As you may have heard, rain curtailed our painting time on Wednesday, for obvious reasons. But we had a rain plan in mind: a visit to the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine, about an hour away . To be entirely honest, we chaperones were torn between wanting to work a full, productive day and wanting to be able to take students to this mine, given how central mining is to Appalachia's past and present (and, in some form, future). The weather resolved this dilemma, and we piled into vans for the twisty-over-the-mountains trip.
There were two, equally fascinating, components to the mine. First was the underground tour, which Rebecca has written beautifully about (see next post). My dreams last night were haunted by images of men lying on their sides, often in inches of muddy watter, in a space barely two feet high, working a seam. The veteran coal miner who guided our tour was blunt about the value of human lives: the ponies that hauled the coal out of the tunnels, he told us, cost $50 dollars each; miners were free -- and plentiful. If the order came to evacuate, they would hustle the ponies out, leaving the men to fend for themselves. Many of the images above come from that tour.
The second was the reconstructed Coal Camp, the self-contained community where miners and their families lived and worked -- complete with school, church, post office, barber's shop, doctor and Company store. The system was one that can only be called indentured servitude, as the Company controlled prices and even issued its own scrip, only usable internally. The sharp contrast between the three story, nicely-appointed Superintendent's House and the small Miner's House embodied the hierarchical differences.
No comments:
Post a Comment