Depression Era Coal Miner

Lacy Hughart, 97 years old,  Oct. 1, 1904

Place of birth:  Fayette County, West Virginia

Moved to Nicholas/Greenbrier County in 1938

My mother was a widow and I was raised on same as nothing.  She washed clothes for a living and raised 5 kids.  It was tough.  That was at Meadow Bridge, Fayette County, West Virginia.  When I was 10 years old, Old Dr. McClung wanted me to go to work in the hay field,  I had never had a pair of shoes before then and he brought me my first pair of shoes.  I got my first pair of shoes when I was 10 years old.  He bought me a pair of leather shoes that came up on my ankle and buttoned. 
 I would go on to his house on  Monday morning and he would take me and his boy out to Greenbrier County to work until Saturday evening and he would bring us back home on Saturday. evening.
There was two boys older than I was (my two brothers) at home and I had one younger brother and one sister, she was 4 years older than me.  My two older brothers worked in the coal mines after they got 16 years old.  They were in the explosion at  Leland Coal Mines.  They didn’t get killed but they was fastened up from Monday morning, 7 a.m. until  Saturday morning, 10 a.m.  The men was bradished off to keep from getting killed.  They had one entrance and then there was  no. 3 and no. 4 and no. 5. they was in no. 5 at the head of the explosion and they was ahead of the explosion and they bradished themselves off and saved themselves. All 52 of them came out alive; 150 men got killed. That was in 1912. 

Work conditions was bad.  They didn’t furnish enough air, and the gas, they couldn’t get it out.  It was two Italians who set off  slate shots at 7 a.m. on that Monday morning and that started the explosion and it went to the main entrance and it burned all the dust that was in there and that was what caused the explosion and 150 men got killed..    My brothers didn’t work for a long time because they was so scared.  They couldn't go back in the mines.

 But I had to go to work, Mother gave them permission for me  to go to work in the mines.  I went to work that March at  Meadow Bridge.  The mines was owned by Morgannet, Bill Diggin owned the mines, he was from New York.  I was not even 16 years old. 

When I was 16 I joined the United Mine Workers of America. I went to work tending to trap doors, two trap doors on the main lines.  I done that for a little while. Trappin' changed the air, I would open a door and then pull the motors through and that would change the air and then I would shut the door.  I went trip ridin' on the third shift on the motors.  At the same place but at a different time I was doing what you call breakin'.  Hook and unhook the cars. The cars had coal in them.
  I done that a little while and then the motor man went crazy.  He lost his mind.  He came running out of the mines and he went off and  they found him in New York.  They put me to running  the motor.   I was 17.  I ran a haulage motor from inside to the outside tipple. 
  In 1921 we had a strike and that broke the Union in District 29. 

I joined the Union in 1919 before I was 16 years old.  I went in half fare -  $5.00. Initiation was $5.00.  Union dues were $1.00.  John L. Lewis was President of the Union at that time.

He was a tough man and I liked him.  They broke the Union and the mine I was working at blowed out and they didn’t work anymore.  I went to Greenbrier County, MarFrance,  the owner was from New York. 

I got up at 5 a.m. to get ready and get everything done.  You went to work at 7a.m.  It was scary going back in there when you weren’t used it.  I had a dangerous job running the motors for years.  I would haul from 25 to 35 cars a trip.  I went to runnin' motors when I was 17.
  First we used oil lamps to see with, a lamp on your head, then 3 or 4 years later carbide lights, and then later on a battery light with a battery on your hip.  I wore mostly overall jacket and overall pants, no hard toed shoes then they didn’t come around until back in the 30s.
  I loaded coal a little while twice, coal loaders had a hard time after they broke the Union.  Coal went down to 17 cents a ton, that is what they paid the coal loaders.
  I got a letter about four or five months ago from Union District 31 that I was oldest coalminer living.  I worked 42 years in the mines. 

I worked with what was called a string team; a string of mules, one behind the other, and sometimes they had 3 mules. They took a car to a room where the coal was and then went to another place where the coal was and put in on the track and then they came back and got the other.  All I had  was 20 teams of mules on the place I hauled from.  They had a driver, a mule driver.  At  MarFrance after you worked a long time the mine broke out behind a big holler and they had to cross from a tipple and they could turn the mules loose over there about a mile and half and they would go on their own, nobody had to tell them where to go to, they would go to the barn on their own. The coal loader stayed in one place and the mule and driver would take it from place to place and then it would go to the outside. 

I was not in any explosions but fire explosions back then. Electric fires, the people didn’t pay any attention to what they were doing and when it exploded you had to get out of there fast, get out of the smoke or it would kill you..  I was in two different fire explosions in two different mines.  That was long toward the last work I done in the mines. 

When I worked at the mines at MarFance over half of them was colored fellows.  We got along, yes, we got along.  I have had colored people work for me in the mines, trip riding.  Winding Gulf Mines over East Gulf is over from Beckley, do you know where that is?  I answered, "No."   It is about 15 miles beyond Beckley and a lot of them gathered in there and then they would come to MarFrance, they would catch a new mines opening up and they would come to it, white people would to.  They liked a new mines.

When I was just a  strapplin', I got trip riders wages, and when I was motorman, I got motorman wages, $7.18 per day. When the Union went broke you got $4.48 per day and everybody had to stay on every shift until it was cleaned up. 

I lived in a coal camp from 1920 to 1938, at the mines at MarFrance.  It was a dirty, bad job.  I married June 30, 1925.  My wife was Finest Summers, her given name.
  The coal company, when they moved in a new mines, they built houses for you for the people who was going to go to work there. That was a coal camp.  They had a company store you had to buy whatever you needed from the company store.  They had doctors, paid the doctor bill most of the time $1.00 per month.  We used script, I worked for 3 years without a payday.  You had to live out of the company store.  In the spring everybody had to eat ramps around the coal mines because they couldn’t buy any food, they didn’t have anything to buy with. They would nearly starve to death.  They had what they called Bull Dog script, it had a picture of a Shepard dog on it, they would write it out for a dollar a day, if you had anything.  During those 3 years when I was running the motor I  had money in the office but they wouldn’t give it to you.  My youngest brother was working for me then.  Me and him went in one evening and my wife had been to the store and she got one can of peaches and they had the peelings on them.  That is all they would give her for the whole family to eat..  Better than that we would take that script and buy stuff from the peddler. 

But a lot of coal loaders loading coal for 17 cents a ton they didn’t have nothing.  I know people who had potatoes planted in the spring and they would have to dig them up and eat them to keep from starving to death. 

I had a big load of children, I had 10 children.  I had 6 girls and 4 boys. You know I didn’t make nothing working in the mines so I had to go to a farm and work in the mines too.  The house I sold after I quit working in the mines, I built myself.   I worked on the night shift and I worked on the house during the day,  I built my own house, that was after I quit the mines but I was still working and they cut me off in 1957 and I couldn’t get no more work in the mines so I built the house and lived in it but I had a farm and raised stuff and I sold some of the stuff I raised. 

I never got to go to school any, I couldn’t finish the 4^th grade .  I had to go to work when I was 10 years old.  We always had some food to eat and I would buy from the peddler.  I could buy flour and I had meal ground to make bread out of.

I was 14 in 1918 when the war closed and the WWII, I had too big a family, they didn’t take me. 

At MarFrance one time, I had to pull out five men at one time, dead, they were all caught underneath a piece of slate.  I pulled them all out by myself.  I have seen a lot of roofs falling, rock falling all around you.  You didn't know if you would get out dead or alive. 

I had a brake man at MarFarnce breaking for me and we was outside and they called us back in, "slate fall"  and me and my brakeman.  They raised up the slate with jacks and we pulled the man out and he was the brakeman brother and he didn’t know that. And he was dead. 
They didn’t care nothing about killing mules back then.  They brought them out of Missouri.  Paid $50.00 a head and when they got one killed they got $50.00 out of insurance.  Same thing they paid for them.  So they didn't care how many mules they killed. 

After I left MarFrance, I worked for Raven Coal Company on route 55 above Summersville. I was running outside motor I was running it on a strippin' job.  Running it to the outside tipple. 

The Depression Era everybody had to provide for themselves.  Way back then if the men didn’t have a job you didn’t have nothing.  They didn’t have no social security no money coming in at all until they went back to work. 

I knew families that were starving to death during the Depression Era back them.  In 1921 during the Union strike we lived at Meadow Bridge I had a cousin who stayed with us then.  They had about five families living there in the coal camp. I lived in the lumber company house and I didn't have to pay nothing. We hunted every night for possum, they didn’t have anything to eat.  We would clean up those possums and they would eat everyone of them.

I hauled coal for colored people at MarFrance and they called me Mr. Lacy. 

I never did make any moonshine  but one time me and another fellow decided to make it in the kitchen at his house before I was married, I was just a boy.  We made it in a clothes boiler on the stove, it had a lid to fasten on it, you run it through a worm.  We couldn’t drink it, we got drunk in the room smelling it.  We couldn’t take the boiler home until we got sobered up. 

When I worked at Raven the last four years I was United Mines Workers Local President.  We had twenty-five workers part of time and a little bit more.  I didn’t like being President, one thing you can’t suit everybody.  Everybody wanted something done.  The wouldn’t get shed of me, they reelected me twice. 

The coal miners strike in 1921.  At the mines we worked at we got a letter from John L. Lewis, there was five mines in that country, they was going to send a car load of food, every time they said they was going to send it, but it never did come. They said they was going to send food but they never did. It caused a strike and broke the Union. They didn’t do any shooting there but they did in Mingo County. McDowell County and Logan County. 

I have Black Lung it was diagnosed in 1960.  I went to Beckley to be examined and a woman doctor, Ms. Scott , she turned me down.  I signed again and I got a lawyer  and they called me again they had a law judge in Huntington and I had to go down there.  See,  I was running a motor for years and years in sand dust and coal dust.  He made them pay me.  I think politics made them turn me down.  See people was getting it for three and four  years and then they quit and I was one of the ones they quit.  A lot of them are not getting it, a lot of them not getting it now, that has Black Lung. 

Working in the mines was not a good occupation, back in them days you had to work in the mines or not work.  Coal operators would take everything from you they could get a

hold of and not pay you anything. 

Mountaintop removal and strip mining: I think we would be better to take the top off than take the sides off. There would be still be good land there if it was leveled off.  When you strip the sides off it ruins everything.
  I draw ten times more now than when I worked in the mines.  I draw United Mine Workers pension, Black Lung and Social. Security.  I got it coming in and nothing to use it for except save it for my children.    If I had that money back in 1925 I would have been alright, I didn’t have nothing back them. 

Me and my wife had $40.00 for our honeymoon but we didn't go on a honeymoon.  We went from the coal mines at MarFrance to Fayetteville..  That was all we had when we got married.  

I was married from June 30, 1925 to now, my wife has been dead since in January, 1980.

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And when I asked Lacy if he had anything else to tell me.  He asked me if that was my computer and I had to admit it wasn't.  I told him it belonged to the Nicholas County Board of Education and actually it was Kevin's but that he was gone hunting and I had borrowed it without his knowledge.  He thought that was pretty funny and then he remarked that was one thing he didn't know anything about, computers. I told Lacy I was going to put up on the "Net."  He liked that.  I think Lacy Hughart is one of the beautiful people left on this planet today and his interview is pretty amazing for someone 97 years old.  I gave Lacy a hug and set out for the office with Kevin's laptop.

end of interview