by Kevin Traube
Steve Sodosky is blessed with a wonderful memory.
I went to work in the mines when I was 16½ years old. Roosevelt was president. I earned 22 cents an hour.
A twenty-five year veteran of the mines, the 89 year-old Sodosky is a living scrapbook of first-hand experiences from the coal fields of West Virginia, working in a variety of mines throughout southern West Virginia during his time. His memories breathe life into our insight of the state’s long and sometimes difficult mining heritage. We understand in a general way that life was hard for early Twentieth-Century mining families who lived in the shadow of the coal tipples, but it’s a more powerful thing, indeed, to hear about the day-to-day realities of that sort of life from one who lived it.
For example, it’s a valuable experience to enter Beckley’s Exhibition Coal Mine and actually see what that mysterious underground world looks like, but the time is greatly enriched by hearing the stories of the miners who are your guides. The little nuances of coal town life they share are just as compelling as the larger stories of challenge and struggle in the coalfields. Without them, the larger story would just seem a story. As with Steve Sodosky, to talk with a man or woman who lived the coal town life puts real emotions into what would otherwise be just another story from another history book.
One Sunday, my papa took me into the mine. No one usually worked on Sunday, but he wanted to move slate so he could be ready to mine coal on Monday. It was the first time I had ever been in one. I was 10 years old. I was in there about 12 hours while he worked and as he moved slate I ate the cake and drank the tea from his lunch. It was dark when we went in and dark when we came out. I don’t think he wanted to be alone in there that day.
Perhaps even more than the coal, itself, it is the actual mining of the coal that has formed the public’s perception of the Mountain State. Many summer visitors to the state have an interest in seeing an actual working mine, to see a place where, for all the advances in technology and safety, doing your job ultimately means risking your life. It’s the idea of men descending in to the darkness to wrestle coal from the ground that still forms a tragically romantic view of what it means to be a miner.
You don’t have to talk with Steve Sodosky long before the subject turns, in one way or another, to tragedy; lives lost in a cave-in or explosion. Perhaps it wasn’t even a mine he was working at … there still seems to be a personal connection, an empathy with others who accepted the same risks to do the same job in a different location, but ultimately lost the risk.
In truth, though, even life above ground at the mines had real, present dangers.
I was seven years-old in when the slate dump in town blew up. It was 1924. My father worked in the American Coal Company Pinnacle Mine, and we lived in a company house in the company town of McComas.
Slate taken from the mine with the coal was tossed in a pile, and this one was at least 70 feet tall. I used to climb on it with my friends and we could see down through the cracks to the hot, glowing coal and slate deep down inside it.
It had rained for several days and the pond uphill from the slate pile began to leak. It finally ran down into the pile of hot slate. My father had already started work inside the mine for the morning, and my mother had gone out to milk the cow. She noticed the sky turning cloudy with smoke from the slate as the water poured into it. She grabbed us six kids and ran up the hollow about 3/4 of a mile.
When the pile exploded it shook the ground so hard that the men inside the mine could feel it. It didn’t damage anything in the mine. Outside, it was a different story.
The explosion destroyed several houses and killed ten people, including one whole family. One fellow was taking a bath to clean up after working the last shift inside the mine, and he ended up running into the woods with just a towel around him.
I remember walking by that spot sometime later and watching a steam shovel digging the dead bodies out.
We are still in a time of transition for the coal culture of the Mountain State. No one grows up in a coal town any longer. No one shops at a company store. No one is paid in scrip.
When the miners’ payday came in the 1970’s, Beckley’s Main Street area would fill with shopping families, friends would get reacquainted on the streets between stores, and the Murphy’s lunch counter would do a brisk business. We’ve moved from a time when families lived within sight of the mines their own towns were created to serve, to a present day when many West Virginian’s don’t even know where to find an actual working mine within the state.
Still, we live today with many people in our communities from the generation that followed Steve Sodosky’s. They were born and raised in area coal town, took scrip to the company store for a bottle of pop, and ended up leaving as the mines played out and the lifestyle of the region changed.
It seemed like every payday we owed the company so much that we didn’t draw any money. It’s hard to catch up when you’re only making 22 cents an hour.
I remember hearing a foreman say about a fellow who opened the doors for the mules: “I’m going to have to give that man a better place – he owes the company $700!”
Just as coal was mined from the mountains, the rich history that the mining culture created is now being rediscovered and brought into the light. The Coal Heritage Trail, for example, runs from Ansted to Bluefield and offers an interpretive road trip through coal communities and past original company stores and related sites. The Trail is becoming a unifying link for important, historic locations in the southern part of the state, encouraging their development and preservation
The National Park Service at the New River Gorge has also started work restoring the ruins of coal boom towns like Nuttall that lie within its borders, working to make them accessible to the public. Traveling the original Fayette Station Road is presented as an opportunity to view the remnants of logging, railroad, and coal communities that once thrived within the gorge but have now faded from memory and almost from sight.
Coal mine scrip collecting is recognized as an interesting and profitable hobby, spear-headed by the National Scrip Collectors Association and its hundreds of members. Many styles of scrip are as admired by collectors for their intricate design and unique beauty as for their historical value. Thousands of variations exist, since almost every company created its own individual style of scrip to make the coins easily recognizable at its own company store.
It’s been estimated that as much as 500 years of production still exist in the coal seams under West Virginia. Looking back over how mining has changed in the last hundred years, one can scarcely imagine what the future of mining might look like. Chances are, though, it will still entail a way of life of risk and reward, of heritage and humanity.
As we move forward into our future, it’s important to hear and remember the stories of people like Steve Sodosky. Preserving that sort of connection with the past give us a fuller appreciation of the present, and a sense of experience and wisdom to draw upon in the future.
As a kid, sometimes I would hop on the back of the load of coal coming out of the mine that was being pulled by a 10-ton engine. I wasn’t going anywhere; I was just enjoying the ride.
(c) Kevin Traube
Originally published in West Virginia South magazine; June-July 2006