A Liberal
Dose
September 2,
2021
Troy D.
Smith
“Labor
History in White County, Part 1”
Labor Day has become, for many of us, a vacation day… a
go-to-the-lake day, a day to take advantage of sales. The reason it is a
holiday, though, is to celebrate the Labor Movement in the U.S. I wrote a
couple of columns earlier this year (April 29 and May 6) that looked at the
origin of that movement, why it became a holiday, and why we celebrate it in
September while almost every other country does so in May. This time, as my own
celebration of Labor Day, I am going to talk about the Labor Movement in White
County and the Upper Cumberland.
Early labor organizing in this region, like in the rest of
Appalachia, tended to focus on coal miners. Now, the wonderful folks at the Bon
Air Mountain Historical Society know a lot more about coal mining in White
County than I do, and their museum is a treasure. Go check them out, and you
can learn a lot. I can tell you some basics, though. For one thing, while there
was a lot of coal mining in Northern Appalachia before the Civil War
(Pennsylvania and Ohio, mostly), there was very little in Central and Southern
Appalachia until well after that conflict. This is because there were few
railroads in the area. In the antebellum period, most railway construction in
the South was designed primarily to transport cotton to the coast where it
could be loaded onto ships for export. Cotton doesn’t grow well in the
mountains, hence no railroads; without trains, it was impractical to dig coal because,
well, it’s darn heavy and hard to transport. After the Civil War, especially
toward the end of Reconstruction (which officially ended in 1877), northern
investors and southern businessmen started to form partnerships that led to
railroads entering the region, with the opening of coal mines shortly
following. For example, Sparta native and former Confederate General George
Gibbs Dibrell became director and president of the Southwestern Railroad
Company right after the war, and around the time that company was bought out by
the Nashville and Chattanooga Company, Dibrell formed the Bon Air Coal, Land,
and Lumber Company, which shipped its first coal in 1888. Over the next several
years, the company imported around two dozen families from Scotland who had
experience extracting coal. In later years there were also immigrants from
Bohemia and other parts of Europe brought in. Meanwhile, former Union General
John T. Wilder bought up large swathes of land in counties east of here and
also opened up several mines.
There was unrest among Tennessee coal miners by the early
1890s. One of the biggest issues was the fact that the state of Tennessee was
leasing out convicts to work in the mines, at a much lower cost than the wages
of free miners, putting miners out of work. This led to violence in Anderson
County, about an hour’s drive east of White County, as miners not only went on
strike but burned prison stockades and mining company buildings, setting the
convicts free (on the condition they leave the mines). In what became known as
the Coal Creek War, miners engaged in skirmishes with the state militia, with
many killed or wounded on both sides. The situation died down when the
Tennessee government refrained from renewing their contracts with the mining
companies- the miners had succeeded in getting their attention.
The Coal Creek War did not extend into the mines of White
County, though. In 1899 the Bon Air company was able to brag it had never used
anything but free labor, that their safety record was better than their
competitors, and that there had never been a strike in its mines. That did not
last, however. The first strike would take place that very year.
More to come.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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