It wasn’t always this way. The region has a rich history of people banding together and pushing back against the industry, dating back to the West Virginia Mine Wars. The wars, which took place from 1910 to 1922—starting with the union aggregation that led to the first official strike in 1912—involved more than ten thousand miners who went on strike repeatedly over low wages and deadly working conditions. The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum chronicles it all, from the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 to 1913 (one of the worst conflicts in American labor history, with deaths from both malnourishment and hired guards) to the 1920 Battle of Matewan (also known as the Matewan Massacre), in which miners surrounded and killed seven detectives from the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency who had been hired by mine officials to issue eviction letters. The exhibits culminate with information on the 1921 Miners’ March that led to the Battle of Blair Mountain: with ten thousand miners on strike, this was the largest armed uprising of U.S. citizens outside of wartime, and federal troops were called in to break it up. Also included in the museum’s collection are artifacts from coal camp life, including a replica of the tent colonies where miner families lived when they were kicked out of their company homes for striking. The display curves around in a horseshoe of narrative, starting and ending at the front of the museum, reflective (intended or not) of the cyclical nature of labor movements in general, and of the current chapter unfolding under the omnipresent “King Coal.” If the museum narrative were to continue into the present day, Don Blankenship might have his photo in the museum in association with his own wars against laborers: In 1984, a strike at Blackberry Creek against Massey turned bloody and lasted more than a year. Blankenship, for his part, was largely concerned about his television, which, famously, was allegedly shot by pro-union forces.
The first displays upon entering the museum are bookshelves full of historic artifacts, presented without the austerity of glass cases, which keep a barrier between article and viewer. During a tour, Steele takes great care to explain the personal history of an oil lantern used to light the way for the miners. “My dad, he worked in the mine with all different people, and it didn’t matter where you were from and what you looked like—if you were union brothers, you were union brothers,” she says. “A couple years ago, he went to visit with an old friend from the mine, an African American man, and the friend showed him this old lantern. My dad told him his daughter collected old stuff like this to help preserve it, and the man said, ‘Then you give this to your daughter to look after and keep safe.’ So it’s here now, and to me its presence here in the museum is a tribute not only to my father and to that man, but to the friendship between them, that saw each other as brothers. Funny, isn’t it,” she muses as she puts the lantern back down, “this article that was created for safety was really just another thing that could have blown up in their faces.”
There is a lot of love in the museum that has gone toward making that part of history clear: the role all people had in the labor strikes and mine wars. A picture of a white woman and an African American woman sitting in the kitchen of a factory house is on proud display, and indeed, many of the group photos of union members and of families—including the ones that show people peeping out of the holes slit in tents by the Baldwin–Felts agents hired to destroy the shelters—show people of all backgrounds.
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The building where the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum is located was rented for a year and a half prior to the museum’s opening. As in much of Matewan, the building is one of the original structures of the town, and still contains bullet holes from the shoot-out between Sid Hatfield, a union sympathizer and the police chief of Matewan during the Battle of Matewan, and the mine’s hired guards. Most of the museum’s founders had been working together on the project for two years, with creative director and exhibition designer Shaun Slifer joining the team when the space was rented about six months later. Slifer has been installing exhibits for a decade in museums, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Frick Art & Historical Center, and others; he also has worked on projects from a people’s history perspective in the past, including Pittsburgh’s Howling Mob Society signs, which were featured in the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Additionally, he presented on the National Conference for Historic Preservation, and co-edited the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative’s Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas, published by Microcosm.
“It is a bit strange to think about a museum coming together so quickly, especially when in Pittsburgh the museums are these official and long-standing establishments,” Slifer says. “But there was a lot of work behind the scenes before we got to the place we are now.” While the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum may have opened its doors relatively quickly, the same techniques and attention to detail went into the design of this small storefront museum as in those larger-budget spaces. Everything is archival and, once a visitor has entered into the horseshoe past the initial open shelves, the displays all have Plexiglas cases. There are videos of historic newsreels as well as oral histories playing from a parabolic speaker. There is also much to read at each display, and large quotes in vinyl dance along the walls to help guide the narrative.
Prior to the creation of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, co-founders Kenny King and Wilma Steele had been a part of the modest Blair Mountain Museum, which
