Appalachian Figures
On a rise above the Tug Fork at Buskirk Cemetery in Pike County, Kentucky, a tall stone bears the face of William Sidney “Sid” Hatfield. The inscription remembers him as a defender of working people who was gunned down on the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse in Welch and links his death to the miners’ rebellion at Blair Mountain.
Most people meet Sid Hatfield through stories of the Battle of Matewan or the movie that fictionalizes those events. He usually appears as the fearless young police chief, nickel-plated pistols on his hips, standing between coal company detectives and union miners. That image is not wrong, but it leaves out something important. Before he became “Two-Gun Sid,” he was a Blackberry Creek farm boy from Pike County, Kentucky, whose life followed the border between Kentucky and West Virginia long before the mine wars turned that border into a battlefield.
This story traces Sid from Blackberry Precinct to Matewan, from Senate hearings to the courthouse steps at Welch, and finally back home to Buskirk. Along the way, it leans first on the surviving primary sources census entries, trial records, Senate testimony, contemporary newspapers, photographs and then on the historians and public history projects that have tried to make sense of his short, violent life.
Blackberry Creek and the 1891 or 1893 question
The federal census for 1900 lists Jacob and Rebecca Hatfield living in Magisterial District 5, Blackberry Precinct, Pike County, Kentucky, with a son William S. Hatfield in the household. The enumerator recorded his birth as May 1891 and gave his birthplace as Kentucky, which fits the pattern of a Pike County farm family raising a large brood along Blackberry Creek in the tug valley borderland. Those entries place the boy who would become “Sid” squarely on the Kentucky side of the river at the turn of the century.
Later local memory preserved on his gravestone at Buskirk Cemetery gives his birth year as 1893 and his full name as William Sidney Hatfield. Modern reference works split the difference and list his birth as May 15 with the year given as either 1891 or 1893, usually agreeing that he was born somewhere in Pike County, often specified as Blackberry.
The tension between the census and the stone is a reminder that even basic facts in Appalachian history often come to us through overlapping layers of evidence. Census schedules and vital records were created by government clerks who sometimes wrote what they thought they heard. Gravestones were ordered by grieving families or unions that might rely on memory rather than paperwork. Genealogists and local historians have generally followed the 1900 census and the Clio grave entry in giving him a Pike County birth in 1891, but the 1893 date carved in stone still confronts visitors who climb the hill at Buskirk.
Family tradition and later biographical sketches agree that Sid was one of many children of Jacob “Jake” Hatfield, a Pike County farmer and sometime coal worker, and that he was a grandson of William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield of feud fame. As a boy he helped on the farm, then went into the mines and took up an apprenticeship as a blacksmith, picking up the mixture of heavy labor, gun handling, and quick temper that neighbors remembered later.
From Blackberry Creek to Matewan
By the late 1910s Sid had crossed the Tug Fork and settled in Matewan, a coal town on the West Virginia side whose main streets and rail yard hugged the north bank of the river. The Matewan Historic District nomination notes that this small commercial center grew up as a company town where coal operators and their agents controlled housing, policing, and much of daily life.
In 1919, Mayor Cabell Testerman appointed Sid as chief of police. The West Virginia Encyclopedia’s Mine Wars exhibit describes him as a young officer known to miners as a hero who supported the United Mine Workers’ organizing drive in the Tug Fork fields. The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum’s “On this Day” feature fills in more color, portraying him as a rough living blacksmith and miner who nonetheless shared with Testerman an unshakable belief that miners had the right to join a union. It credits both men with refusing bribes from company agents who wanted to mount machine guns on Matewan rooftops during the 1920 organizing campaign.
By that point Sid had married, separated, and moved in the orbit of the extended Hatfield family. He would later marry Jessie Maynard Testerman, the widow of Mayor Testerman, in a union that scandalized some contemporaries and became part of his legend. Secondary accounts and genealogical compilations point to a 1920 marriage record, entered only weeks after the battle on Mate Street, as evidence of how quickly their relationship became formalized once the mayor was dead.
Matewan: evictions, a gunfight, and a border town turned symbol
On May 19, 1920, Baldwin–Felts detectives arrived in Matewan to carry out wholesale evictions of miners who had joined the United Mine Workers. Contemporary state reports and later histories of the Matewan Historic District agree that the agents had already driven families from company houses up nearby hollows and now intended to do the same within town limits.
The National Historic Landmark documentation and modern summaries from the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum describe the confrontation that followed. Hatfield armed some of his deputies and positioned them along the rail tracks near Mate Street. When the Baldwin–Felts men tried to board their train out of town, he stepped forward with warrants, insisting that they had no authority to terrorize local residents inside the town charter. Someone fired. Within seconds a close range firefight along the tracks left Mayor Testerman and two miners dead on the town side and seven detectives, including brothers Albert and Lee Felts, dead on the other.
In the weeks after the battle, local newspapers such as the Williamson Daily News and Charleston papers covered the killings day by day, printing interviews and rumor in equal measure. Labor press outlets like the West Virginia Federationist portrayed Sid as a rare lawman who sided with miners against coal operators, while Baldwin–Felts sympathizers cast him as a gunfighter who had engineered an ambush. These clashing portrayals would harden in later retellings. Contemporary coverage summarized in document collections and mine wars histories shows just how quickly the word “massacre” attached to the event on both sides, even when they disagreed on who had massacred whom.
Trials and testimony: Sid speaks for himself
The Matewan killings produced multiple layers of official documentation. The murder trials that followed were held in Mingo County and are preserved in transcripts and related materials now housed in the H. C. Lewis Collection at the Eastern Regional Coal Archives in Bluefield. Historian Rebecca Bailey’s dissertation on Matewan’s politics leans heavily on these trial records and calls them the only known copies of the full proceedings.
In early 1921 Sid Hatfield and several others went on trial for the killing of Albert Felts. The defendants were acquitted after jurors heard conflicting eyewitness accounts from townspeople, miners, Baldwin–Felts agents, and labor spy Charles E. Lively. The Williamson Daily News printed Lively’s testimony in February 1921, offering a version of events in which Sid and armed miners fired first and in which the detectives killed at Matewan were painted as victims of a premeditated trap. Later accounts of Lively’s career as a professional infiltrator for mine operators, including a biographical study that calls him one of the deadliest men in the coal mine wars, have encouraged historians to treat that testimony cautiously.
Sid also spoke in his own voice in Washington. In the summer of 1921, the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor held extensive hearings on violence in the West Virginia coal fields. The printed volume West Virginia Coal Fields: Hearings includes a long section titled “Testimony of Sid Hatfield” in which he described the lead up to the Matewan gunfight, the efforts of Baldwin–Felts agents to plant machine guns in town, and his view that he had been enforcing the law for the benefit of miners and citizens.
Historians have noted that his Senate testimony, like all courtroom statements, was crafted for an audience and shaped by his own self image. Yet, read alongside hostile sources like Lively’s testimony and company friendly coverage, it remains one of the few primary documents in which Sid presents himself not as a feud inspired gunman but as a small town chief of police determined to uphold what he understood as legal authority inside Matewan.
Welch, August 1, 1921: assassination on the courthouse steps
Acquittal in the Matewan cases did not end the legal war around Sid Hatfield. Within months, he and deputy Ed Chambers faced new charges related to a gun battle at Mohawk, a company town in neighboring McDowell County. Baldwin–Felts agents and some state officials claimed that Sid had led an attack on nonunion miners. Union supporters and sympathetic journalists argued that mine guards had staged the shooting to frame him.
On August 1, 1921, Sid and Ed traveled with their wives to Welch for a scheduled hearing at the McDowell County Courthouse. Contemporary accounts and later public history pieces agree that both men arrived unarmed, having been promised safe conduct. As they climbed the steps, several Baldwin–Felts agents, including Lively, opened fire at close range. Sid died almost instantly from multiple gunshot wounds. Chambers was shot again as he lay on the ground and finished off with a bullet to the head. None of the detectives were ever convicted.
Out of state newspapers picked up the story. The Springfield Republican in Massachusetts ran a front page headline reading “Sid Hatfield Is Killed in Fight” and described him as the former police chief of Matewan, famous for the earlier battle. The Herald Democrat in Colorado carried its own account under the heading “Sid Hatfield Shot Dead,” noting that several Baldwin–Felts men, including C. E. Lively, had been arrested pending investigation.
Within West Virginia, coverage split along familiar lines. West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s later retelling of the event summarizes what many miners’ families remembered that Baldwin–Felts detectives killed two unarmed men in front of their wives on the courthouse steps and that the murders became a spark for the mass march that turned into the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Funerals, Buskirk Cemetery, and a Kentucky homecoming
Sid’s body came home across the Tug Fork. His funeral drew an estimated three thousand people, according to later summaries that draw on contemporary reports and oral histories. Fraternal orders such as the Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias turned out to honor a member they now saw as a martyr to the cause of unionism.
The Clio entry on his grave recounts that his coffin traveled back to Pike County and that he was laid to rest at Buskirk Cemetery, a Kentucky hillside burial ground that looks back across the river toward Matewan. The stone marks his role as Matewan’s chief of police, notes his ties to the famous feud family, and proclaims his defense of miners against the Baldwin–Felts agency.
For a Kentucky based view of Sid, that burial place matters. Many accounts of the West Virginia mine wars treat him as a West Virginia figure, and for good reason his public career unfolded on that side of the line. Yet his grave among Pike County Hatfields, with Tug Fork below and the coal towns of Mingo County just across the water, makes clear that his life belonged to a borderland where families, unions, and company power ignored state boundaries.
Film, photographs, and the making of “Smilin’ Sid”
The surviving visual record of Sid Hatfield deepened his legend. The West Virginia and Regional History Center’s West Virginia History OnView collection preserves photographs of him clowning for cameras, grinning around gold filled teeth, and posing in a double portrait with Ed Chambers above an image of the Welch courthouse, an x marking the spot where they were killed.
Shortly after the Matewan trial he appeared as himself in a United Mine Workers sponsored film called “Smilin’ Sid,” a reenactment of the battle that cast him and the miners as heroes and Baldwin–Felts men as villains. The Clio cemetery entry notes this film work and points out that he became a symbol of resistance in union propaganda long before academic historians took up his story.
Newsreel style footage of Sid survives in the documentary series West Virginia: A Film History, which drew on archival film held by state repositories. In these clips, he looks younger than most Hollywood depictions a compact, slightly rumpled man rather than a towering gunslinger. Yet the presence of two revolvers on his hips and the easy way he moves among miners still fits the “Two-Gun” nickname repeated in captions and exhibits.
Historians, spies, and the problem of hero worship
Since the 1970s, scholars have tried to pull Sid out of the haze of hagiography while still recognizing why he mattered. Lon Savage’s Thunder in the Mountains remains a foundational narrative of the 1920–21 mine wars. Savage uses Senate hearings, trial records, and contemporary newspaper coverage to show how Sid’s stand in Matewan and his later assassination helped trigger the march that led to Blair Mountain.
Documentary collections such as David Alan Corbin’s Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals reprint key primary sources including speeches, newspaper articles, and official reports that mention Sid and his opponents. William C. Blizzard’s When Miners March offers a first person view from the miners’ side. Written by the son of Blair Mountain leader Bill Blizzard, it remembers Sid as a steadfast ally who refused to betray the union even when offered money and they viewed his death as proof that coal companies would stop at nothing.
Rebecca Bailey’s dissertation on Matewan and A. P. Duafala’s article on the historiography of the West Virginia mine wars both caution against treating Sid as a simple folk hero. They emphasize that he operated in a tangled world of local politics, patronage, and kin loyalty, that he carried guns and used them, and that his actions were interpreted differently by miners, company men, and outside observers.
On the other side of the conflict, biographies of Charles E. Lively and studies of the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency use surviving agency papers, Goldenseal articles, and court records to reconstruct the plot against Sid. These works argue that mine operators and detectives saw him not simply as a lawman gone rogue but as a dangerous symbol whose open union sympathies had to be crushed if company power was to remain unchallenged in Mingo and McDowell counties.
Taken together, this scholarship suggests that the truth about Sid lies somewhere between the simple images of a saintly martyr and a reckless gunfighter. He was a working class Appalachian man shaped by a feud haunted family, a harsh industrial frontier, and a coalfield uprising in which both sides used violence and claimed the law.
Pike County, the Mine Wars, and Appalachian memory
For Appalachians on both sides of the Tug Fork, Sid Hatfield’s story remains rooted in place. On one end of his life is Blackberry Precinct in Pike County, where the census taker found Jacob and Rebecca Hatfield with their son William in 1900 and where family tradition still remembers a boy who grew up farming, mining, and learning to handle a gun. On the other end is Buskirk Cemetery, where visitors from as far away as Colorado and New England stop at a hilltop stone that links Kentucky soil to a West Virginia battle for union recognition.
Between those points lie Matewan’s main street, the Senate hearing room in Washington, and the sandstone steps of the old courthouse at Welch. The mine wars were not only about West Virginia coal. They were about migrant families from eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia, African American miners from the Deep South, and new immigrants from Europe who all found themselves living under company guards and company law. Pike County’s Blackberry Creek produced more than a colorful character with two pistols. It produced a man whose decision to stand with miners at Matewan, and to walk unarmed into a McDowell County courthouse, helped turn a regional labor conflict into one of the largest armed uprisings in United States history.
For visitors who trace his story today, primary sources remain the best starting point. Census entries and vital records place him in Pike and McDowell counties. Trial transcripts and Senate proceedings preserve his own words and those of allies and enemies. Newspaper headlines record how the outside world learned his name in 1920 and 1921. Photographs and newsreel clips capture the gap toothed grin that earned him the nickname “Smilin’ Sid.” Public history projects at Matewan, Welch, and Buskirk tie those fragments to specific streets, stairways, and hilltops.
Seen through that layered archive, Sid Hatfield becomes less a myth and more a borderland figure who carried Kentucky roots into a West Virginia fight. His grave back in Pike County, where the stone still insists on 1893, invites people to argue over dates, debate his choices, and keep talking about what it meant when a Blackberry Creek farm boy took his stand against Baldwin–Felts on Matewan’s main street.
Sources & Further Reading
1900 U.S. Census, Blackberry Precinct, Pike County, Kentucky, listing Jacob and Rebecca Hatfield with son William S. Hatfield. Used here through citations and summaries in later scholarly and genealogical work.
West Virginia Legislature and U.S. Senate, West Virginia Coal Fields: Hearings Before the Committee on Education and Labor, 67th Congress, 1st Session, 1921, especially “Testimony of Sid Hatfield,” pages 205 to 221.Digital Collections+1
State of West Virginia v. Sid Hatfield et al., trial records from the Matewan “massacre” cases, H. C. Lewis Collection, Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia, as described by Rebecca J. Bailey in Matewan Before the Massacre.Mining Quiz
William Sidney “Sid” Hatfield, grave and memorial at Buskirk Cemetery, Buskirk, Pike County, Kentucky, documented in The Grave of Sid Hatfield, Buskirk Cemetery (Clio entry) and in photographs and descriptions reproduced in later essays.Clio+1
“Two-Gun Sid Hatfield” and “Assassinations of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers,” sections in the Mine Wars exhibit, e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, West Virginia Humanities Council.West Virginia Encyclopedia+2West Virginia Encyclopedia+2
“On this Day in History, Smilin’ Sid Hatfield was Born” and related features, West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, including summaries of his Pike County origins, Matewan service, and assassination at Welch.West Virginia Mine Wars Museum+2West Virginia Mine Wars Museum+2
“The Grave of Sid Hatfield, Buskirk Cemetery” and “McDowell County Courthouse,” individual entries on The Clio, providing narrative context and site descriptions for his burial place and the courthouse steps where he was killed.Clio+1
“Sid Hatfield,” “Battle of Matewan,” and “West Virginia Coal Wars” entries on Wikipedia, with bibliographies pointing to census records, death certificates, and key monographs on the mine wars.Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
Lon Savage, Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, still the most detailed narrative of the 1920–21 conflict, with extensive use of trial records, Senate hearings, and contemporary newspapers.Internet Archive+1
David Alan Corbin, ed., Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars, PM Press, 2011, a curated collection of primary documents on the mine wars that includes material on Matewan, Baldwin–Felts, and Sid Hatfield.Internet Archive+1
William C. Blizzard, When Miners March, PM Press and Appalachian Community Services editions, a first person narrative from the miners’ side of the mine wars, particularly the Blair Mountain march.Internet Archive+1
Rebecca J. Bailey, Matewan Before the Massacre: Politics, Coal, and the Roots of Conflict in a West Virginia Mining Community, PhD dissertation, West Virginia University, 2001, later published as a book, with detailed analysis of Matewan’s politics and extensive primary source citations.Mining Quiz
A. P. Duafala, “The Historiography of the West Virginia Mine Wars,” West Virginia History 12, no. 1, 2018, an overview of how historians have interpreted the mine wars and figures such as Sid Hatfield over time.JSTOR+1