Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia

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Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia

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Item Title

Exterior, United Mine Workers of America union hall, Sundial, West Virginia. [Photo]

Author/Creator

Photographer: Eiler, Lyntha Scott

Created/Published

September 28, 1995

Notes

The Union Hall in Sundial is the meeting place for Union Local 6608 of the United Mine Workers. During the field project there was much discussion of the Massey/Pittston strikes that had occurred in the 1980s, and about the deeper history of District 17, which some called "the backbone of the United Mineworkers." Districts 17 and 23 had been prominent in the famous March on Blair Mountain of 1921, when 10,000 armed miners attempted to march against the industry's hired thugs in Logan County in order to establish the union there. That uprising was put down by the federal government. In the 1990s, after many decades of union strength in the coal fields, coal is being removed in record quantities with a greatly reduced workforce, much of it non-union. We encountered many miners who had been laid off after nearly twenty years in the mines, just short of eligibility for pensions. Blair Mountain itself is slated for mountaintop removal. We met with members of the UMW Local to ask them for their views on forest issues. A number of miners linked forest health with their hope that deep mining will return to replace mountaintop removal mining -- both as a means of putting more men to work and minimizing the destructive impact of mountaintop removal mining on the land.

Subjects

Fall
September
Year-round work
Mining
Photo
Ethnography
Photographs
UMWA Local 6608 Union Hall
Sundial, WV

Object Type

still image

Medium

35 mm Color Slide

Language

English

Call Number

CRF-LE-C015-14

Part of

The Coal River Folklife Collection (AFC 1999/008)

Repository

Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Digital ID

afccmns lec01514
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afccmns.lec01514