On a sweltering July dawn in 1973, the sleepy hamlet of Brookside woke to the rumble of coal trucks and the sight of cardboard signs nailed to wooden staves: UMWA ON STRIKE—NO CONTRACT, NO COAL. By nightfall gunshots echoed off the Clover Fork valley walls, and Harlan County was once again poised to earn its nickname, “Bloody Harlan.” Over the next thirteen months the fight for a union contract would redraw gender lines, inspire an Oscar‑winning documentary, and leave a young miner dead—yet more determined spirits alive than ever before.
Brookside on the Brink (1973)
Eastover Mining’s refusal to honor the men’s June 22 vote to join the UMWA triggered a walk‑out on July 26. Company guards escorted strikebreakers past skeletal picket lines limited by court order to three people per gate. Shots riddled clapboard homes, strike leaders were hauled to jail, and Duke Power’s lawyers pushed injunctions through a sympathetic county judge. The county teetered between stalemate and open war.
Women Take the Line & the Camera Rolls (1973–74)
With paychecks gone and arrests mounting, wives, mothers, and daughters formed the Brookside Women’s Club (BWC)on September 27. They sang union hymns in the road, endured tear gas and nightsticks, and shamed troopers who hesitated to rough‑up grandmothers.
Filmmaker Barbara Kopple arrived weeks later, her 16‑mm camera becoming both witness and shield. Violence still flared—dynamite at a tipple here, a deputy stabbed there—but the presence of a running lens often stayed itchy trigger fingers. By spring 1974 more than ninety arrests and forty documented acts of violence had hardened national opinion against Eastover and Duke Power.
A Martyr & a Contract (August 1974)
The struggle’s raw cost hit home when 23‑year‑old Lawrence Jones was shot outside the Highsplint gate on August 24and died four days later. Thousands streamed behind his casket. Public fury—and the possibility of federal intervention—drove Eastover back to the table. On September 5, 1974 the company signed a standard UMWA contract that recognized seniority rights, a grievance process, and the miners’ right to strike.
From Picket Line to Silver Screen—and Beyond
Kopple’s documentary, Harlan County, USA (1976), distilled 120 hours of film into a searing record of Appalachian class war and the women who kept the flame. The picture won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary and fixed Brookside’s struggle in the public imagination. Today, BWC grandson Matthew Strong reminds high‑schoolers that “Mamaw’s pistol sits in a shadow box, but her courage is the real heirloom.” Crosses mark the pull‑off where Jones fell, and a 2023 Kentucky Heritage sign directs travelers off KY‑522 to the silent prep plant—a pilgrimage site for labor historians and tourists alike.
Legacy: Women’s Networks & a Long Shadow
Long after the contract ink dried, Brookside’s women kept marching. Sudie Crusenberry glued newspaper clippings of the strike beside her children’s drawings, creating a scrapbook that historians now mine for clues to grassroots strategy; Bessie Lou Cornett, who once faced down coal trucks, later organized against a highway project that threatened a Black Knoxville neighborhood—proof that the picket line was a training ground for regional civil‑rights and environmental justice campaigns.
The strike also left a cautionary lesson. Brookside inspired miners across Central Appalachia, yet corporate consolidation and a collapsing coal market eventually outpaced union strength; by 2015 the closure of Patriot Coal’s Highland mine meant that no working miner in Kentucky still carried a UMWA card. Retired Brookside picketer Kenny Johnson warned that when “non‑union operators see there’s no competition, they’ll cut corners on safety”—a reminder that Brookside’s gains, like its songs, require each new generation to keep the chorus alive.
Sources & Further Reading
- Global Non‑Violent Action Database, “Harlan County KY Coal Miners Win Affiliation with UMWA.”
- Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, Interview with Lois Scott, Aug. 28 1986.
- Barbara Kopple, Harlan County, USA (First Run Features, 1976).
- Henry Chiles, “Appalachian Women Make Their Voices Heard,” Medium, Apr. 28 2018.
- Heather Duncan, “Mountain Justice: Appalachian Women Fought for Workers Long Before They Fought for Jobs,” Scalawag, Mar. 25 2019.
- Associated Press, “No More Union Coal Mines Remain in Kentucky,” Fox Business, Sept. 5 2015.
Author’s Note: The Brookside stand reminds us that the line between isolation and history’s center can be one dirt road, one song, or one stubborn grandmother away.