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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
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