112 ChaPter 2
keys to the trunk, and I refused to do it, and then they hit me and threw me
down.” One senator then asked, “What was your physical condition at that
time?” Mrs. Seville’s answered “I was pregnant for five months.” Finally,
Governor Harry Hatfield—of Hatfield and McCoy fame—mediated an end to
the strike with the right to organize a union, along with better wages and
hours, semi-monthly pay, and selection of checkweightmen for the workers.
Afterwards, a local banker estimated that the strike and violence cost the Paint
Creek area $100 million, led to 50 murders, and caused starvation and mal-
nutrition among miners that caused a large number of other deaths.
The Paint Creek Battle would be minor compared to what was to come,
the Battles of Matewan and Blair Mountain in the early 1920s. Matewan was
in Mingo County, along the Tug Fork River, and home coal mining operations
and thousands of miners, many of whom wanted to join the UMW, led by its
energetic new president John L. Lewis. As Miners joined the union, however,
the coal operators fought back, firing the worker from his job and removing
him from company-owned housing—as in Paint Creek. The operators even
brought in scabs, mostly Blacks and Italians, to take the strikers’ jobs, but they
ended up supporting the Miners Union too. Still, by May 1920, about 3,000
Tug Fork area workers had joined the union, and nowhere was the UMW
more active than in Matewan. In that city, a rare combination existed—the
police chief, Sid Hatfield [again, of Hatfield and McCoy fame] had been a
miner himself and he and the mayor, Cabell Testerman, openly supported the
union drive and protected the miners. On the morning of May 19th, how-
ever, conditions were to change drastically and tragically. Thirteen Baldwin-
Felts agents, including the president Thomas Felts and his two younger broth-
ers, arrived in Matewan to begin evicting miners from their homes. Decades
later, the filmmaker John Sayles would depict the episode in his film, simply
titled Matewan.
Immediately, word of the Baldwin “thugs” made the rounds and hundreds
of armed miners and town folk showed up at the Stone Mountain Mine
Camp, where the miners’s families lived. Testerman rejected the eviction
notices, and Hatfield deputized the entire crowd. That episode was over, but
the operators were ready to ramp up their attack. When Hatfield tried to
arrest Al Felts for conducting evictions without proper authority, a shot rang
out, and the battle was on. Hundreds of shots were fired and Al Felts and
Mayor Testerman, and 5 other detectives and 2 miners, were killed. Sid