall’s Beer Garden, Lowe’s grocery store/beer garden, a movie house, an ice cream soda fountain, a Company Store with post office - all of which are gone. However a few years ago, a few homes and the church that we went to were still standing.

Yolyn had over a hundred homes, a Company Store with post office, a schoolhouse that went to fifth grade, and movie house all of which is no longer there.

Slagle had a schoolhouse which went to sixth grade, it set up on left hand side at bottom of Lowe's Mountain. There was also a Company Store with post office, a church, and about one hundred homes.

Past Slagle was what we, up Rum Creek hollow, called Lowe’s Mountain. It was called l Lowe’s because the Lowe family is the only ones that lived upon the mountain. The mountain's official name is Kelly Mountain. The coal mines kept the road in good condition for it was a short cut for their coal trucks to get across the mountain leading to the coal mines on Buffalo Creek. You can by-pass a lot of bad mountain roads if you were going to Charleston or Man but most everyone was going into Logan. And hardly anyone ever used Lowe’s Mountain as it was a dirt road and only two cars could pass one another, there were some places you couldn't pass another car. It had a 3,500-foot drop or more over the side if you should go off of the road. After you got to the top of the mountain, you came to Lowe’s cemetery, then as you are going down you come to a fork in the road where left goes to Blair and right goes to Buffalo Creek. This is the mountain that the West Virginia coal mines wars were fought on in 1920-1921. My Grandma Francis told me that the non-union men tried to come over Lowe’s Mountain to get up Rum Creek to the coal mine. She said there were some men killed and the government had to call in the West Virginia National Guards.

There are very few homes up Rum Creek now and only one Huge - a coal washing mine in Hutchinson where all the other mines send their coal to get it washed. It is called Alma Coal Mines, so now I guess the place would be called Alma's.

Bridge to get to Dehue School from Hutchinson.The school bus 
dropped children off here
that they pick up at Argyle past Macbeth-Hutchinson.

                                       

This is the water pump that my cousin saved when 
 they tore down the two room school house.

Living in the Coal Camp

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.

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 miner’s 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 wouldn’t 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 miner’s 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.

Samples of script money

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 couldn’t 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 it's own building away from the store. The post office was at the mouth of Macbeth 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 miner’s 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 miner’s family didn’t 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 Dad’s 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 fifty’s. 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 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 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 1950’s some families had an electric stove and a refrigerator. We did have a refrigerator but it had nothing in it but the baby’s 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 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 didn’t 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 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 miner’s 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 doctor’s 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 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 didn’t work for those mines. The doctor would refuse to see you. The doctor’s 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 didn’t 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 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 wasn’t 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.

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 don’t 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 couldn’t afford insect spray in those days, or there was none to buy because it hadn’t 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.

Logan Court House burnt down in 1960. A more modern one was rebuilt.       

My father drove a buggy train like this one to bring the

coal up out of the mines. He had a brakeman who rode the last car to help him
stop the train and keep it on the tracks.