A Southern West Virginia Mining Community Revisited

Abstract

Southeastern Geographer Vol. XXXVIII, No. I, May 1998, pp. 1-21 A SOUTHERN WEST VIRGINIA MINING COMMUNITY REVISITED Tyrel G. Moore Raymond Murphy’s depiction of a southern West Virginia mining community in the 1930s por­ trayed 20th-century industrial expansion into the Appalachian South and the region’s linkages with the larger national economy. His work provides a useful baseline for viewing the techno­ logic and economic restructuring which have occurred in the second half of the century. This paper compares the southern West Virginia mining community of the 1930s with that of the 1990s to document community-level impacts of economic restructuring within the region’s coal industry, and those that occurred with deindustrialization during the 1980s. The study identifies key trends in mining employment and population dynamics that correlate temporally with the region’s close connections to a national industrial economy. That temporal compari­ son provides a developmental perspective that reveals a cascade of economic downturns and population losses which mounted steadily and accelerated steeply in the 1980s. Throughout the period, mining was the cornerstone of an economy that lacked diversity. The persistence of that industry continues to be expressed on a deindustrial landscape. For more than a century, southern West Virginia’s cultural and economic land­ scapes have held a special place in the geography of the Appalachian South. Along with parts of neighboring eastern Kentucky, the area appears in an extensive academic literature as the geographic prototype of southern Appalachian regional development processes. Development, driven primarily by bituminous coal mining operations, transformed a previously remote area into an industrial landscape and fundamentally influenced the region’s economic future (Caudill, 1962; Eller, 1981). In a broader sense, the Appalachian South became something ofa late 19th-century economic bridge that narrowed the separation between an agrarian South and an industrial North. Southern Appalachia’s position on the North-South gradient was formed on a resource-based economy, unlike places on the Piedmont where change was affected by the southward diffusion of the textile industry. A cultural land­ scape of coal-mining complexes and towns geographically expressed the region’s economic emergence and defined its new status as a subregion of the South. It was a regionally representative complex of landscape characteristics that drew Raymond Murphy to southern West Virginia and to publish “A Southern West Virginia Mining Community” in the 1933 issue of Economic Geography. Murphy presented the community, tucked in the valley ofElkhom Creek, as a cap­ sule of the features associated with a larger region where mining was foremost in shaping the cultural and economic landscape (Murphy, 1933). His approach was not unusual in a research genre that centered on vignettes of regional economic Dr. Moore is Associate Professor o f Geography at thè University o f North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223. 2 S o u t h e a s t e r n G e o g r a p h e r specialization that collectively depicted the geography ofthe national economy of the period. It did stand apart, though, from much of what was being written about the region during that time. The Southern Appalachian coalfields were the geo­ graphic locus of sharp public policy debates about the economically troubled na­ tional coal industry and a set of social issues exacerbated by labor strife, exemplified to the worst degree by the West Virginia mine wars (Corbin, 1981). The popular media, government agencies, and social activists placed Appalachia at the center of a campaign for economic and social reform of the industry (Ross, 1933; Morris, 1934; Tryon and Allin, 1936). Amid a period literature dominated by labor and social issues, Murphy’s article stood as a rare piece, devoted exclu­ sively to a geographic perspective that interpreted a landscape that symbolized Appalachia’s industrial development. A half century later, the industrial sector that had created the southern West Virginia mining community declined under the tandem forces of technologic and economic restructuring. A corresponding body of literature publicized the im­ pacts of deindustrialization in the national economy—the plant closings, employ­ ment downsizing, and abandonment that characterized deindustrial landscapes (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Rodwin and Sazanami, 1989; Jakle and Wilson, 1992). Gaventa...