Appalachian Community Histories – Blackberry City, Mingo County: Union Homes, Machine-Gun Fire, and the Battle of the Tug
Blackberry City is one of those southern West Virginia communities whose small size can hide its importance. Resting beside the Tug Fork just south of Matewan, it developed within the same narrow valley where coal mines, railroad tracks, mountain roads, and family homes crowded against one another. Its residents traded in Matewan, attended Matewan schools, worked in mines on both sides of the West Virginia and Kentucky border, and lived within sight and sound of some of the most violent labor conflict in American history.
Yet Blackberry City was not simply an unnamed extension of Matewan. Oral histories, newspapers, government maps, postal records, and Mine Wars accounts preserve a distinct community with its own families and identity. Most importantly, a lifelong resident remembered it as a place where miners owned their homes rather than living entirely in company housing. That difference gave Blackberry City an unusual place in the struggle between organized labor and the coal companies.
A Small Community Beside Matewan
Blackberry City grew along the Tug Fork in a landscape defined by water, steep hills, and the state line. Kentucky lay across the river, while Matewan stood only a short distance away. The railroad and the coal industry connected the settlement to Williamson, Bluefield, Portsmouth, Columbus, and countless mining towns throughout the region.
The community’s location made it part of a cross-border world. Men could live in West Virginia and work in Kentucky mines. Families visited relatives across the Tug Fork. News, business, labor organizing, and armed conflict moved through the valley without paying much attention to the boundary between the two states.
Federal maps eventually fixed Blackberry City on paper, but local memory had recognized it long before. A March 1947 issue of The Mingo Republican mentioned Andy Laporte returning from the hospital to his home in Blackberry City. The notice appeared two years before the community received a post office, showing that the name was already established in everyday use. The Mingo Republican itself served Williamson and the wider Mingo County coalfield from 1904 until 1951.
Kenneth Phillips and the Memory of Blackberry City
The most valuable surviving account of Blackberry City comes from Kenneth Phillips, interviewed in his home on June 2, 1989, for the Matewan Oral History Project. Phillips had been born in Blackberry City on January 8, 1921. Nearly seven decades later, he still lived approximately forty feet from the house where he had been born and raised.
Phillips’s life tied together several generations of the community’s history. His father, Butler Phillips, was born at Hardy, Kentucky, in 1899 and moved into the Sulphur Creek area as a child in 1904. According to Kenneth, Butler entered the mines at only eight or nine years old and soon loaded coal alongside grown men. He remained a miner until 1943, when he entered the trucking business.
Kenneth’s mother was Cora Starr, a member of another family closely connected to the Matewan area. Butler and Cora raised eight children. All attended Matewan High School, an accomplishment Kenneth remembered with pride. Most eventually left for Virginia, Michigan, Tennessee, Florida, Ohio, and other places. Kenneth remained. He recalled promising himself during World War II that, if he survived his naval service and returned to Blackberry City, he would stay near his parents. He kept that promise.
A Community That Was Not a Company Camp
Coal camps across southern West Virginia were often built on company land. The operator might own the mine, houses, store, utilities, and much of the surrounding property. When miners joined the United Mine Workers of America or went on strike, companies could remove families from their homes. During the Matewan strike of 1920, Baldwin-Felts agents arrived to evict union miners and their relatives from company housing, helping set the stage for the gunfight remembered as the Matewan Massacre.
Phillips described Blackberry City differently. He said that the homes around him were individually owned rather than controlled by a coal company. Many residents still depended on the mines for their wages, including mines across the river in Kentucky, but their employers could not simply cancel a lease and order them from company property.
That distinction made Blackberry City a potential refuge for union families. It also made the settlement difficult for anti-union operators to control. Phillips explained that company agents could evict miners from coal camps, but they could not legally remove Blackberry City residents from houses that the residents themselves owned. In his telling, private ownership did not keep the community outside the Mine Wars. It placed the community directly in the conflict.
The Phillips Family and the Union
Butler Phillips was a committed union supporter. Kenneth remembered that his father carried a pistol, performed guard duty, and personally knew Matewan police chief Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers. Butler did not hold a formal union office, but he belonged to the larger network of miners and families who supported organizing in the Tug Fork coalfield.
The Phillips family had also experienced displacement. Kenneth said his father and grandparents had previously been driven from coal-company housing and forced to live in a tent. That history connected them to the thousands of miners’ families who learned that a labor dispute could mean the immediate loss of shelter.
Unionism in Blackberry City was therefore more than a political opinion. It was tied to work, housing, security, and family survival. A miner’s position toward the union could determine whether his children slept under a roof or in a tent colony. It could determine whether armed guards watched his workplace, whether he could speak freely, and whether local authorities treated him as a citizen or an enemy.
Machine-Gun Fire Across the Tug Fork
The darkest part of Phillips’s interview concerned an attack on Blackberry City during the Mine Wars era. He recalled family accounts of machine-gun fire striking his family’s new house and other homes in the settlement late at night. Residents ran from the hillside, crossed over the ridge, and escaped through a ravine toward Sulphur Creek.
Phillips said the gunfire came from anti-union forces on the Kentucky side of the river. In his explanation, the attackers could not use ordinary company evictions against the privately owned homes, so violence became another means of driving union miners away. His account presents Blackberry City not merely as a nearby witness to the Mine Wars, but as a residential target.
The precise date of this attack remains uncertain. Phillips was an infant in 1921, so the story came from his parents, relatives, and neighbors rather than his own direct memory. During the interview he also blended the dates of the Matewan Massacre and the later killings of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers. That confusion requires caution. The broad conditions he described match the documented Mine Wars environment, but the exact sequence should not be treated as fully settled without additional newspaper, legal, or military records.
Even with that limitation, the interview preserves something official reports often miss. It describes what armed labor conflict meant inside a family home. Gunfire was not confined to a mine entrance, courthouse, or downtown street. It reached bedrooms and porches. Parents gathered children in darkness. Families fled into winter hills because remaining inside their own houses seemed more dangerous than escaping through the woods.
Blackberry City and the Three Days Battle of the Tug
Blackberry City’s direct place in the Mine Wars is confirmed by the West Virginia State Archives. Its account of the Three Days Battle of the Tug states that fighting beginning on May 12, 1921, spread for approximately ten miles along the river and involved Blackberry City, Alden, Sprigg, New Howard, Rawl, and communities across the river in Kentucky.
The battle grew from the bitter struggle to organize Mingo County’s nonunion mines. Armed union supporters exchanged fire with mine guards, police, and nonunion forces. Telephone and telegraph lines were cut, a power plant at Merrimac was destroyed, and the valley became a broken battlefield of wooded slopes, mining settlements, railroad property, and river crossings. A negotiated truce ended the principal fighting on May 15.
Sources disagree about the number killed, which reflects the confusion of a battle scattered through mountains and communities rather than fought on a single open field. What is certain is that Blackberry City stood within the combat zone. The settlement’s residents did not need to travel to Matewan or Blair Mountain to encounter the Mine Wars. The war reached their doors.
Sid Hatfield, Ed Chambers, and Family Memory
The Phillips and Starr families carried personal connections to two of the era’s most famous labor figures. Butler Phillips knew Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers. Kenneth’s aunt Sally Starr married Chambers and later worked in the United Mine Workers office in Charleston. She knew national labor leader John L. Lewis and, according to Kenneth, attended labor hearings and remained devoted to the union cause.
Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were killed on the McDowell County courthouse steps in Welch on August 1, 1921. Their deaths enraged miners and helped trigger the armed march that ended at Blair Mountain. For Blackberry City residents connected to the men through friendship, marriage, and union activity, these were not distant events involving strangers made famous by later books and films. They were family losses and community memories.
Such relationships help explain why Mine Wars history remained so vivid around Matewan. Stories passed through households that had sheltered evicted miners, heard gunfire, guarded union supporters, or buried people connected to the struggle. When oral historians arrived in the late twentieth century, they were recording not only remembered events but a local culture shaped by decades of retelling.
Work, School, and Family Life
Blackberry City’s history cannot be reduced to gunfire. Most days revolved around work, school, shopping, church, gardens, family visits, and the constant demands of making a living in the coalfields.
Kenneth Phillips remembered the exhausting schedule his father kept during the 1920s and 1930s. Butler might leave for work at two in the afternoon and return around nine-thirty or ten the next morning. His children were warned not to wake him because he had only a few hours before leaving again. Kenneth later recalled that, as a schoolboy filling out a form, he briefly struggled to remember his father’s given name because the family always called him “Daddy” and he saw so little of him outside work and sleep.
Butler eventually suffered from black lung disease. His experience represented the hidden cost behind the coal trains moving through the valley. A miner might survive roof falls, explosions, machinery, and labor violence, only to carry mine dust in his lungs for the rest of his life.
The family’s eight children nevertheless received high school educations through the Matewan schools. The old schoolhouse, town stores, and crowded Saturday sidewalks formed part of Blackberry City’s wider community life. Kenneth remembered Matewan so packed on Saturday evenings that there was scarcely room to walk. Stores stayed open late while mining families from surrounding settlements came to buy supplies and meet neighbors.
From the Mine to the Railroad
Kenneth followed his father into mining for a time, but his longest career was with the Norfolk and Western Railway. He and Butler operated a small union mine around the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kenneth emphasized that it paid union wages and that they belonged to the union even while operating it.
In 1950 he began working for the Norfolk and Western. Over the next thirty years he served as a fireman and engineer, running through territory between Williamson, Bluefield, Portsmouth, and Columbus. His career illustrates the close relationship between mining communities and the railroad. Coal provided the freight, but railroad employment also offered miners and their children another path to steady work.
The railroad connected Blackberry City to a much larger industrial system. Coal dug from the mountains passed through yards and towns before reaching factories, power plants, and distant markets. A man living in a small settlement beside Matewan could spend his career moving across several states while still returning to the same home ground.
A Post Office and an Enduring Name
Blackberry City’s post office opened in 1949, giving formal federal recognition to a name local people had already used for years. Its establishment reflected a community substantial enough to justify its own postal identity even though Matewan remained the nearby commercial center.
The post office operated until the early 1980s. Its closure followed a pattern repeated in many Appalachian settlements as transportation changed, population declined, and postal service consolidated. Closing the office did not erase the place. Blackberry City continued to appear in maps, road records, family histories, cemetery records, and the memories of residents.
The surviving place name matters. Small unincorporated communities often disappear from general histories because they had no municipal government, mayor, or courthouse. Their records are scattered under nearby towns, postal routes, magisterial districts, family surnames, and creek names. Blackberry City survived in part because federal maps and postal documents joined local usage in keeping the name visible. The United States Postal Service’s historical Postmaster Finder includes establishment and discontinuance information for many former offices, although the agency warns that not every office established before 1971 is represented in its online database.
Floods, Roads, and a Changing Valley
The Tug Fork gave Blackberry City its cross-border location, but it also brought danger. Major floods repeatedly damaged Matewan and nearby communities. John L. McCoy, another participant in the Matewan Oral History Project, remembered the devastation caused by the 1977 flood. He lost several houses, and he described severe damage throughout Matewan and its surrounding communities.
The narrowness of the valley magnified every transportation problem. Roads, tracks, houses, businesses, and the river competed for limited space. By 1989, Kenneth Phillips worried that Route 49 and other local roads had been neglected. He contrasted the small coal trucks of earlier decades with the much larger loads that later traveled through the region, damaging highways and bridges.
His comments reveal how the community’s relationship with coal changed. In the early twentieth century, the major struggle concerned company power, union recognition, and the right to remain in one’s home. By the late twentieth century, residents also faced mine closures, declining employment, heavy truck traffic, weakened infrastructure, and the sense that state leaders had forgotten the southern coalfields.
Why Blackberry City Matters
Blackberry City complicates the familiar image of the Appalachian coal camp. Its residents lived in a coal-dominated economy and faced the same operators, guards, dangerous labor, and political pressures found in company towns. Yet at least part of the settlement, according to its best surviving oral history, consisted of privately owned homes occupied by miners and union families.
That property ownership had real consequences. A company could fire a miner, but it could not automatically evict his family from a privately owned house. Blackberry City therefore offered a degree of independence that company camps denied. At the same time, Phillips’s account suggests that economic control could give way to armed intimidation when legal eviction was unavailable.
The community also demonstrates why local history depends on sources beyond official town records. Blackberry City emerges through one man’s oral testimony, a newspaper personal notice, census schedules, post-office forms, topographic maps, county deeds, cemetery stones, and a state account of a battle scattered along the Tug Fork. No single source tells the whole story.
More research remains possible. Mingo County deeds and land books could identify who first divided and sold the lots. Census records could reconstruct the households and occupations of residents before and after the Mine Wars. Newspapers might confirm the machine-gun attack remembered by the Phillips family. Postal files could show why the community received its own office in 1949. Each discovery would add names and details to a place too often overshadowed by Matewan.
Rebecca J. Bailey’s history of Matewan demonstrates how questions involving land ownership, transportation, labor organization, local politics, and family relationships are essential to understanding the Mine Wars. Blackberry City fits within that larger history while also revealing how a small, privately owned settlement could become strategically and emotionally important to union miners.
Blackberry City’s story is ultimately about the power of home. During an age when coal companies controlled much of a miner’s working and domestic life, residents remembered owning their houses as a form of protection and independence. That protection was incomplete, as the gunfire across the Tug Fork made clear, but it helped create a community that stood with organized labor and endured through war, flood, migration, and economic decline.
Matewan became a national symbol of the Mine Wars. Blackberry City reminds us that the struggle also belonged to the smaller settlements nearby, where families slept behind bullet-marked walls, sent children to school, boarded trains for work, and refused to surrender the ground they called their own.
Sources & Further Reading
Hennen, John, interviewer. “Kenneth Phillips Interview.” June 2, 1989. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia Archives and History, Charleston, West Virginia. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/Sc2003-135/mdcoralhen03.html.
Hennen, John, interviewer. “John L. McCoy Interview.” May 31, 1989. Matewan Oral History Project Collection, Sc2003-135. West Virginia Archives and History, Charleston, West Virginia. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/Sc2003-135/mdcoralhen01.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “Matewan Oral History Project Collection.” Sc2003-135. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/specialcollections/sc2003-135.html.
West Virginia Archives and History. “Three Days Battle of the Tug.” Time Trail, May 1998. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/timetrl/ttmay.html.
The Mingo Republican (Williamson, WV). March 6, 1947. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn86092084/1947-03-06/ed-1/.
United States Congress. 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 S. Res. 80. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921. https://books.google.com/books?id=EQQ9AAAAYAAJ.
Operators’ Association of the Williamson Field. Statement Made by the Operators’ Association of the Williamson Field before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor of the United States Senate. 1921. West Virginia University Libraries, Printed Ephemera Collection. https://pec.lib.wvu.edu/record/P19118.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Matewan Massacre Records.” A&M 2962. West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1090.
National Park Service. Matewan Historic District: National Historic Landmark Nomination. Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior. https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NHLS/Text/93000303.pdf.
National Park Service. “Matewan Massacre.” Last modified September 27, 2024. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/matewan-massacre.htm.
National Park Service. “Introduction to the West Virginia Mine Wars.” Last modified September 27, 2024. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/introduction-to-the-west-virginia-mine-wars.htm.
National Park Service. “Resources on the West Virginia Mine Wars.” Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/resources-on-the-west-virginia-mine-wars.htm.
Savage, Lon. “Battle of the Tug.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last modified February 8, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/753.
e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. “Mingo County.” West Virginia Humanities Council. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1772.
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/node/40.
Gourley, Lela Dawn. “‘Mixed Up in the Coal Camp’: Interethnic, Family, and Community Exchanges in Matewan During the West Virginia Mine Wars, 1900–1922.” Master’s thesis, Old Dominion University, 2019. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/history_etds/26/.
Corbin, David Alan. Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922. 2nd ed. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015. https://wvupressonline.com/node/577.
Corbin, David Alan, ed. Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011. https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=364.
Savage, Lon. Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. https://books.google.com/books?id=6Nl5PiTRwwMC.
West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. “For Your Research.” Accessed July 21, 2026. https://wvminewars.org/research.
United States Geological Survey. Matewan, Kentucky–West Virginia. 7.5-minute series topographic map. 1954. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_maps_all/471/.
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Map Collection.” National Geospatial Program. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/topographic-maps.
United States Geological Survey. Geology of the Matewan Quadrangle in Kentucky. Geologic Quadrangle Map GQ-373. Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, 1964. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/gq373.
United States Geological Survey and United States Bureau of Mines. “Coal Reserves of the Matewan Quadrangle.” Information Circular 9355. https://pubs.usgs.gov/usbmic/ic-9355/index.htm.
United States Postal Service. “Postmaster Finder.” Accessed July 21, 2026. https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/postmaster-finder/welcome.htm.
National Archives and Records Administration. “Census Records.” Accessed July 21, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census.
National Centers for Environmental Information. “Flood at Blackberry City, Mingo County, West Virginia, January 31, 2013.” Storm Events Database. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/eventdetails.jsp?id=426690.
Author Note: Blackberry City is easy to overlook beside better-known Matewan, yet its families stood directly within the West Virginia Mine Wars. I hope this article preserves the community as a place of union loyalty, homeownership, work, and survival, not merely a footnote to Matewan.