Where the road turns to rock and dirt, we found it had been barred by the Company, and a hastily spray-painted “No Trespassing” sign erected on steel cable crossing the road. We drove up the winding mountain road, intending to go up to the scene of the crime.
By the way: the coal company owns the HeadStart Center’s property, so HeadStart won’t even complain about little poor kids being the first to go. Heaven help the mariner when some blast breaks the mountain open and sends those millions (if not billions) of gallons hurtling down onto our HeadStart Center right before it washes the rest of our town and its people down the creek and into the New River.
Watch the forest burn down right before your eyes lyrics full#
Like all played-out coal mines, it’s full of water. Like I said, that mountain’s been mined before.
Here at my home about four miles from the site, we already hear the distant rumbles, like bombs going off, as the blasting of Gauley Mountain proceeds. The coal company has begun the process of blasting the mountain to death from the top down. The mountain’s drainages are the Gauley and New Rivers themselves. The company controls 18,000 acres or more that almost completely encircle my town. A coal company has gotten a permit to utterly destroy the mountain right up to the boundary of the New River Gorge National River, all in the name of seams of coal that are sometimes as thin as six inches. cash, no less), have health care and a pension for their old age but you probably know all that.Īnyway, about fifty folks from my hometown went up on Gauley Mountain Saturday for an event termed a “Blessing of the Mountain.” See, the mountain in question is presently in the early stages of its execution.
A lot of blood got spilled, but in the end, the coal miners of the early twentieth century won the right to form a union, be paid a living wage (in actual U.S. They knew they were slaves and resented it. There’s a war going on in West Virginia again, only the combatants have changed a bit.Ī hundred years ago, when my Great-grandfather was mining coal in these hills, he and his folks understood that human dignity required a community to stand together against the coal bosses who treated them like slaves. I saw on Saturday, April 5 that the past is never so far away that we can’t see it come to life before our eyes. If asked, most folks would tell you that the days of the mine wars are a long gone piece of West Virginia’s violent past. These are the Dodge Citys and Tombstones of Appalachia. They roar down gorges as old as the earth itself, past the ghost towns that are all that’s left of the mine wars of a century ago towns where Mary Harris “Mother” Jones worked to organize the slaves of the coal industry: Thurmond and Glen Jean and Brooklyn and Cunard and Hawks Nest and Prince and McKendree places that are little more than wide mossy spots by the riverside, with a few squared stones marking where entire generations played out. Thousands and thousands of people come here every year to raft the New and Gauley Rivers. I live in Fayette County, West Virginia, the heart and soul of West Virginia’s whitewater rafting tourism industry. Bob graciously permitted me to post it here.
It cuts to the heart of the conflict in the coalfields, between miners and those working to protect the mountains and the communities around them - a conflict propogated by coal companies and shrouded in fear. Bob Kincaid, host of Head-on-Radio Network ( ) has offered this poignant essay.
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