Online Exhibits
With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities Cares Act Grant, we stayed hard at work in 2020-2021 digitally cataloging our museum’s entire collection: photographing everything in our care and recording all of the details, the research, and the stories which will continue to expand on the people’s history that we preserve and share.
We’ve since expanded our collection to nearly 800 entries, each photographed and cataloged in an integrated system which makes it easy for visiting researchers to call up any of our artifacts. These Online Exhibits are an opportunity to take our collection beyond the museum walls, to share more of our work globally, to the people, for free. Enjoy!
Our online exhibits are hosted by CatalogIt Hub.
Union S.W.A.G:
An Organizing Tool
Union SWAG (Stuff We All Get) comes in the form of pens, stickers, buttons, keychains, and pretty much anything else you can slap a union logo on. I’ve seen these small, seemingly innocuous, items carry a greater weight than any of us would imagine…
Dark as a Dungeon:
Mine Lighting & Lamps
When Merle Travis sang that “It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines,” he wasn’t exaggerating…
16 Tons: Coal Company Scrip & Tokens
For decades, many coal companies in Appalachia paid their miners primarily in a privately issued currency known as scrip…
The Land Will Tell The Story: Beneath the Soil of Blair Mountain
Between 2006 and 2009, several archaeological digs led by Kenny King, Harvard Ayers, and Brandon Nida explored remote spots along Spruce Fork Ridge in southern West Virginia, where the Battle of Blair Mountain took place in 1921…
Selections from the Museum
Featuring artifacts currently on exhibit from the collections of Kenny King, Wilma Steele, Chuck Keeney, and Doug Estepp…
Glass at the Museum
We have a lot of rare glass pieces at the museum, from treasured household items passed down through families to throw-away soda bottles found on the Blair Mountain battlefield…
various household sewing items
collection of Wilma Steele | photo by Roger May
