Appalachian Community Histories – Merrimac, Mingo County: White Star Mining, Coal Camp Life, and the Battle of the Tug
Merrimac sits in Mingo County, West Virginia, along a narrow stretch of the Tug Fork coalfield where the railroad, river, mountains, and coal seams crowded close together. On a modern map it can look like one more small unincorporated community between Williamson and Matewan. In the early twentieth century, however, Merrimac was tied to a working railroad station, a coal tipple, company mines, a store, a post office, and one of the most violent episodes of the West Virginia Mine Wars.
There is an important geographic distinction to make at the beginning. Merrimac is in West Virginia, not Virginia. Mingo County itself did not exist until January 30, 1895, when it was created from the southern portion of Logan County. It remains West Virginia’s youngest county. Anyone tracing Merrimac before 1895 therefore has to look in Logan County records, and before West Virginia became a state in 1863 those records fall under Virginia.
Merrimac’s recorded history becomes much clearer after 1900, when outside capital and the Norfolk & Western Railway transformed the Tug Valley. Coal leases were signed, mines driven into the mountains, machinery installed, company housing built, and settlements that had once been little more than names along the river became industrial communities.
Merrimac was one of them, but its story would eventually become larger than the mine.
Coal Beneath Merrimac
One of the best surviving records of Merrimac’s early industrial history was created not by a local historian but by a lawsuit.
In Goodykoontz et al. v. White Star Mining Company, decided by the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia in 1923, the court reconstructed the chain of ownership behind the mines. The case concerned a coal lease dated April 15, 1901, covering approximately 621.69 acres in Mingo County. Given W. Merrill and W. J. McClaren leased the property for thirty years at a royalty of five cents for every gross ton of coal mined or removed.
The lease eventually passed to the Merkman Coal & Coke Company. Merkman developed the Alma seam, driving entries, air courses, and rooms beneath the property. The company later failed financially and went into bankruptcy. S. J. Patterson purchased the leasehold property and, on May 8, 1907, transferred it to the White Star Mining Company.
That 1907 transfer provides a useful starting point for Merrimac as a White Star coal community.
White Star continued mining the Alma seam for several years. Around 1912 the company also began working what the court called the Pond Creek seam, located below the Alma coal. For a time both levels were mined simultaneously. Around 1917 White Star stopped working the Alma seam and concentrated its attention elsewhere, a decision that eventually helped produce the lawsuit.
The legal dispute gives an unusually detailed picture of what was happening underground. The landowners alleged that water accumulated in the abandoned Alma workings, roof falls developed, and mining in the lower seam threatened the support beneath the coal remaining above. They claimed that roughly two million tons of merchantable coal had been left in the Alma seam when White Star stopped working it, although that figure represented an allegation in the litigation rather than an independently measured reserve.
For a small community whose early physical landscape has largely disappeared, the court record is remarkably valuable. It allows the history of Merrimac to be followed underground, through abandoned entries, flooded workings, coal pillars, roof pressure, and the economic calculations of a company deciding which seam was worth mining.
White Star Nos. 1 and 2
State mining records show that Merrimac developed into a substantial enough operation to support separate White Star mines.
The West Virginia Department of Mines continued to list the White Star Mining Company at Merrimac after the Mine Wars. Its directory for the year ending June 30, 1923, identified White Star Nos. 1 and 2 with Merrimac as the company’s post office address.
Earlier mine inspection material identified the workings as mechanized operations connected to the Norfolk & Western corridor. The research assembled for this article traces White Star No. 1 to the Alma coal and describes electric mining equipment and motors in use at Merrimac, while White Star No. 2 worked another commercially valuable seam.
This was not simply a few men digging coal from a hillside opening. By the 1910s Merrimac belonged to the industrial coal economy that had spread across southern West Virginia.
Electric machinery cut coal. Motors moved mine cars. Tracks carried production out of the mountain. Above ground, coal moved toward the tipple and railroad. Around those operations grew the other pieces of a company community: workers’ homes, a store, transportation, postal service, and the small network of people who kept the place functioning.
The Railroad Station and Coal Tipple
Federal surveyors left behind one of the clearest snapshots of early Merrimac.
During spirit leveling work in West Virginia in 1909 and 1910, the United States Geological Survey followed the Norfolk & Western Railway through the Tug Valley. Its measurements recorded Merrimac “in front of station,” where the top of the rail stood at an elevation of 680.6 feet.
Just two-tenths of a mile northwest, the surveyors recorded another benchmark at the Merrimac coal tipple, placing their marker in the foundation of a water tank. Additional measurements continued northwest along the railroad.
Those dry surveying notes are important because they establish the physical shape of Merrimac by 1909 and 1910. There was a station. There was a coal tipple. There was railroad infrastructure directly connected to the community.
The Norfolk & Western was the artery that made places such as Merrimac possible. Coal could be cut from a mountain in Mingo County and shipped into a national industrial market. Machinery, supplies, mail, workers, travelers, and news could move back in the other direction.
The railroad also meant that Merrimac was never completely isolated. Matewan, Rawl, Sprigg, Williamson, and the mining communities across the Tug in Pike County, Kentucky, belonged to one interconnected industrial landscape. A dispute in one camp could move rapidly into another.
In 1921, that connection became painfully clear.
A Community Inside the Mingo County Strike
Beginning in 1920, the United Mine Workers of America intensified its effort to organize miners in southern West Virginia. Coal operators in the region resisted unionization, and miners who joined the UMWA could face dismissal and eviction from company housing.
Mingo County became one of the central battlegrounds.
The famous Matewan confrontation of May 19, 1920, was part of this struggle, but it did not end it. Violence continued along the Tug Fork as union miners, nonunion workers, mine guards, private detectives, deputies, and the newly organized West Virginia State Police confronted one another.
Merrimac was particularly important because White Star remained a working mining operation in the middle of the disputed coalfield.
The West Virginia State Archives holds an extraordinary Merrimac-specific record in the Logan Coal Operators Association Collection. Box 114, Folder 20 is titled “History of the Strike As Far As It Affected the White Star Mining Company, Merrimac, W. Va.” The surrounding folders preserve United Mine Workers material, strike orders, coal company correspondence, Mother Jones addresses, newspaper clippings, and records relating to violence during the 1920 to 1921 conflict.
Few small Appalachian communities have such a specifically identified archival record of how the Mine Wars affected them.
By the spring of 1921, Merrimac was no longer simply a mining camp caught near the larger story. It became one of the places where that story exploded.
The Three Days Battle of the Tug
On May 12, 1921, heavy gunfire erupted along the Tug Valley.
The fighting became known as the Battle of the Tug or the Three Days Battle. Union supporters fired from the hills toward working coal camps, while nonunion miners, mine guards, police, and other armed men returned fire from the valley. The conflict stretched across roughly ten miles of coal country and crossed the state line into Kentucky.
Merrimac was near the center of the outbreak.
The West Virginia State Archives’ account states that union supporters used military tactics to isolate Merrimac, destroyed its power plant, and cut telephone and telegraph communication. Fighting then extended through communities including Rawl, Sprigg, Blackberry City, Alden, and New Howard.
Contemporary newspaper coverage conveys how frightening the situation became for people trapped inside the community.
The Atlanta Tri-Weekly Journal reported that telephone communication with Merrimac had been interrupted. According to the paper, there was only one telephone in town, located in the mining company store. Attempts to reach Merrimac failed while firing continued from the surrounding mountains and from across the Kentucky side of the Tug.
That single detail says a great deal about the community in 1921. The company store was not merely where families obtained food and supplies. It was also a communications center in a place where White Star’s industrial operation touched nearly every part of daily life.
Other contemporary reports placed the beginning of the worst violence at Merrimac. Associated Press accounts described heavy firing there and at McCarr, Kentucky, and referred to Merrimac as the place where the previous day’s shooting had begun.
The violence struck people connected directly to White Star. Contemporary reporting identified Noah Phillips and a man named Calvert, employees of the White Star company commissary at Merrimac, as seriously wounded.
Across the valley, families could do little but wait. Rifle fire came from wooded mountainsides where shooters could disappear into terrain they knew intimately. Homes, mines, railroad structures, stores, bridges, and industrial equipment stood below them.
The geography that had made the Tug coalfield profitable now made it exceptionally difficult to control.
Trains Passing Through a Battlefield
The Norfolk & Western continued running through the same narrow corridor where men were exchanging rifle fire.
Contemporary accounts described gunfire around the Merrimac railroad stop, bringing the industrial and military geography of the community together in one scene. The research record for Merrimac includes reports of passenger trains passing through or stopping near the company property while shooting continued around the settlement.
It is difficult to imagine a clearer picture of the Mine Wars.
Coal had brought the railroad. The railroad had brought mines, capital, workers, and communities. The company system had concentrated homes and businesses around those mines. When the labor conflict became an armed conflict, the same narrow valley offered almost nowhere to escape it.
The mountains provided cover to armed men. The railroad provided rapid transportation for police and reinforcements. The Tug Fork marked a state boundary but did little to separate the people shooting across it.
Merrimac became a battlefield because it was a working coal town.
The Fighting Did Not End Cleanly
The main Battle of the Tug is generally dated May 12 through May 14, with a truce arranged on May 15. Thousands of rounds had been fired along the border. Buildings had been struck, infrastructure damaged, and people killed.
Yet Merrimac did not suddenly become peaceful when the three days were over.
The Wheeling Intelligencer reported renewed heavy firing at Merrimac on the night of May 15. The persistence of the shooting illustrates how misleading the neat name “Three Days Battle” can be when applied to a much longer period of violence.
Merrimac appears again in archival newspaper indexes later in 1921. The West Virginia State Archives identifies a September 3 article from the Huntington Advertiser under the headline “Fighting is in Progress at Merrimac in Mingo; One Attacker is Killed.” By then West Virginia was approaching the climax of the Mine Wars at Blair Mountain.
Merrimac therefore belongs not just to a single three-day confrontation but to the broader armed struggle that engulfed southern West Virginia during 1920 and 1921.
The Battle of the Tug also helped push the state government closer to greater military intervention. Governor Ephraim Morgan sought federal troops during the May fighting, and although they were not sent at that time, federal forces would eventually enter West Virginia during the miners’ march later that year.
Life Continued After the Gunfire
The Mine Wars can easily overwhelm every other part of Merrimac’s story, but the community continued to exist after the rifles quieted.
The 1923 West Virginia Blue Book provides one small piece of evidence. Ferd McCoy of Merrimac served as a Lee District member of the Democratic County Executive Committee. Several years earlier, the 1916 Blue Book had listed Floyd Hall of Merrimac as a constable for Lee District and had included Merrimac among the recognized post offices of Mingo County.
These references show a community that was not simply a cluster of anonymous company houses.
People living at Merrimac participated in county government, politics, postal service, churches, schools, family networks, and the ordinary relationships connecting neighboring coal towns.
The post office appears to have opened around 1903, at roughly the same moment that industrial development was accelerating throughout the region. Postal history records place its closure in 1965, after more than six decades of service.
That lifespan roughly parallels Merrimac’s transformation from an expanding coal settlement into a much smaller post-boom community.
Scrip, the Company Store, and White Star
The company store remained an important institution well after the Mine Wars.
White Star company scrip survives today, physical evidence of the controlled economic systems common in Appalachian coal camps. The National Scrip Collectors Association identifies Merrimac and the White Star Mining Company in its records of West Virginia company money.
Business records also indicate that White Star continued ordering scrip-related material during the 1920s. Taken alongside the 1923 mine directory, the evidence shows that White Star remained an active force in Merrimac well after the community’s most famous episode of violence.
Scrip is one of the most tangible reminders of how deeply the mine company could shape life in a coal community. A miner’s workplace, landlord, merchant, and local economic system might all be tied to the same corporation.
Yet even company towns were never entirely company creations. Families made homes there. Children grew up there. People married, worshiped, argued politics, traveled to neighboring communities, and developed attachments to places that corporations themselves might eventually abandon.
Merrimac outlived White Star’s dominant years.
From White Star to the Merrimac Coal Company
By the 1930s another name appears in the record: the Merrimac Coal Company.
Coal mine indexes list both White Star Mining Company and Merrimac Coal Company as operators associated with Merrimac.
A 1934 account of economic conditions in Logan and Mingo counties described the Merrimac Coal Company operation alongside the Dayton Coal Corporation at Matewan and the Alma Fuel Company at Sprigg, reporting that the three operations were being run by George Gibbs. The same Depression-era account described mines throughout the region operating on shortened schedules as companies waited for additional orders and better market conditions.
Evidence connected to the 1935 coal industry’s legal battles also lists the Merrimac Coal Company, with a Columbus, Ohio, address, among bituminous coal operators.
The corporate names changed, but the pattern was familiar throughout Appalachia. A coal property might pass from one operator to another as companies failed, reorganized, merged, or sought new investors.
The mountains remained.
The people remained longer than many of the corporations did.
Merrimac After the Coal Boom
The closing of Merrimac’s post office in 1965 offers one rough marker of change.
By then the age of the classic company town was disappearing across much of southern West Virginia. Rail transportation had changed. Mechanization meant mines could produce coal with fewer workers. Older mining operations closed or consolidated. Company housing moved into private hands or disappeared. Stores that once depended upon hundreds of mining families lost customers.
Merrimac did not vanish entirely, but its place in the region changed.
The community survived as an unincorporated place, remembered locally and still appearing on maps, but it no longer possessed the combination of mine, station, tipple, store, and company infrastructure that had defined it in the early twentieth century.
Then another chapter of coal history brought Merrimac back into public records.
Merrimac and the Forgotten Communities
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Merrimac became associated with Rawl, Lick Creek, and Sprigg in a very different coalfield controversy.
The four settlements were sometimes collectively called the “Forgotten Communities” during disputes over drinking water and coal slurry disposal.
A 2014 report prepared for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency examined the economic and social effects of water problems in the area. According to public records reviewed in that study, approximately 1.4 billion gallons of coal slurry had been injected into underground mine workings, with concerns about contamination affecting 769 residents of Rawl, Lick Creek, Merrimac, and Sprigg beginning in the mid-1980s.
The report dealt with household costs, alternative water supplies, treatment, and the larger consequences communities face when residents lose confidence in private wells.
Years earlier, a government health consultation had examined private wells in the same communities. Sampling included wells in Merrimac, Rawl, Lick Creek, and Sprigg and considered complicated questions involving geology, metals, well construction, treatment systems, and groundwater chemistry.
It is important not to flatten that complicated environmental history into a single claim about every illness or every water sample. Government reports themselves discussed limitations in the available data and sampling methods.
What is historically striking is the continuity.
Nearly a century after the first coal leases transformed Merrimac, the underground workings of the coal industry were still influencing the lives of people above them.
Coal History Written Beneath the Ground
Merrimac offers a particularly clear example of how Appalachian community history can exist on several levels at once.
There is the visible history of the railroad station, tipple, company store, post office, houses, and people.
There is the documentary history found in court cases, mine reports, company correspondence, census schedules, government surveys, newspapers, and scrip.
Then there is the underground history.
The 1923 White Star court case described coal seams stacked beneath one another, abandoned workings filling with water, roof falls, pillars being removed, and fears that mining one seam might destroy another. Decades later, environmental studies again focused attention on underground mine workings beneath the same group of Mingo County communities.
For Merrimac, the landscape above ground cannot be separated from what happened beneath it.
The coal built the community. The struggle over who would control the coal helped turn Merrimac into a battlefield. The decline of coal reshaped the settlement. Even after some mines were closed and forgotten, underground workings remained part of the community’s later environmental story.
Why Merrimac Matters
Merrimac is easy to overlook beside better-known names such as Matewan, Williamson, and Blair Mountain.
It should not be.
Its history contains much of the twentieth-century story of the southern West Virginia coalfields in one small place.
A 1901 lease opened hundreds of acres to industrial mining. Merkman Coal & Coke developed the property before bankruptcy shifted the operation to White Star in 1907. Federal surveyors soon found a railroad station and coal tipple. White Star developed multiple mine workings beneath the surrounding mountains, and families gathered around the employment those mines provided.
Then came the Mine Wars.
In May 1921 Merrimac became one of the focal points of the Battle of the Tug, with rifle fire pouring from the mountains, communications cut, company employees wounded, and state authorities struggling to control a conflict that crossed the river into Kentucky.
Afterward the miners went back underground. The company store continued doing business. Scrip continued circulating. People voted, received mail, raised families, and watched companies come and go.
Merrimac survived the violence that made it briefly famous, only to enter the quieter history shared by hundreds of Appalachian coal communities whose populations and institutions contracted as the industry changed.
That quieter history may ultimately be just as important.
Merrimac reminds us that the West Virginia Mine Wars did not occur on an empty battlefield. They happened in people’s communities. The places listed in newspaper reports as Merrimac, Rawl, Sprigg, Matewan, or McCarr were homes before they were battle positions.
Behind the headlines were miners leaving for work, clerks standing behind company-store counters, families listening to gunfire from the hills, railroad passengers passing through the valley, children growing up beside the tracks, and generations who continued calling these places home long after the companies that built them had disappeared.
For a small place along the Tug Fork, Merrimac carries an unusually large piece of Appalachian history.
Sources & Further Reading
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources. Health Consultation: Private Well Water Quality, Williamson WV Sites, Williamson, West Virginia. 2005. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/pha/WilliamsonPrivateWell/WilliamsonPrivateWellHC040605.pdf
Atlanta Tri-Weekly Journal. “Mountain Warfare Continues in West Virginia-Kentucky Coal Fields.” May 14, 1921. Georgia Historic Newspapers, Digital Library of Georgia. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn89053713/1921-05-14/ed-1/seq-1/
Corbin, David Alan, ed. The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology. Charleston, WV: Appalachian Editions, 1991. https://books.google.com/books?id=LwjSAAAAIAAJ
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://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/minewars.html
Goodykoontz et al. v. White Star Mining Co., 94 W. Va. 654, 119 S.E. 862. Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, October 30, 1923. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/goodykoontz-v-white-star-929797871
Hawes, Bryson B., Craig L. Patterson, Ben Stout, and Alice Jones. Economic Impacts of Surface Mining on Household Drinking Water Supplies. EPA/600/R-14/152. Cincinnati: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Risk Management Research Laboratory, 2014. https://nepis.epa.gov/Adobe/PDF/P100KNIJ.pdf
Jordan, Daniel P. “The Mingo War: Labor Violence in the Southern West Virginia Coal Fields, 1919–1922.” In Essays in Southern Labor History: Selected Papers, Southern Labor History Conference, 1976, edited by Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed, 102–143. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/minewars.html
Laurie, Clayton D. “The United States Army and the Return to Normalcy in Labor Dispute Interventions: The Case of the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars, 1920–1921.” West Virginia History 50 (1991): 1–24. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh50-1.html
Lee, Howard B. 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://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/112480
Lunt, Richard D. Law and Order vs. the Miners: West Virginia, 1907–1933. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979. https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/50438
Mingo County Genealogical Society. Heritage of Mingo. Williamson, WV: Mingo County Genealogical Society, 1985–. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Mooney, Fred. Struggle in the Coal Fields: The Autobiography of Fred Mooney. Edited by J. W. Hess. Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1967. https://books.google.com/books?id=nE3tAAAAMAAJ
National Archives and Records Administration. Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M841. See West Virginia roll 140 for Mason through Raleigh Counties, including Mingo County. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M1126. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Descriptions of Census Enumeration Districts, 1830–1950. Microfilm Publication T1224. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930/enumeration-districts-descriptions.html
National Archives and Records Administration. Enumeration District Maps for the Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Microfilm Publication M1930. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930/enumeration-districts-maps.html
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Map Showing Lands of Z. T. Vinson and Associates and Other Individuals and Companies Lying on Waters of Tug River in Pike County Kentucky.” Drawing HS-G11378, Document D-631, November 4, 1911. Norfolk & Western Historical Society. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=269493
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 of the United States Senate. 1921. West Virginia University Libraries, Printed Ephemera Collection, P19118. https://pec.lib.wvu.edu/record/P19118
PostalHistory.com. “West Virginia Post Offices: Merrimac, Mingo County.” Records Merrimac post office, 1903–1965, and Merrimac Rural Station, 1965–1976. Accessed July 25, 2026. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp?county=&pagenum=125&searchtext=&state=wv&task=display
Savage, Lon. “Battle of the Tug.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Last revised February 8, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/753
Smith, Nancy Sue. An History of Mingo County, West Virginia. Williamson, WV: Williamson Printing Company, 1960. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
Smith, Nancy Sue. History of Logan and Mingo Counties, Beginning in 1617. Williamson, WV: Nancy Smith, 1966. West Virginia State Archives. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/counties/mingo.html
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
United States Geological Survey. Results of Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1909 and 1910. Bulletin 477. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-05993_00_00-003-1471-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-05993_00_00-003-1471-0000.pdf
West Virginia Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines for the Year Ending June 30, 1923. Charleston, WV: Department of Mines, 1923. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Annual_report_of_the_Department_of_Mines_for_the_year_ending_…_%28IA_annualreportofde41west%29.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1923. Charleston, WV: State of West Virginia, 1923. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1923.pdf
West Virginia State Archives. “Logan Coal Operators Association Collection.” Ms90-82, especially Box 114, Folder 20, “History of the Strike As Far As It Affected the White Star Mining Company, Merrimac, W. Va.” https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms90-82.html
West Virginia State Archives. “May 12, 1921: Three Days Battle of the Tug.” West Virginia Time Trail. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/timetrl/ttmay.html
West Virginia State Archives. “West Virginia’s Mine Wars.” Bibliography and archival research guide. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/minewars.html
Wichita Daily Times. “Report Concerted Attack Made on Town of Matewan.” May 15, 1921. The Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas Libraries. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1716900/m1/1/
The Michigan Daily. “Fighting Resumed in West Virginia-Kentucky Coal Strike Region.” May 14, 1921. Michigan Daily Digital Archives, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/midaily/mdp.39015071755719/1235
Author Note: Merrimac is one of the Mingo County coal communities whose small size today hides an unusually important history. Its story connects company mining, the Norfolk & Western Railway, the West Virginia Mine Wars, and the generations who remained after the coal boom faded.