Inside the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum
Presenting the largest exhibition of Mine Wars history anywhere in the United States, we walk visitors through this legacy with compelling, dynamic exhibitions of archival photos and videos, first-person accounts, rare artifacts and replicas, and timelines placing the events of the Mine Wars era in a global context.
Life in the Coal Camps
Beginning with a memorial to the 361 coal miners who died in the Monogah disaster in 1907, visitors learn about life in the private, company-owned coal mining towns of the Central Appalachia of +100 years ago.
The Paint Creek & Cabin Creek Strikes
In the long arc of struggle for basic human rights and dignity in the Appalachian coal fields, these events in Kanawha County are considered the first volleys in the Mine Wars in West Virginia, the inspiration for Ralph Chaplin’s song “Solidarity Forever”.
This exhibit includes Women’s Resistance, highlighting the lesser known militant side of the women who fought in the Mine Wars.
Bloody Mingo
After the first World War, narrated with timelines which put the events in West Virginia in an international context, some of the renewed struggle in the coalfields centered on the town of Matewan, accelerating to the pivotal Battle of Matewan in 1920.
The Battle of Blair Mountain
In the heat of late summer, 1921, the murders of people’s heroes Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers lit a powder keg of righteous anger. A multi-ethnic crowd of organized miners armed themselves and began marching across the state, growing in the thousands and eventually clashing with a private, anti-union vigilante army on the slopes of Blair Mountain in Logan County, West Virginia.
From Treason to Triumph + The Mine Wars: Memory & Legacy
After the Battle of Blair Mountain, union miners and their families weathered treason trials and many more years of struggle for their dignity and basic human rights before the union eventually regained it’s strength.
In Memory & Legacy, we celebrate the modern fight to save the Blair Mountain battlefield from strip mining, and the citizen archaeology which has shaped our understanding of a history which was nearly buried by state and coal company narratives.
all photography above by Roger May
coal miner’s meal bucket, collection of Wilma Steele | photo by Roger May
