Blair Mountain: The Largest Armed Uprising Since the Civil War

For nine days at the end of August and start of September 1921, something like 10,000 armed coal miners marched on Logan County, West Virginia, to fight their way through a private army defending the coalfields. It is the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War, and before federal troops ended it, the government readied Army bombers loaded with poison gas for the miners still on the mountain.

Sheriff Don Chafin held the ridge with roughly 3,000 deputies, state police, and hired guards, paid for by the Logan County Coal Operators Association. Estimates of the miners’ side run from about 7,000, the figure on the state historical marker, to as many as 15,000; ten thousand is the figure that shows up most often in the record. Whatever the exact count, it was the largest armed force organized labor ever put in the field in this country, and the other side had airplanes.

Matewan, then Welch

The march had two immediate triggers, a little over a year apart. On May 19, 1920, agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency arrived in Matewan, Mingo County, to evict striking miners’ families from company housing. Matewan’s police chief, Sid Hatfield, sided with the miners and confronted the agents with arrest warrants. The gunfight that followed killed ten people: seven Baldwin-Felts men, including brothers Albert and Lee Felts, and three townspeople, among them Matewan’s mayor, Cabell Testerman. A jury acquitted Hatfield of murder, and the coalfields treated him as a hero for it.

West Virginia was not inventing this fight. Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre had already shown, in 1914, what a company’s private guards would do to a tent colony of strikers; the Baldwin-Felts agency ran the same playbook for the coal operators of southern West Virginia. The following year, the agency answered Matewan directly. On August 1, 1921, Hatfield and a friend, Ed Chambers, climbed the steps of the McDowell County courthouse in Welch, unarmed, wives at their sides, to face an unrelated charge. Baldwin-Felts men shot both of them dead on the steps. None of the shooters was convicted. They claimed self-defense. Thousands turned out for Hatfield’s funeral, and miners across the region started arming themselves within days.

A telegram that wasn’t real

United Mine Workers District 17, led by president Frank Keeney and secretary-treasurer Fred Mooney, called the miners to assemble in the Kanawha Valley. On August 24, with thousands gathered at Marmet and ready to march south, the union’s most famous organizer, Mother Jones, tried to stop them. She held up a telegram she said came from President Harding, promising he would end the mine-guard system if the miners went home. Keeney telephoned Harding’s secretary, George Christian, who told him no such telegram existed. Jones would not produce the document when the miners asked to see it. They marched anyway.

Chafin’s line

Chafin struck first, raiding the mining camp at Sharples on August 27 with about 70 officers. The main fighting opened three days later. On August 30, a 45-year-old miner and Baptist minister named John Wilburn told his congregation he was laying down his Bible to take up his rifle, and led 50 to 75 armed men up the mountain. At dawn his group ran into three of Chafin’s deputies, and the shooting started. Who fired first is disputed in the record: by one account, Deputy John Gore shot and killed a Black miner in Wilburn’s group, Eli Kemp, and died in the return fire; by the National Park Service’s telling, the miners wounded Gore first, Gore killed Kemp, and Wilburn’s men then finished Gore. Both versions end the same way, with Kemp and Gore dead and the battle open. The line, eventually some 15 miles of ridge, was held by miners Black and white together.

Across the battle, close to a million rounds reportedly went off along that ridge. Chafin’s side hired three private biplanes and dropped homemade bombs on the miners at Spruce Fork Ridge: two canisters of gas and two loaded with gunpowder, nuts, and bolts for shrapnel, according to the historian James Green. One bomb never exploded. Miners recovered it whole and later carried it into a courtroom as evidence.

Washington sends its own bombers

President Harding federalized troops on September 1. Separately, on the government’s order, General Billy Mitchell sent Army Air Service bombers into West Virginia, staged at an airfield near Charleston and loaded to drop gas on the miners below if the order came. The Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area, which researched the wreck of one of the planes, calls it the only time the US military has readied itself to bomb American citizens. The order never came. On September 3, Mitchell recalled the planes to Langley, Virginia, and one of them, a twin-engine Martin bomber called Bomber No. 5, went down in a storm over Nicholas County on the flight back, killing four of its five crew. No federal bomb ever reached Blair Mountain. The nearest the government came to gassing its own miners ended in a training-flight crash instead.

Miners lay down their rifles

More than 2,000 federal soldiers arrived under General Harry Bandholtz. Many of the miners were World War I veterans themselves, and by the accounts left behind, that mattered: they would fight Chafin’s private army, not the United States Army. By September 3 they were surrendering by the hundreds; roughly 1,000 turned their weapons in directly to federal troops, and the rest scattered home on their own. Nobody kept a reliable count of the dead. Figures for miners killed run from about sixteen, a modern historian’s estimate, to as high as a hundred, and for Chafin’s side up to around thirty, and every one of those numbers shows up in a source describing the same nine days.

The trials, and who never stood one

West Virginia indicted 985 miners, on charges that ran from murder to treason against the state government. The trials moved to Charles Town, hundreds of miles from the coalfields. Bill Blizzard, the 28-year-old miner the union treated as the march’s field general, faced treason charges in three venues, Charles Town, Lewisburg, and Fayetteville; a jury acquitted him in the main trial, and prosecutors dropped the rest. The recovered dud bomb from Spruce Fork Ridge, entered as evidence, argued his side of the story better than any lawyer could. Keeney and Mooney, who had called the march in the first place, faced treason charges too, along with roughly twenty other UMWA officers. Most of the 985 either walked free or drew light sentences, the last of them paroled in 1925.

John Wilburn did not walk free. He and his son were convicted of murder for killing Deputy Gore, sentenced to eleven years apiece, had the term cut to five by one governor, and were pardoned by the next after three years in the state penitentiary. Sheriff Don Chafin, whose hired army held the ridge and whose planes dropped the bombs, was never charged with anything. Neither were the coal operators who paid for his army.

The union paid a longer bill than any courtroom handed down. Membership in the southern coalfields collapsed for most of the following decade, and union organizing did not return to those counties with legal protection behind it until the New Deal’s labor laws in the mid-1930s.

The Redneck Army

The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum records that miners tied red bandanas around their necks at Blair Mountain as a mark of their solidarity, and that they called their own force the Redneck Army. The word is older than the battle by about a century: dictionaries trace redneck to at least the 1830s, describing poor, sunburned white farm laborers across the rural South. The miners did not coin the insult. They wore it up the mountain.

A fight over the mountain that hasn’t stopped

The battlefield’s legal fight ran longer than any of the criminal trials. In 2006 it made the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of the country’s most endangered historic sites, threatened by mountaintop-removal mining. On March 30, 2009, roughly 1,600 acres of it were added to the National Register of Historic Places. Nine months later, on December 30, 2009, it came back off, after Alpha Natural Resources and Arch Coal, two coal companies holding overlapping mining permits on the ridge, produced a list of landowners objecting to the listing.

A Charleston attorney checked that list. Two of the objectors were dead, one of them for 27 years. Two more were life-estate holders who did not legally own the land they lived on. US District Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled on April 11, 2016 that federal officials had accepted the state’s list without checking a single name on it, called the delisting “arbitrary and capricious,” and sent the case back. On June 27, 2018, the Keeper of the National Register restored the listing, calling the earlier removal a mistake. A century after Don Chafin’s line, the mountain was still being fought over, on paper this time, by people who had learned to read a deed book.