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Coal Was King
Contributed by
Jim_Cundiff
on
Monday, 10th March 2003 @ 05:30:00 AM in AEST
Topic:
StoryPoetry
|
Coal was King in these mountains for many
a year. My grandfather owned a coalmine…
back then owning a mine meant you had a
hole dug in the ground, hand hewn timbers
keeping the roof from caving in on top
of you as you laid flat on your stomach
or back, often in an inch or two of
water, with a pick and shovel digging
enough coal out of the mountain to keep
your family warm another night possibly two.
If you were lucky, and found a good vein,
you might have a high enough roof to drive
a small pony and a wooden sled into
your mine to bring the coal out, If not, you did
like my grandfather and father did and carried
coal out of the mine in burlap sacks.
Having a coal mine then didn’t mean you had
money, just that your family might stay warm
through cold Winter nights, no central heat, just
a pot-bellied stove or a shared fire grate.
This was in the Forties and Fifties when
a lot of people in the mountains where
Coal was King still lived in mining towns or
coal camps as they were known. Called coal camps
because the coal companies would often build a town
near their mines. A town of identical, cheap
clapboard houses for the miners’ families…All
the house they could afford, seeing as they
were paid not with money but coal company
script, worthless, only good for company housing,
only accepted, at the company store.
Generations fell into the coal camp
trap, sons joined fathers deep underground
for twelve hour days . Sons became fathers,
and their sons joined them still working
hours on end only to end up deeper
in debt to the coal company, providing
an endless supply of virtually free
labor for the mines to exploit
Even today, you can drive through Southeastern
Kentucky towns and see identical
rows of frame houses, lining both sides of
the streets in what was once a company town.
The mines got the easy money out and
left the towns they built for profit to live
or die without the one-time King. Coal was
King in those mountains for many years.
My grandfather worked in the mines as a
young boy, coal mining was a dangerous
business, even more than it is today.
At that time, all the coal mining in the
mountains was done deep underground
in hand dug mines where teams of small ponies
pulled carts of coal out of the earth’s
bowels in rail carts riding on miniature
railroad tracks. These small ponies were worth
their weight in gold, a pony would sell for
two or three times what a saddle horse did
simply because of the amount of coal
the pony would pull out of the mine in its life.
My great-uncles weren’t miners they farmed,
growing acres and acres of corn they
sold to the miners living in the camps
miners would buy corn not to eat, but drink.
My great-uncles and others like them would
raise their crop and then spend weeks turning the
corn into whiskey or moonshine as it
was better known. They would ride their horses
to the camps with loaded “Four gallon bags”,
saddle bags that held two gallon jars of
‘shine on each side. At the camps, the miners
paid my uncles with what they had, not with
money, just coal company script, but it
bought the family things they could not make.
things like coal oil for lanterns, back then
electricity had yet to find its
way into the mountains. It bought ‘wheat lights’
they wore on hard hats as they mined enough
coal to keep the family warm for a
winter, and things like candy and oranges
for the children, come Christmas time, my dad
often tells how special it was to get
candy, you didn’t just grab a candy
bar at the convenient store coming home
from work back when he was a child.
When my father came home from ‘Nam,
he saved enough to buy a used coal truck
The coal truck owners were contract labor
their trucks, numbered based upon seniority,
at one time my father and grandfather
had trucks two and three, this was a couple
of years before the last big ‘coal boom’
in the mountains, my father worked all day
and then came home to work most of the night
just to keep his truck running. He sometimes
tells the story of my mother throwing
his dinner out the front door, plate and all
because he was still working on that truck
two hours after supper was ready.
His driver wrecked the coal truck one day,
and that was the end of my father’s truck
what he got from the insurance company
was enough to either pay off the loan
for the truck or fix it. Dad paid the bank,
sold the truck. It was bought not for its parts,
but for its number. He could not see a
future worth continuing with the truck
Two years later, coal truck owners in the
mountains were making a hundred thousand
a year after they paid their driver and
all the bills for the truck. Dad was working
for the coal company by then, he spent years
working on a dragline shovel, driving
a rock truck, and running a drill. Where else
was a college dropout going to make
forty to sixty grand a year?
From the mid Seventies through the late Eighties,
coal was truly King in the Eastern Kentucky
mountains, In Breathitt, Perry, Knott, Leslie,
and Letcher counties more than twenty mines
that each provided over two thousand jobs,
high paying jobs, the highest paying jobs
that people in that area had ever seen.
Cadillacs, satellite dishes, and boats
all set in the yards of new brick homes, homes
much fancier than any of the ones where their
owners grew up. Much fancier, and much
more expensive, but all the area banks
always had money for coal miners
New Cadillacs had to be had at least
every two years, boats had to be faster
than anything else on the lake. And since they
owned boats, they had to have lake cabins,
the banks had no problem financing
the miners’ dreams, remember, coal was king
Not quite all the coal miners and coal truck
owners fell into this money trap, but
most ended up really no better off than their
forefathers who had owed their souls to the
company store. This generation’s
company store had only been hidden
in a nice brick exterior downtown
changing its name and means of operation.
I watched my father and grandfather
bring money home and knew I would follow
down their path so high school was just a joke
what good was algebra going to be
mining coal? I wasn’t the only one,
who felt this way. If I did make it to
college as my parents demanded, the
small private school in town’s most prominent
degree was in mining technology
and the vocational school taught heavy
equipment, what else was there but mining?
Coal was King in the Southeastern Kentucky
mountains we called home.
I left high school two weeks early, going
through U. S. Army basic training at
the age of seventeen, some excitement
before spending life just like my father
and grandfathers before me, fourteen hour
days, driving a coal truck or some other
piece of equipment for Falcon Coal or
which ever coal company was hiring
that week. But I came home to a changed world.
Plunging oil prices provided a cheaper,
cleaner alternative to King Coal.
There ended up not being any mining
jobs for me or very few others of my
generation as coal companies laid off
workers and trucks, the twenty or so mines
dwindled, fewer surviving every year
as OPEC continued to offer cheaper oil.
Soon all the strip mines were gone, only the
‘deep mines’, going miles and miles underground
remained, and they were cut to skeleton crews,
as forty thousand jobs became less than
four hundred. In the midst of all this, cars
were stolen and houses burned as miners,
who lived paycheck to paycheck simply by
the grace of the bankers, lost everything
they owned, insurance companies got stuck
with millions of dollars worth of claims, forced
to pay the banks what the miners now could not.
Copyright ©
Jim_Cundiff
... [
2003-03-10 05:30:00]
(Date/Time posted on
site)
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Re: Coal Was King
(User Rating: 1 )
by ladyfawn on
Monday, 10th March 2003 @ 11:07:03 AM AEST
(User
Info | Send
a Message)
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| this is excellent, so true, still i meet people who have never had electric, always walking miles for water from the spring, living in a way the 'civilizied' world has awful words for, friends who still work in coal mines and get the dust in their lungs, no, never enough money, and yeah, they make moonshine on my mountain lol, all these hardships yet they laugh, smile and find a joy in life i have not seen elsewhere, the whole thing you have written is so very touching to me, our mountainous kentucky is honestly america's last frontier, in so many many ways:) ty, hugs always nessa |
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