Appalachian History Series – United Mine Workers of America in the Appalachian Coalfields
From the outside, the story of the United Mine Workers of America can look like a national saga of strikes, contracts, and Capitol Hill showdowns. In the mountains, it was also a local story written in union cards tucked into overalls, in picket signs propped behind doors, and in the minutes of small locals that met in school basements and union halls from Matewan to Harlan and Jenkins.
The archival trail that survives in and around Appalachia is unusually rich. Charters, president’s office correspondence, pension ledgers, Senate hearing transcripts, and oral histories let us watch the union rise, nearly fall, and reinvent itself, all while miners and their families tried to carve out a measure of security in company towns and boom and bust coal camps.
This overview leans first on those primary and near primary sources, then on the classic monographs and documentary histories that grew out of them.
Early organizing and the long road into the southern coalfields
The United Mine Workers of America was born in 1890 when several regional miners’ organizations and a Knights of Labor trade assembly joined together. From the outset it imagined itself as an industrial union for everyone who worked in and around coal mines, regardless of skill, religion, or nationality.
The union’s own archives, housed at UMWA headquarters and in partner repositories, preserve that early ambition in charters, contracts, and correspondence. The headquarters collection and its inventory of district records, now partially described in finding aids such as the United Mine Workers of America Inventory at West Virginia University, point to dozens of boxes covering Appalachian districts like 17, 19, 23, and 29. Those files trace how a largely Midwestern and northern union tried to establish a foothold in company dominated camps in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia.
The United Mine Workers Journal, the union’s newspaper, lets us see this process from the ground level. In the scattered runs preserved in the M. H. Ross Papers at Georgia State University and in digitized bound volumes, reports from district organizers and local correspondents describe modest membership gains, retaliatory evictions, and the constant tug of war over checkweighmen and wage scales.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, UMWA locals had become fixtures in many northern and central Appalachian coal towns. Southern West Virginia and parts of eastern Kentucky, however, remained largely nonunion strongholds where operators relied on company guards and private detective agencies to keep organizers out.
Mine wars in West Virginia
The best documented phase of UMWA history in Appalachia is the West Virginia mine wars period. Here the combination of union records, federal investigations, and later oral histories create an almost day by day account.
The Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike of 1912 and 1913 started as a dispute over wages and spread into a broader fight over union recognition and civil liberties in Kanawha County. Contemporary testimony from miners, wives, coal operators, and public officials survives in a thick Senate hearing transcript produced under the Kern Resolution. The volume, Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia, captures everything from evictions and tent colony life to the use of state militia and martial law.
Photographs from the Library of Congress show the Senate subcommittee posing in front of hastily erected shacks while, inside the hearing room, miners tried to describe a world where company guards controlled the roads and the right to assemble. That record, and the related hearings on West Virginia coal fields more broadly, pulled Appalachia’s company town system into national view.
The escalation continued into the 1920s. Newspaper coverage, UMWA president’s office correspondence with District 17 at Penn State, and later compilations like Winthrop D. Lane’s Civil War in West Virginia and David Corbin’s documentary history Gun Thugs, Rednecks, and Radicals allow historians to reconstruct a chain of confrontations that included the Matewan gunfight, the assassination of Sid Hatfield, and the march that culminated at Blair Mountain.
At Blair Mountain in 1921, somewhere around ten thousand armed miners confronted several thousand deputies, state police, and company men along the Logan County ridges. Federal troops, summoned by the governor and the president, eventually ended the fighting. Later union memoirs and Mine Wars Museum research materials emphasize that many of these marchers were UMWA stalwarts from union counties who hiked into nonunion territory to defend the right to organize.
Despite the drama, the sources also show the cost. Reports gathered by the UMWA, the Bureau of Mines, and state officials reveal a union nearly broken in the southern West Virginia fields by the end of the 1920s. The West Virginia Encyclopedia’s entry on the Appalachian Wage Agreement notes that UMWA membership in the state had fallen to a few hundred by that point, even as the union remained strong in places like Illinois and Ohio.
“Bloody Harlan” and the fight for Kentucky
While southern West Virginia drew early national attention, eastern Kentucky produced its own long record of struggle between the UMWA, rival unions, and determined coal companies.
Local newspapers, court records, and union files for UMWA District 19 document the early failure of standard organizing drives in Harlan County during the 1920s and early 1930s. Operators, backed by sheriffs and company guards, responded to union cards with firings and evictions. When miners and their families rallied again in the depths of the Depression, the county became known nationally as “Bloody Harlan.”
Testimony gathered by visiting investigators, including the Dreiser Committee of writers and reformers, shows miners caught between the established UMWA, the Communist led National Miners Union, and company controlled associations. Songs like “Which Side Are You On,” written by Harlan activist and sheriff’s wife Florence Reece, distilled those divisions into a simple choice and later became a standard union anthem.
Later, the oral histories collected in Alessandro Portelli’s They Say in Harlan County capture how those conflicts continued to echo in the memories of miners, deputies, and family members. Portelli’s narrators talk at length about factional fights inside the union, about Black and immigrant miners in Lynch and Benham, and about the complicated feelings many mountain people had toward both union and company.
Even after the headline grabbing clashes of the early thirties, Harlan remained contested ground. Local newspapers, the correspondence files of union and company lawyers, and Kentucky oral history collections show UMWA campaigns sputtering out and restarting, often shadowed by violence and economic retaliation, through the 1940s and beyond.
New Deal, the Appalachian Wage Agreement, and the promise of 1946
The rebirth of the UMWA in Appalachia depended on a shift in federal labor law as much as on local courage. The National Industrial Recovery Act, especially Section 7a’s recognition of workers’ right to organize, opened the door for a massive unionization drive in 1933. UMWA president John L. Lewis sent organizers back into counties that had run them out a decade earlier.
Their success made possible the Appalachian Wage Agreement of 1933, the first regional master contract to cover much of the Appalachian bituminous coalfield. The agreement, as summarized in the West Virginia Encyclopedia and Mine Wars Museum interpretive essays, standardized wage rates across West Virginia and surrounding states, limited child labor, and attacked some of the most hated features of the company town system, including scrip pay and compulsory trading at company stores.
This did not eliminate exploitation. It did, however, give miners across the region a shared wage floor and a stronger bargaining position. Later agreements gradually pushed southern Appalachian wages toward parity with northern fields.
The next watershed came with the “Promise of 1946.” After a national strike, the UMWA and the federal government negotiated the creation of the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds. UMWA Funds histories and West Virginia reference works describe how this White House brokered deal created welfare and retirement funds and a separate medical and hospital fund, later combined as the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds.
Fund records, pension ledgers, and physician account books held at WVU and other archives show what that promise looked like in practice. For many retired miners in the central and southern Appalachians, the funds meant a modest pension, hospital access through Appalachian Regional Hospitals, and some protection against catastrophic medical bills. For widows and children, they meant a continuation of benefits after the main breadwinner died from injuries or occupational disease.
Black lung, rank and file rebellions, and Miners for Democracy
The story of UMWA in Appalachia did not end with contracts signed in Washington. From the 1950s into the 1970s, a new wave of activism erupted from below, sometimes in tension with the union’s own leadership.
The black lung movement grew out of frustration that coal miner’s pneumoconiosis remained unrecognized as a compensable occupational disease. For decades, resolutions from UMWA conventions and petitions from rank and file miners begged national officers to push the issue more forcefully. The West Virginia Encyclopedia’s entry on the Black Lung Movement and related studies highlight how the pivotal turn came after the 1968 Farmington mine disaster. Local miners, aided by crusading physicians like Donald Rasmussen and I. E. Buff, formed the Black Lung Association and launched wildcat strikes that spread across southern West Virginia in early 1969.
Oral histories and photographs from that movement show home made signs, courthouse rallies, and rank and file miners flooding the state capitol in Charleston. The pressure won a strong state level black lung bill and pushed Congress to pass the federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which set dust limits and created a federal black lung compensation program.
At the same time, many miners came to see the union’s national leadership as unresponsive or hostile to grassroots demands. Reform slates and dissidents within the UMWA drew energy from black lung activism and from long simmering complaints about election fraud and lack of accountability. Their campaigns, and the eventual rise of Miners for Democracy and reform president Arnold Miller, can be traced through UMWA convention records, court cases, and collections at the Reuther Library and other labor archives.
Rank and file rebellions did not erase the union’s influence in the coalfields, but they changed its internal culture and broadened its focus to include occupational health and pension security more explicitly. They also left a paper and audio trail that lets historians listen directly to Appalachian miners wrestling with what a democratic union should look like.
Remembering UMWA in Appalachia
Today, with far fewer active coal miners in central and southern Appalachia, the UMWA’s presence in some communities is easier to see in monuments, oral histories, and archives than in daily life. Yet the union’s imprint remains strong.
In places like Matewan, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum curates photographs, strike leaflets, and Senate hearing excerpts that introduce new generations to the mine wars and their legacy. In Harlan County, oral histories gathered by university archives and independent projects keep alive the voices of women and men who lived through “Bloody Harlan,” the Brookside strike, and the everyday work of local unions. Portelli’s Harlan County interviews and collections at the University of Kentucky’s Nunn Center form only part of that chorus.
Meanwhile, the UMWA archives themselves continue to grow. District records, president’s office files, and the working papers of organizers such as M. H. Ross and others are being described and digitized. Combined with oral histories, documentary films like Harlan County, USA, and newer media, they give Appalachian researchers an unusually layered view of how one union reshaped the region’s economy and politics, and how miners and their families tried to hold that union accountable in turn.
For local historians, genealogists, and students, the story of UMWA in the Appalachian coalfields is more than an abstract labor narrative. Union contracts explain why grandparents were able to buy a house or send a child to college. Pension files and black lung claims explain how widows made it through hard years. Minutes from small locals in hamlets and hollow towns reveal how miners debated national politics and local school issues in the same cramped meeting rooms.
Those records, preserved from WVU and Penn State to county historical societies and oral history centers, make it possible to tell a story that is both intimate and regional, rooted in particular union halls yet connected to national struggles over labor, health, and democracy.
Sources & Further Reading
United Mine Workers of America. “UMWA Collection & Archives.” United Mine Workers of America. https://umwa.org/umwa-collection-archive/.
United Mine Workers of America Archives. “The UMWA Archives Collections Policy.” https://umwa.catalogaccess.com/home.
United Mine Workers of America. United Mine Workers Journal. Official publication of the United Mine Workers of America. Catalog record at HathiTrust. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005655949.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “United Mine Workers of America Inventory, A&M 2982.” West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1106.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “United Mine Workers of America, District 29 Records, 1941–1976.” West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/667.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. “United Mine Workers of America, Local Union 6046 Archives, ca. 1933–1974.” West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/799.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. United Mine Workers of America, Health and Retirement Funds Records, A&M 2769. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/882.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. United Mine Workers of America, Physician Record Books, 1948–1950, A&M 3237. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1553.
West Virginia and Regional History Center. United Mine Workers of America, Miscellaneous Papers, Charter for Union Local No. 3934, A&M 2261. West Virginia University Libraries. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/agents/corporate_entities/947?filter_fields%5B%5D=subjects&filter_values%5B%5D=Blankenship+vs.+Boyle.
Pennsylvania State University Libraries. “United Mine Workers of America Photographic, Graphic, and Artifacts Collection.” Penn State University Libraries. https://libraries.psu.edu/about/collections/united-mine-workers-america-photographic-graphic-and-artifacts-collection.
Walter P. Reuther Library. “United Mine Workers of America Collections.” Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. https://reuther.wayne.edu/taxonomy/term/557.
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. “Printed Ephemera Collection on the United Mine Workers of America, PE.010.” Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/pe_010/.
Georgia State University Library. “United Mine Workers of America Contract Collection.” Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University Library. https://archivesspace.library.gsu.edu/repositories/2/resources/556.
M. H. Ross Papers. “United Mine Workers of America Materials.” Digital Collections, Georgia State University Library. https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/mhross.
Digital Public Library of America. “When Miners Strike: West Virginia Coal Mining and Labor History.” DPLA Primary Source Sets. https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/when-miners-strike-west-virginia-coal-mining-and-labor-history.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Education and Labor. Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate, Sixty-Third Congress, First Session, Pursuant to S. Res. 37. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913. Digital edition, HathiTrust. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433004194795.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Education and Labor. West Virginia Coal Fields: Hearings Pursuant to S. Res. 80 Directing the Committee on Education and Labor to Investigate Recent Acts of Violence in the Coal Fields of West Virginia and Adjacent Territory. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-GP3-bbe903eb7436112f2536587b0e84be54/pdf/GOVPUB-GP3-bbe903eb7436112f2536587b0e84be54.pdf.
Lane, Winthrop D. Civil War in West Virginia: A Story of the Industrial Conflict in the Coal Mines. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921. Internet Archive edition. https://archive.org/details/civilwarinwestvi00lanerich.
Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Letter to John L. Lewis on the Captive Coal Mines Strike.” October 26, 1941. In The American Presidency Project. University of California, Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-john-l-lewis-the-captive-coal-mines-strike.
West Virginia University Libraries. “Mountaintop: Coal Mine Wars in West Virginia.” WVU Libraries educational multimedia project. https://libguides.wvu.edu/mountaintop.
West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. “For Your Research.” West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. https://wvminewars.org/research.
NEH for All. “Recognizing Mine and Labor History: The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.” NEH for All case study. https://www.nehforall.org/projects/recognizing-mine-and-labor-history.
PBS LearningMedia. “The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.” PBS LearningMedia resource. https://iowa.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/222eb86d-de89-4f06-b339-28c13cfed252/the-west-virginia-mine-wars-museum/.
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://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=364.
Trotter, Joe William Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. https://books.google.com/books/about/Coal_Class_and_Color.html?id=nF-963i4uiUC.
Lewis, Ronald L. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_labor_history/2.
Green, James. The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015. https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-devil-is-here-in-these-hills/.
Smith, Barbara Ellen. Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease. Updated ed. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020. https://www.abebooks.com/9781642592757/Digging-Own-Graves-Coal-Miners-1642592757/plp.
Clark, Paul F. The Miners’ Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers. Ithaca, NY: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 1981. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Miners_Fight_for_Democracy.html?id=2di6AAAAIAAJ.
Nyden, Paul J. “Rank-and-File Rebellions in the Coalfields, 1964–80.” Monthly Review 58, no. 10 (March 2007). https://monthlyreview.org/2007/03/01/rank-and-file-rebellions-in-the-coalfields-1964-80/.
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. https://books.google.com/books?id=nF-963i4uiUC.
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Brookside Strike Oral History Project.” University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7kkw57h03p.
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History and Kentucky Oral History Commission. “Immigrants in the Coal Fields Oral History Project.” University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/items/search?search=Immigrants+in+the+Coal+Fields.
University of Kentucky Libraries, Special Collections Research Center. “Business, Industry, and Labor Oral Histories.” Research guide. https://libguides.uky.edu/scrc/business_industry_labor.
West Virginia Humanities Council. “Appalachian Wage Agreement.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. February 8, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/234.
West Virginia Humanities Council. “Black Lung Movement.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org (search “Black Lung Movement”).
West Virginia Humanities Council. “Miners for Democracy.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org (search “Miners for Democracy”).
Oxford Research Encyclopedias. “West Virginia Mine Wars.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford University Press, 2019. https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-552.
American Friends Service Committee. “The Legacy of the United Mine Workers of America.” American Friends Service Committee, 2023. https://afsc.org/news/legacy-united-mine-workers-america.
National Park Service. Labor History in the United States: A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study. Washington, DC: National Historic Landmarks Program, National Park Service, 2022. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/upload/Labor_History_in_US-Theme_Study-Final-revised.pdf.
National Park Service. “National Historic Landmark Theme Study on Labor History: Americans at Work.” National Park Service, August 27, 2024. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/americans-at-work.htm.
Working Class History. “E57–58: The West Virginia Mine Wars, 1902–1922.” Working Class History podcast, October 18, 2021. https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e57-west-virginia-mine-wars-1902-1922/.
Kopple, Barbara, dir. Harlan County, USA. Documentary film. Cabin Creek Films, 1976. Criterion Collection entry. https://www.criterion.com/films/777-harlan-county-usa.
PBS. The Mine Wars. American Experience documentary film. PBS, 2016. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/mine-wars/.
Author Note: As a historian who writes about coal, labor, and memory in Appalachia, I am drawn to the places where union records, court files, and family stories overlap. I hope this overview helps you see the United Mine Workers not as an abstract national name, but as a network of local halls, strikes, benefits, and decisions that reshaped daily life in coal towns across the mountains.