Hatfields, McCoys Revisited, Visited : History of Mountain Feuding Lures Scholars and Tourists

For decades the old-timers in this gritty coal town knew things about its dark and bloody past they felt were better left unsaid. Now they’re hoping to turn a skeletons’ closet into a tourist payoff.

Helen Dawson, for example. Now 83, she was a 12-year-old girl when she witnessed the assassination of Matewan Police Chief Sid Hatfield and told her father what she saw.

“He told me never to tell,” she said. “He said it would put the whole family in danger.” All those years, she never told.

Hatfield was a hero to striking coal miners. Coal company agents shot him dead in broad daylight on the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse. That was Aug. 1, 1921.

From that killing erupted the largest of the little-known coal field battles of 1920-21. It ended only after President Warren G. Harding sent federal troops to disperse the miners, about 20,000 of them, who meant to organize a union. By whatever means.

Dawson, who now serves as city recorder in nearby Kimball, was but one of many who kept their counsel. What finally loosened their tongues was the 1987 movie “Matewan.”

“There was enough violence on both sides that for about the first 20 years after it happened people kept their mouths shut just because they were afraid of getting shot,” said director John Sayles, who made the film. “Once you clam up that long, it’s tough to get out of the habit.”

So silence became a way of life in Matewan, a hard-times town backed up against the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River on southern West Virginia’s Kentucky border.

“I was 28 before I even heard about any of this stuff,” said Margaret Casey, a Matewan businesswoman who was born here well after the coal war.

“Somebody said something about the ‘Matewan Massacre’ and I said, ‘Matewan what?’ I knew some of the folks who were tried, but as long as a grandparent or Uncle So-and-So lived, nobody talked.”

And not because there wasn’t plenty to talk about.

The shooting began on May 19, 1920, after 12 coal company detectives came to town to evict striking miners from their company-owned homes. Hatfield sided with the miners.

As the detectives waited for a train, miners and townspeople led by Hatfield and Mayor Cabell Testerman opened fire from rooftops and second-story windows. The mayor, two miners and seven detectives were killed.

The miners and townspeople were found innocent of murder in a sensational trial, but Hatfield and Testerman’s successor, Ed Chambers, were ambushed a year later.

So much drama for such a little place.

Today, Matewan is another struggling mountain town of about 620 people. The coal industry, about the only industry, is undergoing major technological changes that frequently mean layoffs.

But Mayor Johnny Fullen has big dreams. He and others see a future Matewan as a national historic park where visitors can trace the Appalachian past from the Indian inhabitants of about 2,300 years ago through the mountains’ industrial rise and fall in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Fullen is convinced that visitors will find their way to Matewan even though it’s about 100 miles from the nearest interstate. In fact, you have to drive 13 miles along a narrow, twisting road from the nearest four-lane highway. Still, some are curious enough even now to wander through.

But before the new Matewan can live, Mayor Fullen believes, the old Matewan must die.

“I got a card in the mail that just said, ‘Please let the past die.’ That’s all. No signature,” the mayor says.

“But there’s a story here to tell and if you get some distance from it, it has a different appearance. The things that happened here were important. This is where people stood up to the coal operators, where things began to change.

“It’s not just our history. It’s the history of the industrial age.”

Filmmaker Sayles was among the first to tell the tale.

“The media of the time,” Sayles says, “painted the Matewan Massacre and the mine wars that followed as the workings of an out-of-control mob rather than anything like the push-and-shove situation that it was.

“That image has lingered in the memories of people down there.”

By 1920, Matewan had already had its share of publicity. At the turn of the century, nearly a generation before the mine war, big city reporters descended on the area to write about the famous feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia on one side of Tug Fork and the McCoys of Kentucky on the other.

The feud gave Appalachia a reputation that still lingers.

Tradition has it that the Hatfield-McCoy feud began as a dispute over ownership of a pig and escalated into outright war through some misguided sense of family loyalty by inherently violent people.

Historians say there was more to it than that. They see the feud as a larger dispute over land and its timber and mineral wealth, perhaps the first rumblings of a conflict between an agrarian, self-sufficient society and the industrial era.

“The Hatfields and McCoys thing has never helped,” Sayles says. “It has always been portrayed as some sort of backwoods feud, when really the causes were as much political and economic as anything.”

The Hatfields and the McCoys were not illiterate people, Sayles says. “Those families were some of the most important people in the area.”

The 1987 release of “Matewan” was a turning point for many residents, who for the first time saw their history portrayed in a sympathetic, even heroic, light.

Referring to the coal company “detectives,” Sayles says, “There were things that the Baldwin-Felts agents had done, things so Simon Legree-ish that if I had put them into the screenplay for ‘Matewan’ no one would have believed it.”

For example, he said, company agents intercepted a Red Cross shipment of milk intended for the children of striking miners and added kerosene.

“Other people told us about growing up in a coal camp where owners and supervisors would just shoot through the coal camps to show them who was boss,” Sayles says. “That kind of fear is hard to grow out of.”

Company-owned coal camps, as they were called, surrounded Matewan, which was an independent community. In the coal camps, company control was total.

Owners told their employees where to live and where to spend their money, often paying wages in company scrip that could only be spent at the company store. The companies built the schools and hired the teachers.

David Corbin, a West Virginia historian who has written two books about the mine wars, said he grew up ignorant of his state’s history, including the shootings at Matewan.

“Our real history was buried,” he says. “First shame, then ignorance, kept it buried.”

John Alexander Williams, a historian at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., who is working with Fullen, says his plan for Matewan’s historical redevelopment includes a theater for regular screenings of “Matewan.”

The film, he says, depicts the events leading to the shootout “with a seriousness and dignity too rarely seen in film and television treatments of Appalachian people.”

“Cinematic treatments of the Hatfields and McCoys in particular and mountain people in general tend to run to comic-strip stereotypes.”

Williams’ plan calls for a park much like the one at Harpers Ferry, near Washington, D.C., where people and businesses mingle with the historic.

The Army may help. The Corps of Engineers plans to build a flood wall around Matewan, protecting the town from the ravages of the Tug Fork.

The Tug is mostly a stream where kids can wade on an August afternoon. But 36 times in the last 43 years, the Tug Fork has crippled Matewan.

Williams’ plan would take visitors from pre-history to the first exploration from Virginia by Robert Fallam, who turned back at present-day Matewan in 1671 when he found “mountains and hills rising like waves one piled upon the other.”

Williams also proposed a portrayal of the Hatfield-McCoy feud “emphasizing the events and personalities of this famous series of incidents, but also the social and environmental history of the pre-industrial inhabitants of the valley.”

While portraying the Matewan Massacre and the resulting mine wars, Williams says it also is important to include “a survey of the town’s role as a center of economic and social life during the era of industrial expansion in the United States.”

Finally, Williams and Fullen believe visitors also will be interested in Matewan’s modern economy, coal mining on a grand scale: long wall mining underground and mountaintop removal strip-mine projects above.

“There are vehicles of Gargantuan size and often strange shapes plying the roads or parked alongside them,” Williams says. “No one who visits Matewan for the first time can fail to notice that something is going on there that is rarely seen in the urban and suburban districts.”

Fullen and Matewan Development Center Director Paul McAllister Jr. believe Matewan and its residents will benefit most, however.

“People have been so beaten down by the constant, countless negative images of this area that they’re almost embarrassed to admit they’re from down here,” McAllister said.