No longer fueling U.S., coal legacy remains
BMADISON, W.Va. oone County claims to be the birthplace of America’s coal industry, the rich and abundant black rock discovered in these verdant hills almost three centuries ago. Coal gives name to nearly everything in these parts — the Big and Little Coal Rivers, the weekly Coal Valley News, the wondrous Bituminous Coal Heritage Foundation Museum, and the West Virginia Coal Festival, celebrating, as we arrive in town, its 24th year.
The festival is more state fair than true celebration of coal. There’s a carnival, a talent competition, seven beauty queens (from Little Miss Coal Festival to Forever West Virginia Coal Queen).
Late in the afternoon of the second day, high on a hill graced with the statue of a miner, there’s a small memorial service for the West Virginia men who died on the job over the previous year. The total deaths are five, fewer than the number of Miss Coal Festivals who wilt in the heat on the steps of the neoclassical courthouse, draped in charcoal-black sashes.
Coal mining, celebrated with rhinestones and pageantry, is an enduring legacy rather than a thriving enterprise.
“We’re keeping our heritage alive. We don’t want it to be a dying industry,” says Delores W. Cook, titularly the festival’s vice president/treasurer/assistant director but in fact its true sovereign. “This has been a way of life for people in West Virginia, keeping the lights on for all of the United States, for many, many years.”
Boone’s fortunes rose and subsequently plummeted along with the industry. But coal’s grip holds hard, a source of revenue the state has been slow to replace. Fewer than 700 county residents worked the mines last year.
Decades past its heyday, and despite the availability of cleaner and more widely used energy resources, coal is enjoying its moment in politics, culture and the environmental debate.
Coal is an idea some Americans can’t quit, though it employed fewer than 66,000 miners in 2014. Kohl’s department store has more than twice as many workers.
But retail doesn’t play as powerfully in the American imagination, launching stories, inspiring music, forging identity. “Entire communities were formed to mine” coal, said Barbara Freese, author of Coal: A Human History. “Coal created its own geographical area and culture.”
“I happen to love the coal miners,” declared President Donald Trump in announcing U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Trump welcomed coal miners and executives to the White House for a photo op, the first in ages, and declared “an end to the war on coal” — a conflict minted by an industry association — at a time when even the Kentucky Coal Museum was switching to solar energy.
“We’re learning we can’t have all our eggs in one basket. We need to grow and diversify,” says state Sen. Ron Stollings at the festival opening, reading from Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin III’s address.
But in this region, coal is a tradition that continues to haunt.
“It’s not only an industry that’s lost, but a way of life, one filled with terrible hardships,” says composer Julia Wolfe, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio, Anthracite Fields, commemorates Pennsylvania’s miners. “The trick is not to romanticize the life. There are very beautiful things about the community’s dependence on each other, but there’s also terrible abuse and negligence.”
The industry was long marked by excessive volatility: all in during boom times, then neglect, companies decamping under the cloak of bankruptcy, threatening pensions, wrecking the security of proud men. Jobs evaporated. But the mountains remained.
The industry’s declining fortunes contributed to the death of opportunity for many men to be their families’ top wage earner, another conversation of our times.
“Coal’s been going downhill since World War II,” says former miner Jim Chaney. “In Boone County, it used to be you mined the coal or you moved the coal.”
Now, he believes, “it will come back, but never the way that it was.”