Denmar's 90th Anniversary

On this day in West Virginia history: It's the 90th anniversary of Denmar Sanitarium, now a prison. The West Virginia Colored Tuberculosis Sanitarium was established on February 16, 1917. The West Virginia Board of Control purchased 185 acres of land and several buildings at Denmar in Pocahontas County, and the facility opened in January 1919. Through its various incarnations, many people from our end of the county have been employed here, and there is a body of stories about ghosts on the premises.

Febuary 14, 2007 on Droop Mountain

The sun came out for a few minutes yesterday afternoon--not really long enough to compose a photograph.

Barbara Ellen of Big Ridge

While searching for something else, I found this interesting article: "Beyond the Mountains": The Paradox of Women's Place in Appalachian History by Barbara Ellen Smith, 1999 (from NWSA Journal Volume 11, Number 3). Smith's prose sometimes lurches about in that academic code-talking style,

[T]he history of women in Appalachia has only begun to be written. Those who make the attempt must come to terms with implicitly gendered constructions of Appalachia and narratives of regional history that feature men as the determinant actors....

but she always recovers, and tells engaging stories of her family and how it informs her studies in Appalachian women's history. I expect the following passage will send you on to read the complete article. Big Ridge is continuous with Pocahontas County's Allegheny Mountain.

I have a faded color photograph of my grandmother, Lelia Belle Fridley Smith. She is standing at the side of the dirt road on the summit of Big Ridge, an ancient mountain that lies on the present border between West Virginia and Virginia, where she and my grandfather settled in 1913. She is gazing east over a panorama of ridges, which are incandescent with fall. Her face is turned away from the camera.

The plain wool scarf, knotted under her chin, her dark sweater and long skirt, the high cheek bones that jut out from the partial profile of her thin face--all mark her as a "mountain woman" from an earlier era. She bore and raised eight children in log cabins and frame houses that never had running water; hoed 50 years of successive plantings of corn on steep mountain hillsides; raised gardens of tomatoes, cabbage, peas, and endless varieties of beans; and used a shotgun to kill the copperheads and rattlesnakes that lurked in the dark corners of the barn and sunned themselves near the blackberry patch. Her dinner table groaned with the bounty that her tending produced.

I remember her as a shy person; even with children, she was quiet to the point of awkwardness. I cannot remember the sound of her voice, or a single word she ever spoke to me. Maybe that is why I have invested her with so many of my own feelings and thoughts. As I gaze at her gazing out over the mountains, I imagine that this rare moment of leisure, when she can enjoy the beauty of the mountains rather than work their soil for a living, brings her pleasure and contentment. As I look at the undulating ridges in front of her, I feel a sweet yearning--for home, for the mountains, for what I imagine her life to have been.

One day I was looking at this picture with my father. He interrupted my sentimental reflections. "She was all the time looking beyond the mountains," he mused to himself. "Big Ridge was like a prison for her; she wanted to see the rest of the world."

...[T]his is a cautionary essay about unquiet women....Nothing I set down on paper seems authentic; nothing captures their experiences, although they are certainly Appalachian women. There is no established historiographic tradition, no "literature review" in which their lives may be interpreted....These women have been dead for anywhere from eight years to more than a century, but they haunt me now.

1924 Valentine's Day Party, Prescott, Iowa

These children's Valentines were in a box of my mother's handkerchiefs, along with some holiday postcards, dated 1922 to 1926. She attended country school near Prescott, Iowa during that time. Happy Valentine's Day!

Steel Cut Oats: Experimental Results and Literature Search

I couldn't remember yesterday morning how much water to put in my oat groats. Is it three parts water to one part oats, or four parts water? My experimental results indicate the optimal ratio is somewhere in between. Below are some links I collected in my before-breakfast Internet search. For the record, I microwaved my oat groats in a mixing bowl, two cups of water to one half cup groats. The authorities below would probably all scoff at the microwave, but I get good results on all my long-cooking porridge mixtures thus: microwave (in an oversize bowl) on full power for two minutes, let porridge stand for two minutes; repeat until you achieve the desired consistency. I do this while wandering in and out of the kitchen getting ready for work, or while drinking my tea and tidying up.

• Cooking Steel Cut Oats in a Thermos, by way of the Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment. A little surprising, but many spiritual seekers value a sound digestion.
• The Best Bowl of Oatmeal from Porridge for Parkinson's, an organization that raises funds for Parkinson's Disease Research.
• Crockpot Oatmeal. Start cooking your steel cut oats at bedtime; they'll be ready for breakfast.
• Sunday Brunch: Steel Cut Oats from blogger Baking Sheet.
• Karen's Kitchen: Everything Oats. It may not be EVERYTHING, but it is "many things oats." Oat facts, oat anecdotes, oat recipes.
• Scottish Buttermilk Oat Scones

Self-Patterned Socks In the Snow

I don't buy self-patterning yarn. Why should the yarn designer have all the fun? I pattern my own socks, thank you very much. However, my wonderfully-named friend Merrily bought this "Froehlich Wolle Blauband MaxiRingel" sock yarn, and mailed it from Michigan on her grand tour of the West. It's quite delightful, and I never would have thought to put a coral stripe in this violet medley. Unfortunately, the yarn is discontinued. Note to self: use more discordant colors in Fair Isle socks.

History of Carbohydrate Chemistry

In my continuing search for materials on the history of chemistry, I've been browsing the Web for carbohydrate chemistry. Here are some good sources. Reading about "how they came to know that" seems to help me understand and remember this material, which was always less than intuitive for me.

• Web Articles by Edwin Thall including several good history of chemistry topics. I found this set of articles via Stereochemistry, Thall's discussion of three-dimensional organic chemistry, and how "they figured it out."
• Chemical Heritage Foundation has extensive history of chemistry resources.

  CHF maintains a world-class collection of materials that document the history and heritage of the chemical and molecular sciences, technologies, and industries; encourages research in CHF collections; and carries out a program of outreach and interpretation in order to advance an understanding of the role of the chemical and molecular sciences, technologies, and industries in shaping society.

Stranger With a Camera

Here are a couple more quotes dealing with the issue of cultural stereotypes and Appalachia. Please note that Shelby Lee Adams uses his family ties to Hobart Ison as a reassurance to Lecher County residents that he is "one of them," and not exploiting them. I am somewhat less convinced by this credential, as people often exploit their own. However, Ison and Adams have a lot to show us about the conflict between the "from here" and "come here" Appalachians.

"Appalachia, Democracy, and Cultural Equity" by Dudley Cocke of Appalshop's Roadside Theater

A story points to how confusing poverty is to those who are poor and those who try to empathize with it....As part of the national media's coverage of...[Johnson's War on Poverty], CBS produced "Christmas in Appalachia." Charles Kuralt narrated: "Up on the hill is the Pert Creek School. And up there on this one day is the only sign in this hollow that it is Christmas in Appalachia." The camera cut to half a dozen kids gathered around a coal stove singing "Silent Night." After the broadcast, a little town in Virginia named Appalachia received so many pairs of shoes, simply addressed to "Appalachia, U.S.A.," that....a shoe-burning party was proclaimed by City Council.

The events covered in Stranger With a Camera, 2000 deal with the results of such well-intentioned attention.

....On September 24, 1968, a Lecher County, Kentucky landowner, Hobart Ison, shot and killed National Film Board of Canada director Hugh O'Connor for filming a poor family on his land....filmmaker [Elizabeth] Barret uses...this incident to raise troubling ethical questions about identity, balance and media exploitation which no journalist...can afford to ignore.

Poverty was not new to Eastern Kentucky in 1968; absentee mine ownership, mechanization, unemployment, strip mining, decaying company towns had left more than half the population living below the poverty line. But it was the politically charged atmosphere of America in the 1960s that transformed these creeks and hollows into symbols of persistent poverty, a standing rebuke to the American Dream. Barret traces how a courageous expose by a local lawyer, Harry Caudill, generated front page articles in the New York Times, a BBC documentary and Charles Kuralt's classic documentary, Christmas in Appalachia....

Many locals agreed with Ison that the issue wasn't poverty but the right of outsiders to holdup another people's culture. Ultimately Ison served only a year in jail for his crime. In the 60's Ison's argument about outside agitators was already familiar in the South from White Citizens Councils attacks on the Civil Rights Movement. Today it resonates strangely with certain strands of post-modern cultural criticism....

Little Sockprints in the Snow

Here's evidence that I occasionally complete a knitting project. The pattern is "Little Wave" from Barbara G. Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Designs. It's a good sock choice, as it draws up slightly, and stretches well. I'm not sure why I felt compelled to rush outside and photograph the socks in the snow on our tractor, but here it is.

Shelby Lee Adams' Photographs

I love to look at old black and white photographs. I'm not fussy--Ansel Adams is great, but I also like the work of unknown portrait makers showing people in their yards, their porches, or their coffins. Some time ago, I started to write a short essay on Shelby Lee Adams's work for my Appalachia collection, and just bogged down with it. I still can't decide what I think of his work. In composition, and in the use of contrast, the photographs are beautiful. I don't find his portrait subjects all that disturbing, but I grew up on a farm in Iowa, where hog butchering, woodsheds, satellite dishes, and outhouses were routine, and I wasn't raised to ignore the poor, the handicapped, or the infirm, either.

Adams' photographs feature all these subjects in rural Kentucky. While he protests that these people are his friends and relatives, he only "summers" in the Appalachians. When he returns to his Massachusetts studio, he has to understand that his suburban gallery-go-ers will gawk at these pictures like a fatal car crash. "My God! The poverty, the deformity, the white trash! How much for a print?"

He's making money and a career off the hillbilly stereotype, like so many others (including James Dickey and John Fox, Jr.) have before him. I'm not sure what I think of that, but God help me, I like many of the pictures. You can see some at these links, and also read other reviewers' anguished musings about what it all means.

• Shelby Lee Adams Gallery photos
• More gallery photos, with Adams' CV & bio
• Shelby Lee Adams, Gallery Exibition
• Another gallery, another exhibition
• another one yet
• 2002 review: "I do not see poverty in my pictures:"

  Are Shelby Lee Adams's documentary stills of rural Kentucky insightful or exploitative? Sarah Milroy talks to the photographer, who is himself tormented by contradiction.

• From: Appalachian Books Summer 1998 Releases: Appalachian Legacy: Photographs by Shelby Lee Adams. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1998.

  The author's autobiographical essay and his explanation of his rationale for creating this disturbing book are both interesting. Adams grew up in rural Letcher County, Kentucky, and ironically Hobart Ison who shot and killed a Canadian photographer there in 1967, when Adams was a senior in high school, was his cousin. Adams claims he is interested in the last remnants of traditional mountain people, but he has obviously chosen for this book a disproportionate number of traditional people who happen to have physical and mental abnormalities. They sometimes appear especially grotesque the way Adams has configured the pictures. Thus, despite the title and despite the fact that several of the pictures here are outstanding, this is not a book about Appalachia. Instead, too much of it is simply a book which serves merely to reinforce the worst stereotypes of the region as a whole. As part of a larger collection of all kinds of regional photography, this book may serve an artistic or sociological purpose....

• The holler dwellers: The photographs of Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia are so honest, they make you wince" by Christina Rees (Dec 3, 1998).

  ....We're more likely to look to third-world countries for signs of gross poverty or archaic society than we are to search our own back yard....To most of us urbanites, Appalachia's impression was sealed in celluloid in 1972....Part black-and-white documentation, part haunting artistic vision, Adams' photos go beyond the call of duty on either end....National Geographic meets Diane Arbus, On the Road with David Lynch instead of Charles Kuralt.

  ...most viewers will likely forget they're even looking at stunningly composed photographs. They're too busy marveling at what they reveal: a legacy of rural tradition anchored in welfare, alcohol, coal mining, religion, and questionably extended families....We are outside looking in, and though we try, we can't quite grasp what separates these people from the rest of us. We can't fathom that it's because we own computers and fast cars and work in office buildings, and they handle snakes in church and slaughter hogs and use outhouses. Sure, theirs is an evaporating culture in a fast-homogenizing world, but you can see in those eyes, those knowing, challenging gazes, that their mixed fate is rooted far deeper than the material, far past their lack of college education and paltry paychecks. That Adams' photos can hint at the complexity of this buried mountain culture without exploiting its people is the second part of his art.

  ....It's difficult to neatly package an emotional response to this work. The sensationalist in us wants to know all the dirt, to find affirmation in our suspicion of the subjects' depravity. The humanitarian in us wants to suspend judgment and study the photos as art and fact. Devil on the left shoulder, angel on the right. In the end, our projected criticism may say more about us than about them--Adams' endangered holler dwellers. And we can only hope that if someone photographed us in our natural environment, our eyes could meet the camera with the same soulful honesty, the same beautiful truth.

Sewing, Linux and Social Bookmarking

I've been trying to understand Web 2.0, and social networking. Really, I have. For me, Technorati, Digg, and other hip sites just aren't very interesting. I keep checking back every few months, though. Last week I made my first interesting discovery using the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. You'll see by my sidebar that I like Linux and sewing. Here's a website relevant to both topics: Free-penguin.org: patterns for Tux

Welcome to the free-penguin project page. This project provides 'executables' that enable you to make your own soft-toy Linux® penguin.

Hardware Requirements: First research efforts have shown that at least a needle, a long thread, black and white plushy fabric as well as yellow textile are necessary. Other assets that might be needful are thimbles, more thread and scissors. Warning: Before you start, make sure that you know what you are doing. Doing things on a trial-and-error basis in the fields we are dealing with here can do a lot of harm.

And they have a blog! Will this sew a del.icio.us button back on my Mozilla toolbar? Only time will tell.

Poetry, Newton, and Alchemy

Here are some excerpts from an interview on Newton's alchemy with historian Bill Newman, who has some interesting things to say about alchemy, poetry, and riddles. It's no wonder alchemy interested both John Donne and Isaac Newton.

[A]lchemy has been portrayed as the epitome of irrationality and a sort of avaricious folly....But we now know that most of the great minds of the [seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] were involved in alchemy, including Robert Boyle, John Locke, Leibniz, any number of others....[Alchemy] became legal during Newton's time. But why was it illegal? There's a long association, for good reasons, between alchemy and counterfeiting.

....[Newton] thought that alchemy promised tremendous control over the natural world. It would allow you to transmute virtually anything into anything else, not just lead into gold. There are other things, too, that probably were in Newton's mind. For example, alchemists realized that if the philosophers' stone were real and it got out to the public, it would ruin the gold standard.

....[T]his was the enigmatic language of alchemy. I mean "enigmatic" in a quite strict sense: it was a riddling language. The best way to look at these metaphors is in the light of riddles....the "menstrual blood of the sordid whore" is decipherable. It means simply the metalline form of antimony. That is the "menstrual blood" that's extracted from the "sordid whore," which is the ore of antimony.

It is a code, and it's clear that the alchemists delighted in this code. It's almost a form of poetry. In fact, lots of alchemists wrote in the form of poetry, quite literally.

....Newton was reading alchemists over a period of time, ranging over perhaps a thousand years, and there was a lot of development in these treatises. But Newton generally thinks they're all saying the same thing, so that's a problem....he was weaving together extracts from different authors, trying to make sense out of them. I think alchemy was the ultimate riddle. Newton delighted in riddles, and this provided a challenge to him that he just couldn't resist.

My inevitable list of links:

• The Alchemy Website. A broad range of articles, illustrations, and essays on the many meanings of alchemy.
• An interview on Newton's alchemy with historian Bill Newman. Part of Newton's Dark Secrets PBS (November 15, 2005)
• Isaac Newton by James Gleick (2003) is an excellent biography of Sir Isaac Newton. I had previously read quite a bit about Newton, but I couldn't seem to form a mental image of the man or his environment. Gleick interweaves the scant Newtonian biographical material with the political, economic, and science history.
• James Gleick has a very interesting internet site, around.com, where he archives some essays, reviews, and an ecclectic collection of links. It hasn't been updated recently, but there's plenty here to amuse and instruct.

Chemistry Lessons and John Donne

I'm preparing another chemistry lecture, and I keep coming back to John Donne. It may seem strange, but it's all connected in my head. I suspected the Bridgid in Cyberspace celebrants might find the final couplet of Donne poem Love's Alchemy a little, well, misogynistic, so I went with a The Relic (equally strange and blasphemous in its own way). But my reading lately has included some history of chemistry, including its early roots in alchemy. Here's Donne's chemistry connection:

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,
Say, where his centric happiness doth lie.
        I have loved, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery.
        O! 'tis imposture all ;
And as no chemic yet th' elixir got,
        But glorifies his pregnant pot,
        If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
    So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,
    But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
        Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?
        That loving wretch that swears,
'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
        Which he in her angelic finds,
        Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
    Hope not for mind in women ; at their best,
    Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess'd.

Here's my usual list of links:

• The Alchemy Website. A broad range of articles, illustrations, and essays on the many meanings of alchemy.
• An interview on Newton's alchemy with historian Bill Newman. Part of Newton's Dark Secrets PBS Airdate: November 15, 2005
• General, Organic and Biochemistry, courtesy of James K. Hardy and the University of Akron. An excellent quick reference to the chemistry I'm concerned with now.

Sweatshirt Patterns--Finding a Favorite

Last week I started a developing favorite sweatshirt pattern. I had purchased Kwiksew's Sweatshirts Unlimited because I liked their "Beautiful Lingerie" book, and the company Web site's blurb promised:

The Master Pattern included in this book is for a sweatshirt in eight different sizes....The book includes unlimited variations for necklines, hems, sleeve finishes, design changes, decorative finishes and much more. With the help of this book, you can design a sweatshirt for any occasion from sporty to a dressier look.

This sweatshirt book was published in 1989, at the height of the Dreadfully Oversized Women's Wear Epoch, so the photos may distress the fashion-conscious. However, there is a nice size range, from finished chest measurements of 35 inches to 56 inches, and there are many neckline, sleeve, pocket, and bottom-edge variations, as well as a substantial section on "design changes." The design changes include yokes, elaborate fabric inserts, and many surface embellishment techniques. It cost about as much as three regular patterns, and I think it was a good buy.

I handled the oversized styling issue by guessing how much wearing ease I would like. About four inches works well for me for loose-fitting knit clothes; the patterns as written allow eight inches. I copied the pattern in my best size guess, cut up an old sweatshirt (from the same Dreadfully Oversized Epoch) as a first test, and found the fit through the body about right. The shoulders were still too big for my taste, so I took out some of that fullness, and got a good fit in my second trial, using $1.50-a-yard sweatshirt fleece. Now that the fit is worked out, I can have fun experimenting with some of the design variations.

J.J. Thomson's Experiments--At Last, I See!

When I was an undergraduate student, I believed my chemistry and physics professors hated me. I was a biological sciences major, and had to take large lecture sections with the 200-300 pre-med and pre-vet students. They were no fun as classmates. ("Will this be on the test?" they whined; later, as an instructor, I heard a pre-med choral whine of "My daddy will sue you for giving me a C.") As a student, it was almost impossible for me to ask a question in lecture, and I never got a civil (let alone helpful) answer from a chemistry or physics professor in the three years I spent in those departments.

This was in sharp contrast to my experiences in all my other classes, from Chaucer to calculus to microbiology. Of course, I graduated loving Chaucer, and statistics, and botany....and hating chemistry. Of course, every science job I ever had after grad school was in biochemistry.

Now I'm teaching a college-level chemistry class, and having flashbacks to the seventies as I prepare lectures. I'm current on DNA, but haven't thought about electron shells, subshells, and orbitals much lately. That's how I got curious about John Thomson's nineteenth century experiments on subatomic particles and electromagnetic charges. My chemistry students were supposed to work through a little computer simulation on "how we discovered the mass of the electron," but we couldn't make it "come out right." When I did this in physics lab in 1976, with equipment old enough to have been original to Thomson's lab, we got the same non-result. I couldn't make sense of it then, but I was determined to figure it out this time. That's how I came to find these excellent links. There are some amazing student resources available now. I'm a bit jealous.

• Three Experiments, One Big Idea. This is an excellent explanation from the Center for the History of Physics. I'm slowly working my way through the many interesting chemistry and physics "exhibits" on their site.
• Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940): "Carriers of negative electricity." Nobel Lecture in Physics, December 11, 1906. [from Nobel Lectures: Physics, 1901-1921 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1967)]. The text of Thomson's Nobel Lecture. I was amazed to find I could follow it.
• J.J. Thompson's experiment and the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. Mark E. Tuckerman of New York University has his lectures for General Chemistry I (Honors) available on line. The Thomson experiment lecture is quite clear and readable.
• A Brief History of the Electron from Egglescliffe's Physics Website.Their information is quite comprehensible, and this is their generous mission:

  The idea behind the website is to encourage the study of physics at post-16 level and share ideas and educational material....Feel free to print/download these pages and use them in lessons / private study or starting points for www exploration. Any of the material in this website is freely available for anyone to use in their own educational web projects. If you want to acknowledge this site as a source fine, otherwise do not worry."

St Bridgid's Day Poetry Reading

Last year Reya threw a poetry reading in honor of St. Brigid. This year, Deborah Oak is hosting the event. I find I'm reading much the same poetry as last year--for me, midwinter is John Donne season. Part of it is his surprising use of science language and imagery.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
    Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres, 
    Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers' love 
    --Whose soul is sense--cannot admit 
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
    The thing which elemented it.  

Part of it is the mingling of the profane and the divine. I keep coming back to "The Anniversaries." They are too long for a poetry reading, and I can't seem to excerpt, so here is a shorter, strange musing, "The Relic" by John Donne.

            When my grave is broke up again
            Some second guest to entertain,
            --For graves have learn'd that woman-head,
            To be to more than one a bed--
                And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
                Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

            If this fall in a time, or land,
            Where mass-devotion doth command,
            Then he that digs us up will bring
            Us to the bishop or the king,
                To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
                A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.
And, since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.

            First we loved well and faithfully,
            Yet knew not what we loved, nor why;
            Difference of sex we never knew,
            No more than guardian angels do;
                Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
                Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.
These miracles we did ; but now alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

I Heart Beartown

Beartown State Park is an interesting rock formation on Droop Mountain, almost on the Pocahontas-Greenbrier county line. In the 1970's the parks department built a boardwalk through it. On a day like today, I might get some spectacular pictures, but odds are good I'd slip on the ice. I can do that here at home on the porch more conveniently, so I thought I'd post these photos from last October.

Hatfields and McCoys

While we're thinking about West Virginia history, we should remember that Sid Hatfield was kin to Anse Hatfield, and the other participants in the famous feud. Here's my favorite book on the topic.

Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 by Altina L. Waller. 1988. University of North Carolina Press. This is a scholarly book, but very engaging. Waller avoids simplistic explanations of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Many older references explain it as the natural violence of the inbred, degenerate hillbillies, while more recent authors present it as the exploited natives driven to violence by outsider-capitalists. Waller examines the feud in the social context of its place and time, and bases her account of the community on contemporary resources such as court records, deeds and wills. There are good pictures. (I always like pictures.) The amazon.com link includes some reviews of the book by authorities in the field.

Sid Hatfield's Trial

On this day in West Virginia history: On January 28, 1921, the trial of police chief Sid Hatfield for his role in the Matewan Massacre began in Williamson.

When non-union miners in Mingo County went on strike for the right to join the United Mine Workers in the spring of 1920, mine guards from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency evicted miners from their company-owned houses. After twelve Baldwin-Felts men arrived in Matewan, chief of police Sid Hatfield encouraged townspeople to arm themselves. The situation exploded into a gunfight in which seven detectives and four townspeople were killed.

The trial of Sid Hatfield and twenty-two other defendants for the murder of one of the detectives, Albert Felts, began on January 28, 1921. Some forty armed Baldwin-Felts agents lined the streets of Williamson that morning to influence the pro-union jury. Despite the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses, the jury acquitted Hatfield and the other defendants in what was the lengthiest murder trial in the state's history.

Realizing the impossibility of gaining a conviction in southern West Virginia, Baldwin-Felts gunmen prevented Sid Hatfield from standing trial in an unrelated case in McDowell County later that year. Hatfield and a deputy, Ed Chambers, were murdered on the steps of the county courthouse, sparking an armed march on southern West Virginia by union miners, which ended with the Battle of Blair Mountain. Again, despite numerous eyewitness accounts, accused murderers went free. Baldwin-Felts agents C. E. Lively, "Buster" Pence, and Bill Salter were acquitted of the Hatfield and Chambers murders on the grounds of self defense, although neither victim was armed.

As usual, I have links:

• Matewan, WV Homepage includes detailed information on the Battle of Matewan.
• Mingo Genealogy's Matewan history page
• History of Mingo County
• The Red Neck War of 1921 Michael M. Meador, originally published in The Goldenseal Book of the West Virginia Mine Wars
• Blair Mountain from the Other Side by R. B. Adams, also from The Goldenseal Book of the West Virginia Mine Wars
• Wikipedia's "Battle of Blair Mountain" seems reasonably accurate (although I am no expert), and it has links to a number of interesting related articles.
• National Trust for Historic Preservation's Blair Mountain Battlefield page describes it as one of America's "11 Most Endangered Places."
• Preservation Alliance of West Virginia's Blair Mountain site also has information about the Battle of Blair Mountain.
• Ironically named Blair Mountain Estates, a ritzy development in Western North Carolina.

Prison Notebook of Captain James M. McNeill

Louise McNeill, Pocahontas County's most famous poet, wrote a short piece about her paternal grandfather, called The Prison Notebook of Captain James M. McNeill, C.S.A.. Here's an excerpt:

James McNeill, "Grandpa Jim", grew up on the family farm at Buckeye, Pocahontas County. He remembered seeing the wild pigeons how all day long, flying over, their wings darkened the sun. Almost his first memory was of the big and the three smaller Indians who came to his mother's cabin when he was five or six years old. He remembered, too, going to "pay school" and cutting his bare feet on the crick ice....

[In the Battle of Droop Mountain, November 6, 1863] Jim McNeill was captured and started on his long journey to Fort Delaware. Driven north along the Droop road with the prisoners, he met his Yankee brother, Al, hurrying south with the Federal troops. "Howdy, Jim," said Al with a kind of narrow, Scotch-Irish triumph. But the Captain didn't even nod. "The Rebels ain't speakin' today." He looked straight ahead of him and went on to Fort Delaware prison where he was held prisoner till June 13, 1865....somehow, there he got hold of a pen and a little brown notebook and with only a few months of "pay school" for his literary stylistics began to write poems....

The notebook is a small, ledger-like book, some six by four inches in size, and is faded and torn. It has lain undisturbed in the top drawer of a black walnut highboy these 100 years and is filled with jottings and poems.Some of the poems are good poems, and many of them are written from a war prisoner's point-of-view.

• The text quoted above is from The 22nd Virginia Infantry Regiment History Society. They quote the article completely, but don't say where it was published. I think it's print source is Louise McNeill Pease, "The Prison Notebook of Captain James M. McNeill, C. S. A.," West Virginia History 31(April 1970): 180-184.
• Pocahontas County Early History. This is another interesting but poorly-attributed article on Pocahontas County history.
• McNeill family history. A genealogy resource.