Appalachian Community Histories – Matewan, Mingo County: Coal, the Mine Wars, Floods, and a Town That Endured
Few places in Appalachia have become as closely associated with a single historical event as Matewan, West Virginia. The name immediately brings to mind Sid Hatfield, Baldwin-Felts detectives, striking miners, and the gunfire that erupted beside the railroad tracks on May 19, 1920. Yet the famous shootout was only one moment in a much longer community history.
Matewan was already an important commercial center before the Mine Wars reached its streets. It had grown beside the Norfolk and Western Railway as coal development transformed the Tug Fork Valley, becoming a place where residents of surrounding company towns could shop, conduct business, attend school, visit doctors, watch movies, and step partly outside the control of the companies that dominated so much of coalfield life.
That distinction helps explain why the events of 1920 happened in Matewan. It was connected to coal without being wholly owned by a coal company. Local government still mattered there, and when company detectives entered the town to remove union miners and their families from company houses, they encountered local officials who challenged their authority.
The resulting confrontation made Matewan nationally famous, but the town continued long after the shooting stopped. Residents endured declining coal employment, changing transportation patterns, fires, repeated floods, and the catastrophic Tug Fork flood of 1977. They rebuilt, preserved what remained of the historic business district, and eventually turned the very history that had once overshadowed Matewan into part of its future.
Before the Coal Boom
The narrow geography of Matewan shaped almost everything that followed. The community developed where Mate Creek enters the Tug Fork, with steep mountains crowding the available level ground. The river also forms the state boundary, placing Kentucky immediately across the Tug from the West Virginia town.
Long before Matewan became a municipality, families lived along the river and its tributaries in what was then Logan County. The future town remained isolated by the terrain, connected more naturally to other Tug Valley settlements than to many communities elsewhere in West Virginia.
The decisive transformation came with the railroad. The National Park Service’s Matewan Historic District documentation states that landowner F. A. J. Ferrell platted Matewan in 1890. The Norfolk and Western Railway arrived in 1892 as its line pushed through the region toward Kenova and the Ohio River, opening the Williamson Coal Field to large-scale development. Matewan incorporated in 1895, the same year that Mingo County was created from western Logan County.
Coal mines followed the tracks, and people followed the mines.
The transformation was extraordinary. Between 1890 and 1920, the populations of Logan, McDowell, and Mingo counties increased many times over as mining companies recruited workers and opened new operations. African Americans from the South and immigrants from Europe joined people already living in the mountains, creating coalfield communities that were more socially complicated than later stereotypes sometimes suggest. Mingo County did not receive immigration on quite the scale of some neighboring coalfields, but the expansion of mining nevertheless altered the population, economy, and culture of the Tug Valley.
A Town Surrounded by Company Camps
Matewan differed in an important way from many settlements that appeared during the coal boom.
It was not simply a company town.
Mining companies throughout southern West Virginia often owned the houses where miners lived, the stores where families bought food, and many of the other institutions upon which everyday life depended. Employment and housing were therefore closely connected. Losing a mining job could mean losing a home as well.
Matewan developed beside that system without completely belonging to it. Two mines opened near the community around the time the railroad arrived, but the incorporated town became a commercial and financial center serving numerous surrounding mining camps. The Matewan National Bank became an important regional institution, while merchants filled the business district along Mate Street.
The physical arrangement of the town revealed how dependent Matewan was upon the railroad. Level land was so scarce that buildings on the north side of Mate Street effectively possessed two fronts. One faced the street while the other faced the railroad, allowing passengers to step from trains and directly enter businesses. The commercial district contained banks, hotels, drugstores, hardware stores, apartments, restaurants, and other establishments supported by miners and their families.
By the early twentieth century, substantial brick buildings stood along Mate Street. The city hall and lockup dated to about 1908. Testerman’s Jewelry Store and several other commercial buildings appeared during the following years, while the Matewan National Bank and old post office building dated to 1913. Across the tracks stood the railroad depot, a constant reminder of the transportation system that had created the modern town.
Nearby coal camps existed under considerably greater corporate control. Red Jacket, approximately three miles away, became the center of the county’s largest mining operation, while Stone Mountain Coal Camp extended partly within Matewan’s corporate limits. Residents therefore moved constantly between two worlds: the company-controlled camps where many miners lived and the incorporated town where independent businesses and municipal officials possessed greater authority.
That difference would become crucial in 1920.
Unionism Reaches the Tug Fork
The First World War had intensified demand for coal, but the end of the war did not end conflict between miners and operators. Organized labor had made gains elsewhere in West Virginia, yet much of the southern coalfield remained firmly nonunion.
Coal operators attempted to prevent union organization through employment contracts commonly known as yellow-dog contracts, which required workers to remain outside the union. Private detectives and mine guards were also employed throughout the coalfields. To miners, joining the United Mine Workers of America promised more than increased wages. It offered some measure of independence from a system in which losing employment could affect nearly every part of family life.
During the spring of 1920, the union campaign around Matewan accelerated. Organizers held meetings, miners took the union oath, and Mother Jones traveled through the region urging workers to organize. According to the National Park Service’s historical study, approximately 3,000 miners along the Tug Fork had joined the union by May 15. Coal operators retaliated against union members by firing workers and ordering families from company-owned houses. Many displaced families entered tent colonies supported by the UMWA.
The conflict therefore entered Matewan before the first gunshot was fired.
It arrived through families being forced from their homes.
May 19, 1920
Shortly before noon on Wednesday, May 19, thirteen Baldwin-Felts detectives arrived in Matewan aboard Norfolk and Western train No. 29 from Bluefield.
Albert Felts led the group, accompanied by his brother Lee and eleven other agents. Their immediate purpose was to remove union families from houses belonging to the Stone Mountain Coal Company. After eating in Matewan, the detectives traveled to the mining camp and began carrying out the evictions.
Matewan Police Chief Sid Hatfield and Mayor Cabell Testerman challenged them.
Hatfield questioned whether the detectives possessed the legal authority necessary to conduct the removals. Albert Felts reportedly claimed that a court order authorized the evictions, but Hatfield was unable to obtain confirmation that such an order existed. The dispute intensified when Hatfield began seeking warrants against the detectives while they prepared to leave Matewan later that afternoon.
By approximately 3:30, the agents had returned from Stone Mountain after six families had been removed from their homes. They moved back through Matewan toward the depot, where they expected to board a train for Bluefield. Hatfield confronted them near the commercial buildings beside the railroad.
Then someone fired.
The question of who fired the first shot became part of the controversy almost immediately. The Williamson News, reporting only one day later, admitted that even witnesses could not provide a dependable account of the opening seconds. The newspaper told readers that the confusion had been so great that the exact details might never be known. Later testimony, detective reports, and trial evidence produced competing versions of the confrontation.
What is certain is how rapidly the confrontation became a gun battle.
Shots came from the street and surrounding buildings. Mayor Testerman was mortally wounded. Miners Bob Mullins and Clarence “Tot” Tinsley were killed. Seven Baldwin-Felts agents died, including Albert and Lee Felts. Others were wounded or fled toward the Tug Fork and railroad. Ten men ultimately died as a result of the confrontation.
The next morning, the Williamson News described the previous night in Matewan as a scene filled with armed people, followed by an uneasy calm. Passenger trains had initially been instructed to pass through without stopping. State police began arriving in the region, while the bodies of the dead detectives were transported to Williamson.
What had begun as a dispute over union membership, housing, private police power, and local authority had become one of the defining events of American labor history.
Why the Battle Happened in Matewan
The shootout can be told as a dramatic confrontation between Sid Hatfield and the Baldwin-Felts detectives, but reducing the history to personalities misses the larger question.
Why did the confrontation happen in Matewan?
Rebecca J. Bailey’s extensive study of Mingo County argues that the answer reaches far deeper than May 19, 1920. Land ownership disputes, railroad development, coal-company power, political rivalries, earlier violence, economic instability, and decades of local history all helped create the conditions in which the confrontation occurred. The massacre was not simply an isolated explosion imported into an otherwise peaceful community by outside miners, detectives, or organizers.
Matewan itself mattered.
Because the town was incorporated and was not wholly owned by a coal corporation, municipal officials could challenge private detectives in ways that might have been much more difficult inside a completely company-controlled settlement. Hatfield’s authority as police chief and Testerman’s authority as mayor created a competing source of power within the coalfield.
The railroad mattered too. It brought miners, detectives, union organizers, newspapers, commerce, weapons, and information directly into the narrow center of town. The same tracks that made Matewan prosperous also created the physical stage upon which the confrontation unfolded.
The Matewan Trial
The gunfire did not settle the dispute.
Sid Hatfield and more than twenty other men were eventually indicted for the killing of Albert Felts. Their prosecution became one of the largest criminal proceedings West Virginia had yet seen, drawing crowds, prominent attorneys, miners, coal operators, journalists, and witnesses into Williamson.
The trial began in January 1921 and continued for weeks. By the time the jury returned an acquittal on March 19, the number of defendants being tried had fallen to sixteen.
An extraordinary portion of the record survives.
West Virginia University’s Matewan Trial Transcript collection contains approximately 2,000 pages of court reporter testimony from February 12 through February 23, 1921. More than thirty participants and witnesses appear in the surviving transcript, including Baldwin-Felts survivors and Matewan telephone operators. Additional portions survive in the William Archer Papers, while the West Virginia State Archives apparently holds a much larger case file containing transcripts, jury material, and witness statements.
Those records are especially important because the Battle of Matewan quickly became surrounded by legend. The courtroom testimony preserves disagreement, uncertainty, conflicting memories, and competing explanations that disappear when the story is reduced to a simple gunfight between heroes and villains.
From Matewan to a Larger Mine War
Sid Hatfield emerged from the battle and trial as a hero among many union miners. Rather than destroying the organization effort, the shooting strengthened it. Within approximately six weeks, the National Park Service records that more than 90 percent of Mingo County miners had taken the union oath and joined one of thirty-four locals.
The operators still refused to recognize the union.
A strike began on July 1, 1920. Violence spread through the Tug Valley, involving union miners, nonunion miners, mine guards, police, and other armed forces. Federal soldiers arrived in August. After they departed, fighting resumed, and Mingo County was declared to be in a state of insurrection later that year. Soldiers and state authorities patrolled Matewan and neighboring communities while the strike continued.
The conflict crossed the Tug Fork into Pike County, Kentucky, demonstrating how little the state boundary meant to the industrial geography of the coalfield. Mines, railroad lines, workers, company interests, and family connections linked the two sides of the river.
Congress eventually entered the dispute. The United States Senate Committee on Education and Labor conducted an extensive investigation under Senate Resolution 80 in 1921. The resulting hearings preserved testimony from union leaders, miners, coal operators, public officials, and others connected with the conflict. Sid Hatfield himself testified before the committee in July.
Matewan’s local struggle had become a national issue.
The Killing of Sid Hatfield
Hatfield did not live to see the conflict resolved.
After his Senate testimony, he faced charges in neighboring McDowell County concerning violence at the Mohawk mine. Hatfield feared traveling to Welch for the proceedings, but on August 1, 1921, he went there accompanied by his wife Jessie, his deputy Ed Chambers and Chambers’s wife Sallie, and others.
Before approaching the courthouse, Hatfield turned over his weapons to Jessie.
As Hatfield and Chambers climbed the courthouse steps, Baldwin-Felts men opened fire. Both men were killed. According to the National Park Service account, Hatfield was unarmed at the time.
Their bodies returned to Matewan.
Thousands mourned. The funeral procession traveled through town and across the Tug Fork into Kentucky, where Hatfield and Chambers were buried. Their deaths intensified anger among miners who already believed that Mingo County’s legal and political systems had failed them.
Within weeks, thousands of armed miners began moving through Boone and Kanawha counties toward Logan County, intending ultimately to reach Mingo and support the union miners there. Their march ended at Blair Mountain, where several thousand miners confronted forces organized under Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin. Federal troops were eventually sent into the region, bringing the largest armed labor confrontation of the Mine Wars to an end.
Matewan therefore became one link in a chain running from eviction notices in the Tug Valley to one of the largest armed labor uprisings in American history.
The Matewan That Existed Beyond the Mine Wars
The Battle of Matewan became so famous that it sometimes obscured the community where it happened.
Oral histories collected from longtime residents during the late 1980s and early 1990s reveal another Matewan, one filled with schools, grocery stores, restaurants, theaters, merchants, railroad workers, miners, children, and families whose lives cannot be understood only through the events of 1920. The Matewan Oral History Project eventually assembled interviews with dozens of residents, providing one of the most valuable surviving records of ordinary life in the community.
John McCoy remembered attending local schools before entering high school in 1928. He later worked selling groceries from a truck that traveled through the surrounding creeks, carrying the store to families who could not easily come into town. Produce could be brought back from the market in Huntington, showing how commercial networks stretched well beyond Mingo County. McCoy also remembered Matewan’s theater and a downtown that remained tied to both coal and the railroad.
Marshall Kirk remembered an even broader commercial landscape. Department stores, grocery businesses, restaurants, hardware stores, drugstores, and other establishments served the surrounding population. His memories reinforce an important distinction between Matewan and nearby company settlements. The town functioned as a regional marketplace where residents from mining camps could purchase goods outside their company stores.
Howard Sutherland put that distinction plainly in his oral history. Matewan, he explained, was not simply a coal camp. It was a trade center for the larger region. Residents of surrounding coal communities came into town for shopping and services, giving Matewan an economic identity related to coal but not completely controlled by a single mining company.
That role continued for decades after the Mine Wars.
Coal, Business, and Changing Times
Matewan’s prosperity remained tied to the coal industry even when the town itself was independent of company ownership. When the mines worked steadily and miners had money to spend, the merchants of Mate Street benefited. When mining slowed, the effects traveled quickly through every part of the local economy.
The railroad remained equally important. It carried coal outward while bringing merchandise, travelers, mail, and residents into town. The historic depot stood opposite Matewan’s commercial block until its demolition in 1960. Even after passenger travel declined, the railroad corridor continued to divide and define the physical center of the community.
Changes in the coal industry gradually weakened the dense commercial network remembered by older residents. Larger companies absorbed smaller operations, automobiles changed shopping patterns, and residents could travel more easily to Williamson, Pikeville, Huntington, and other commercial centers.
Matewan survived those changes, but another force repeatedly attacked the town from the river beside it.
The Floods
Matewan was built on a narrow floodplain because that was where the railroad, river, creek, and available level land came together. The geography that made settlement possible also made flooding nearly unavoidable.
Residents remembered floods long before 1977. John McCoy recalled being removed from his family’s home during high water in 1917 when he was a young child. Marshall Kirk remembered damaging floods in 1955 and 1957, followed by water running continuously down Mate Street during a 1963 flood.
Nothing in their memories compared with April 1977.
The flood devastated communities along the Tug Fork from Matewan toward Williamson. A later United States Geological Survey hydrologic atlas documented the disaster and mapped the flooding through the valley.
McCoy remembered water rising nearly to the ceiling of the lower floor of his property and destroying businesses and houses. Kirk recalled approximately fourteen feet of water in the post office and described buildings, stores, and homes that disappeared or were damaged beyond recovery.
The flood did more than damage individual structures. It accelerated economic decline by destroying businesses that had survived earlier changes in coal and transportation. A merchant already struggling with declining population or competition from larger shopping centers could rebuild only so many times.
Flooding struck again in the 1980s, reinforcing the conclusion that Matewan’s future depended upon substantial protection from the Tug Fork.
Building the Floodwall
The federal response eventually transformed the town’s landscape.
The United States Army Corps of Engineers developed flood-control projects for the Tug Valley, and Matewan’s floodwall was constructed during the 1990s. SAH Archipedia dates the major floodwall project to 1994 through 1996. The concrete barrier protected the historic center while also requiring changes to the area between downtown and the river.
The project involved more than engineering.
By this point, local preservationists and planners understood that saving Matewan from water while destroying the appearance of the historic town would solve one problem by creating another. New construction associated with the flood-control work therefore attempted to respect the surviving architectural character of Matewan. A new town hall and fire department followed in 1996 and 1997, designed with materials intended to complement the older commercial district.
Flood protection gave Matewan something residents interviewed only a few years earlier had repeatedly said the community needed: the possibility of planning for the future without assuming that the next high water might erase another piece of town.
Preserving the Historic District
Despite the Mine Wars, repeated floods, fires, demolition, economic decline, and the disappearance of many older structures, a remarkable portion of Matewan’s historic core survived.
The old commercial buildings still follow the unusual relationship between Mate Street and the railroad. The 1913 bank and post office building survives, along with other brick buildings associated with the early twentieth-century boom. The old 1908 city hall and lockup remains another physical link to the municipal government that played such an important role in 1920.
Not everything survived.
A December 1992 fire destroyed the Buskirk Building, which had housed the Urias Hotel during the Battle of Matewan and had been used by the Baldwin-Felts detectives. Chambers Hardware was also lost, and the original railroad depot had disappeared decades earlier. Even so, federal preservation officials concluded that enough of the historic streetscape and associated buildings remained to communicate the character of the community during the Mine Wars.
The Matewan Historic District was designated a National Historic Landmark on February 18, 1997. Its national significance rests particularly on the history of labor organization and the events of 1920 and 1921.
The designation recognized something residents had understood for generations. Matewan was not simply the location where a famous event happened. The town itself was part of the event.
Remembering Matewan
For much of the twentieth century, the Mine Wars occupied an uneasy place in West Virginia’s public memory. The stories survived in families, union halls, local recollections, newspapers, books, and archival collections even when they were not always prominent in broader histories of the state.
Matewan increasingly embraced that history as preservation and heritage tourism developed.
Today the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum operates in downtown Matewan in the former Bank of Matewan building. Its exhibits place the 1920 confrontation within the much larger struggle involving miners, their families, union organizers, coal operators, private guards, government officials, Black miners, immigrant workers, and native-born Appalachian families.
That broader interpretation matters because Matewan’s history was never the story of a single gunfight.
The surviving trial record alone stretches across thousands of pages. Federal Senate hearings filled volumes. Company documents preserve one perspective, union records another, and contemporary newspapers reveal how uncertain many details remained even one day after the shooting. Oral histories then carry the story beyond the courthouse and battlefield into grocery stores, schoolrooms, theaters, family businesses, floods, and ordinary homes.
Together they reveal a community considerably more complicated than the legend.
Why Matewan Matters
Matewan matters because its history brings together many of the forces that shaped industrial Appalachia.
The railroad broke the isolation of the Tug Valley and opened enormous coal reserves to national markets. Mining companies created jobs and communities while also establishing systems capable of controlling housing, commerce, and employment. Workers challenged that authority through organization. Local government confronted private power. State and federal authorities entered the conflict. Violence followed, and a small Mingo County town became known across the United States.
Yet Matewan’s importance does not end with May 19, 1920.
The people who remained still had businesses to run and children to send to school. They watched trains pass through town, survived the rise and decline of different mining companies, rebuilt after floods, mourned buildings that disappeared, and tried repeatedly to preserve a commercial center squeezed between a mountain, railroad, creek, and river.
That longer history changes the meaning of the Battle of Matewan.
The gunfight did not occur on an empty stage. It happened in a functioning Appalachian town whose unusual independence from the surrounding company camps gave local officials room to challenge the coalfield’s private system of authority. The streets, railroad, businesses, municipal government, miners, merchants, and families of Matewan were all part of the conditions that produced the confrontation.
More than a century later, the railroad still passes through the valley and the historic buildings remain gathered along Mate Street. The floodwall stands between town and river. Nearby mountains rise abruptly above the narrow strip of ground on which generations of residents built their community.
The shooting made Matewan famous.
The town’s survival is what makes its history larger than the shooting.
Sources & Further Reading
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Matewan Trial Transcript, 1921. A&M 3608. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/2047
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Sid Hatfield, et al., Trial Transcript (1 of 7), 1921.” Box 8, Folder 1, William Archer Papers, A&M 4388. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/96462
West Virginia and Regional History Center. William Archer, Journalist, Research Papers regarding McDowell and Mercer Counties. A&M 4388. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/6481
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Matewan Massacre Records, 1914–1934. A&M 2962. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1090
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Miscellaneous West Virginia Mine War Documents, 1919–1924. A&M 2992. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1128
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Howard Burton Lee Papers, 1912–1964. A&M 2139. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5997
West Virginia and Regional History Center. Justus Collins Papers, 1896–1934. A&M 1824. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown, WV. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/5444
West Virginia State Archives. Logan Coal Operators Association Collection. Ms90-82. Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms90-82.html
West Virginia State Archives. Matewan Oral History Project Collection. Sc2003-135. Charleston, WV. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/specialcollections/sc2003-135.html
McCoy, John L. Interview by John Hennen. May 31, 1989. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/Sc2003-135/mdcoralhen01.html
Kirk, Marshall. Interview by John Hennen. June 26, 1989. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/Sc2003-135/mdcoralhen17.html
Sutherland, Howard. Interview by Rebecca Bailey. June 10, 1990. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/sc2003-135/mdcoralohp03.html
Williamson News. “A Terrible Calamity Brings Instant Death.” May 20, 1920. West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/labor/matewan02.html
United States Senate Committee on Education and Labor. West Virginia Coal Fields: Hearings Before the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate, Sixty-Seventh Congress, First Session, Pursuant to Senate Resolution 80. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921. https://books.google.com/books?id=r2L0zwEACAAJ
Murray, Philip. The Case of the West Virginia Coal Mine Workers: Opening Statement before the Committee on Education and Labor of the United States Senate. 1921. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/
Operators’ Association of the Williamson Field. Statement Made by the Operators’ Association of the Williamson Field before the Sub-Committee of the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate. 1921. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms90-82.html
Olmsted, Harry. Statement of Harry Olmsted, Chairman of the Labor Committee of the Operators’ Association of Williamson Field, to the Senate Investigating Committee. July 14, 1921. Logan Coal Operators Association Collection, Ms90-82. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms90-82.html
National Park Service. “Matewan Massacre.” Last updated September 27, 2024. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/matewan-massacre.htm
Bond, John W. Matewan Historic District National Historic Landmark Nomination. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1996. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/34245a29-7781-4179-a1c2-d620a362223d
Runner, Gerald S. Flood of April 1977 on the Tug Fork, Matewan to Williamson, West Virginia and Kentucky. Hydrologic Atlas 588. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1979. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ha588
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Tug Fork, Big Sandy River Local Protection, Floodproofing, Matewan: Environmental Impact Statement. 1972. https://books.google.com/
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Tug Fork Valley Flood Damage Reduction Plan: Environmental Impact Statement. 1982. https://books.google.com/
Bailey, Rebecca J. “Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in Mingo County, 1793–1920.” PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2001. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/7148/
Bailey, Rebecca J. Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2008. https://wvupressonline.com/
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/
Corbin, David Alan, ed. The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology. Charleston, WV: Appalachian Editions, 1990. https://www.worldcat.org/
Savage, Lon. Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. https://upittpress.org/
Green, James. The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. New York: Grove Press, 2015. https://groveatlantic.com/
Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/
Lunt, Richard D. Law and Order vs. the Miners: West Virginia, 1907–1933. Charleston, WV: Appalachian Editions, 1979. https://www.worldcat.org/
Hadsell, Richard M., and William E. Coffey. “From Law and Order to Class Warfare: Baldwin-Felts Detectives in the Southern West Virginia Coal Fields.” West Virginia History 40, no. 3 (1979): 268–286. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh40-3.html
Lee, Howard Burton. Bloodletting in Appalachia: The Story of West Virginia’s Four Major Mine Wars and Other Thrilling Incidents of Its Coal Fields. Morgantown: West Virginia University, 1969. https://archive.org/
Shogan, Robert. The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America’s Largest Labor Uprising. New York: Basic Books, 2004. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/
Mooney, Fred, with J. W. Hess. Struggle in the Coal Fields: The Autobiography of Fred Mooney. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1967. https://archive.org/
Chambers, S. Allen, Jr. “Matewan.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. https://sah-archipedia.org/essays/WV-01-0003-0007-0002
Chambers, S. Allen, Jr. “Commercial Buildings.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/WV-01-MI5
Chambers, S. Allen, Jr. “Matewan Floodwall.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/WV-01-MI6
West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. “Visit the Museum.” Matewan, West Virginia. https://wvminewars.org/visit-the-museum
West Virginia University Libraries. West Virginia History OnView. West Virginia and Regional History Center. https://wvhistoryonview.org/
United States Geological Survey. USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. Matewan, West Virginia-Kentucky-Virginia quadrangles. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Microfilm Publication M1126. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
National Archives and Records Administration. Records of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Microfilm Publication M841. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices
Author Note: Matewan is one of those Appalachian communities whose most famous moment can easily overshadow the town that existed before and after it. I wanted this article to tell the Battle of Matewan in its proper place while also preserving the larger story of the railroad town, its people, its floods, and its survival.