For my project I am studying the history of coal mines in West Virginia. I am doing this because I want to better understand the history of that state and what those mines meant to the state. To do this I have conducted research into the history of coal mines and company towns and what the significance is. My goal is to educate people on the importance of the coal mining industry and what the miners faced.
For this project I will have it broken up into a few parts. The first part will be about the treatment of coal miners in West Virginia. I will begin with explaining what company towns are and what they did. I will have some quotes from an article written by Mack Gillenwater. His article goes into what company towns were and what they did. Company towns themselves were towns owned by the coal company in which the miners lived. These towns trapped the workers in these towns as the money you earned was only good in these towns. They also were not part of any centralized government meaning they had no oversight.
Next I will be explaining the extremely weak safety standards. In the early 1900s coal mining was an extremely dangerous job. To help illustrate this I will be using a graph from an article by Paul Rakes. In his article he has compiled graphs with data that show the amount of deaths that have happened in this industry.
Lastly I will have a section on the Battle of Blair Mountain. This was the largest labor uprising seen since the civil war. This battle was fought between miners and the government. For this I will be using first hand reports from The Washington Post from 1921. This image is an article from them that I will be using to show the start of the battle. I will also be using reports from Brandon Nida, Trevor Harris, A. Rochelle Williams, and Lou Martin article called “What Did the Miners See?: Archaeology, Deep Mapping, and the Battle of Blair Mountain”.This report goes into what the experienced and details of how the battle happened. I will also be using an article by Brandon Neely of Gettysburg College. I will be using his work to help better educate myself so I am able to write an informative report on this. I will also be using an article posted in the U.S. Department of Labor by Chris Williamson for information and images. Lastly I will be using an article written by Jessie Wright Mendoza. I will be using a picture that was used in the header of my exhibit and I believe it is the most eye-catching picture. I will be using all these sources to help write a detailed summary of the events of Blair Mountain.
In conducting research for this project I used numerous databases to help dictate my research. I was able to find an ample amount of information about the Battle of Blair Mountain and company towns. My goal is to educate the audience into what these miners went through and how their struggles bettered the industry as a whole. I want my project to have some images and quotes from the articles but a majority will be written.