Esau in the Coalfields

Owing Our Souls to the Company Store

Michael and Carrie Kline with Joy and Chuck Lynn

Originally published in a slightly different form in Appalachian Heritage (vol. 59, no. 5, Summer 2011).

Émile Zola writing of working conditions in the French coalfields of the late nineteenth century penned vivid pictures of coal camp life that resonated deeply with mining developments in the new state of West Virginia during the same period. This fiction, based on Zola's six months of intensive research living and taking careful notes in the coal mining district of Borinage, in the Alsace region of northern France, featured such familiar themes as child labor, appalling working conditions, hunger, ever-mounting debt at the company store, crippling and maiming from industrial accidents, and early death from industrial diseases. In Germinal, Zola explored another mortifying interaction between the company store and the village women and girls, daughters and wives of the coal miners: "It was a known fact that when a miner wished to prolong his credit, he had only to send his daughter or his wife, plain or pretty, it mattered not, provided they were complaisant."

In West Virginia we have our own versions of child labor, appalling working conditions, hunger, ever-mounting debt at the company store, mine guards, Gatling guns, and labor wars. But until quite recently, the use of female flesh to extend credit to feed the family was never mentioned by our own regional historians. We've pretty well accepted that early coal operators were a mean, iron-willed breed bent on ruthless control and rising profits — but surely not that mean.

Zola's Germinal was published in 1885. A year or two later the young Collins brothers arrived in the Fayette-Raleigh coalfields of southern West Virginia from their home in Alabama, where Justus Collins had gotten his start in personnel management overseeing prison labor in the mines around Birmingham. These young adventuring capitalists soon bought into thousands of acres of rich coal lands just as the new industry was emerging in the raw and lawless wilderness of our state. So successful was Justus Collins in this land of opportunity that in just a few years he had built and was operating three octagonal, turreted company stores in southern Fayette County, the Justice Colliery Company Store in Glen Jean, the Collins Colliery Company Store in Prudence, and the Whipple Colliery Company Store at the intersection of Rt. 612 near Oak Hill, West Virginia. These stores serviced the needs of families employed at the various Collins mines. The store at Glen Jean burned to the ground in 1934, the year of Collins's death. The same fate befell the Prudence store a few years later. But the Whipple Store, completed in 1893, has miraculously survived for nearly 120 years, a kind of social/industrial history vault in which many unspeakable secrets are stored.

This past July 4, my wife Carrie Kline and I had a prearranged date with Joy and Chuck Lynn, owners and interpreters of the Whipple Company Store Museum and Learning Center these past five years. They bought the imposing old building when it was on the verge of being condemned and razed. Recently retired from business in Florida, they were attracted to the aging structure because of all the history lived within its walls for more than a century.

Joy and Chuck agreed to take us on a tour of the building, even to show us the old embalming room in the basement which was in constant use from when the store was completed in 1893 until the federal government instituted the death certificate in 1932. We recorded their compelling interpretations, moving from one room to another throughout the long day. Our conversations began on the high, arched porch overlooking the parking area and roadways below.

The initial glaring question, of course, was why would two people entering their retirement years want to take on the colossal task of restoring and preserving this relic of the gilded era of coal company dominance. The more than 6,000-square-foot structure is in desperate need of a new roof, for starters, and, of course, heating and plumbing. The list of needed repairs is formidable. Joy Lynn explained that taking on the company store was more to her than just a passing fancy.

Joy Lynn: "My mother is a coal miner's daughter, and my grandmother is coal mining family all the way back to the beginning. Mother was raised nearby on the New River in Brooklyn. I was born in Oak Hill Hospital just two miles up the road, and Granny has been here all her life. Mother has been back and forth between Brooklyn and Michigan. I guess this is really a rescue project. The roof is in bad shape. But with the amount of history surrounding this building, tearing it down was something I didn't want to see happen. Restoring it as a museum was a project we wanted to take on."

The Whipple Company Store was completed a couple of decades into the burgeoning coal and timber rush in the wake of the American Civil War. Soldiers from invading armies of the North had gone back home after the War with tales of the huge trees and rich outcroppings of coal. Surveyors and engineers soon came for a closer look.

For a clearer sense of how this land and resources grab played out in Fayette County and beyond, I reread Ron Eller's Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. The fine-toothed precision of Eller's research makes for troubling reading. The chaos and looting of the region's natural wealth and environmental splendor was akin to the feverish activity of mad dogs in the sheep with blood on their fangs. The new social order that rose to power between 1880 and 1930 quickly abbreviated the U.S. Bill of Rights in industrial communities that...