Coal was not a presence in my life when I was growing up in Oregon. There were no seams near me; coal didn’t power anything around me; there was no lingering pollution or environmental damage from mining. I suspect that I never saw a piece of coal until I moved to Pittsburgh.
But when I got here, coal was suddenly everywhere. I can see coal barges steam up and down the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers from my office, which itself sits on a hill honeycombed with old mines, and looks out at two others whose residents need mine subsidence insurance.
Just up the Monongahela are the only two large-scale steelmaking facilities still remaining in Allegheny County—the Edgar Thompson Works steel mill and the Clairton Coke Works—with their massive coal piles and barges moored four deep.
But as is true across all of the coal-producing regions of the US, the industry has dramatically shrunk since the middle of the twentieth century. Direct employment in coal in Pennsylvania went from 350,000 in 1950 to 125,000 in 1970 to less than 5000 today. In West Virginia, a state long defined in the public imagination by mining, those numbers are similar—125,000 in 1950 to 40,000 in 1970 to about 14,000 today. Increasing mechanization was the initial cause of this decline, but over the last twenty years a general transition to other forms of energy, because they are cheaper and cleaner, has been largely responsible for the decrease in employment in the industry.
“Big Coal” has long been politically powerful in these two states. West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the nation, has essentially been owned and run by coal companies like Pittston Coal and Consolidation Coal (now Consol Energy) for most of its history. Pennsylvania is much larger and has a far more diversified economy, but even there the coal industry maintains a powerful influence on the local and county level.
And even as, or perhaps because, this industry has declined in terms of economic power, it has in the last decade or so seen a kind of revival of cultural power. In his 2016 campaign for president, Donald Trump spoke extensively about ending the so-called “war on coal” and about reviving the industry to its earlier levels. And the voters responded: West Virginia, which had (largely due to union coal miners) long been solidly Democratic until the election of Ronald Reagan, gave Trump one of his largest margins of victory. A bizarre trend called “rollin’ coal” started in which young men modified their diesel-engine trucks to emit large amounts of black smoke and violate clean-air laws, an act of performative polluting. In 2009, West Virginia named bituminous coal the “state rock”—a thumb in the eye of climate-change activists.
Coal-mining regions have put their hopes in Trump for an economic revival and a return to centrality in the national life and imagination. In his increasingly alarming second term Trump continues to push what he calls (reflecting the same relationship to objective reality as most of his utterances) “clean, beautiful coal,” and his turd-polishers like Pennsylvania Senator David McCormick and Washington Examiner journalist Salena Zito obligingly promote the not-yet-resurgent industry with stunts like a recent “energy summit” at Carnegie Mellon University, or PR like a Washington Post puff piece on a mine tour (Does democracy die in the darkness of a coal mine?). Even mine-safety enforcement is associated with anti-mining activists and the “war on coal,” and the Times recently reported on coal miners distraught to learn that the Trump administration, under the guise of “unleashing American energy dominance,” has stopped enforcing rules intended to protect miners against black lung disease.
So, I have been thinking about the cultural place of the coal industry in this region of upper Appalachia at a time when so many of the industry’s signifiers—labor and capital, white working-class culture, energy production, pollution and climate change, rural versus urban life—are so intensely politicized. Coal had always been politically charged in this part of Appalachia: first due to its pure economic power; then due to public awareness of the health dangers of coal-mining and its central, and very visible, role in fueling global climate change; and now due to a backlash against that awareness and a desire of the region’s working-class white population to revive its glory days. But as I’m interested in public history, I wanted to get a slightly different angle on its role in cultural and public—not political—life. So I embarked upon a kind of “necrotour” of monuments to coal disasters in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to see how these monuments frame the industry; how the newer monuments to more recent disasters reflect changes in the industry’s power and reach; how the ownership, management, and funding of these monuments affect the way they tell their stories; and how these monuments reflect other trends in public history, such as the recognition of marginalized populations or the environmental damage caused by industry.
They weren’t hard to find (TheClio.com has a very helpful web site cataloguing most of them, and the National Coal Heritage Area Authority is also a good resource). The coal industry has been, by a good measure, the deadliest one in America, and its worst era was the first decade of the twentieth century, which took the lives of at least 21,000 miners. The Monongah explosions of Dec. 6, 1907 in northern West Virginia, for instance, killed at least 362 men—and likely many others, mainly Italian immigrant boys whose presence underground was unrecorded to evade child-labor laws. Thirteen days later, the Darr mine in Fayette County, Pennsylvania blew up and killed 239, more than half of them Hungarian immigrants. All told, 3000 people died in mine accidents just in 1907.
Darr has inspired two monuments, both along the Great Allegheny Passage bike trail that runs along the Youghiogheny River in Whitsett. A granite stone marker on a plinth, flanked by a small carved caricature of a miner, notes that the disaster “prompted the ban of open flame mine lamps.” In this, the monument is typical of many commemorations of early twentieth-century mine disasters, slotting the carnage into a meliorist narrative about the steady improvement of conditions in the mines, attributable to an increasingly cooperative relationship between unions and mine companies. It’s no surprise that this monument was donated by the local Rotary Club. But in fact, any improvements to safety were furiously resisted by mine owners like Darr’s Pittsburgh Coal Company; and the state governments of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, in the so-called “mine wars” of the time, provided all the help they could to those owners to resist the incursions of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) into the coalfields. Meaningful federal regulation of the mine industry, similarly, came late, and was fitful at best until President Roosevelt’s New Deal began to protect the right of workers to unionize (and thus pressure federal agencies). In reality any “cooperation” on safety measure between workers and owners came from union power and federal enforcement.
About a half-mile down the trail are a series of mosaics adorning a concrete retaining wall. This memorial was created by artist Rachel Sager, who also oversees the “Ruins Project” installation in a nearby disused coal plant. Her Darr piece, completed in 2024, consists of a run of mosaic medallions with numbers for each dead miner surrounding a set of two intersecting circles that consist of small ceramic pieces, each with the name of one miner pressed into its. Its homespun nature made it the most moving of all the monuments that I saw, and its lack of framing or narrative reflects the idea of “history from below.” These names, their sheer volume and ethnic diversity, say a great deal.
Monongah town, with the current population just under 1000, is grim on first glance and I didn’t stick around long enough to have my impressions refined. But its memorial is perhaps the most interesting of all the ones that I visited, consisting of a state highway division plaque from 1963, a large cast bell placed there in 2007, and a marble statue of a mine widow and her child, also erected in that centenary year (Figs. 5-7). Each stresses the immigrant identity of the disaster’s victims: the highway-division sign notes that most the dead came “from countries far across the sea,” and the two recent monuments make it clear that these were Italians. The bell is a gift from the regional government of Molise (which, really, is Italy’s West Virginia), and the widows’ statue, called “Monongah Heroine,” was sponsored by the regional council of Calabria, and co-dedicated by the president of that council and then-West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin. One wonders how warm the currently Trumpified West Virginia would be to a set of monuments stressing the victims’ immigrant identities. The monument lists no corporate support but does identify the United Mine Workers of America as one of the sponsors.
The Eccles mine, in Raleigh County WV, memorializes two disasters at the same site, one from 1914 and the other from 1926, that claimed a total of 193 lives. Even smaller and more remote than Monongah, Eccles sits in a classic West Virginia holler near the population center of Beckley. The Eccles memorial, installed in 1976, sits at the top of a hill, overlooking headstones for all the fallen miners. This memorial was the earliest one on which I saw a particular rhetorical shift: rather than this being a senseless tragedy that should remind us how harsh the conditions were back then (and, by contrast, how much better things are today), this one presented the losses as a sacrifice: not for their families, because of a cruel and exploitive economic structure, but for the nation. “Their contribution to the economic growth of this country shall not be forgotten,” says the plaque, in the words of its sponsor the Westmoreland Coal Company. I’m sure the growth in GDP gave the widows some comfort.
Despite what state politicians and coal companies imply, fatal accidents still happen, and this industry-friendly message is even clearer in one of the two memorials to the 2006 Sago mine disaster, near Buckhannon in Upshur County, WV. Erected in 2016, as the front of the slab says, “In Memory of the Sago Miners,” the monument undermines its moving relief sculpture of miners trapped in an underground chamber by its addendum on the rear: “And All Those Who Have Lost Their Lives In The Pursuit Of Our Nation’s Energy.” The monument was funded by Philippi Main Street, the downtown-revitalization arm of the small town of Philippi, WV, and conveys the preferred language of the coal industry and the West Virginia tourist board alike, as an Instagrammable swing and wooden cut-out of the state, both reading “Almost Heaven,” stand yards away from the memorial. At the monument’s dedication, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin parroted the meliorist line. “We have oxygen in the mines and life-safety cages for miners to go into until they are rescued,” Manchin told the families of the dead. “All these things happened because of the sacrifices your families have made and the lives of the loved ones we lost. They did not die in vain.” Left unexplained in Senator Manchin’s speech was why such safety technologies, commonly available for over a century, had not been put in mines earlier (a second Sago memorial, outside the town of Buckhannon, merely notes that the miners who perished loved their families, country, and God).
The worst mine disaster in recent West Virginia history occurred at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, and its memorial stands in nearby Whitesville. Twenty-nine men died when methane gas, built up because of a neglected ventilation system, exploded. Investigators condemned Massey Energy for its “profoundly reckless” attitude toward safety, and CEO Don Blankenship was convicted of conspiracy to violate mine-safety standards, even serving a year in prison. None of this information appears, however, on the 2012 memorial, a long black granite slab with silhouettes of all twenty-nine miners. On the reverse, panels describe the history of the coal industry in West Virginia, not eliding the “mine wars” but, as is typical, treating this history as one of consistent improvement in safety and in labor-management relations. There is no description of the disaster itself, nor does the monument’s web site mention either Massey or Blankenship. This was, as far as anyone would know an act of God, for to acknowledge the company’s full and legally adjudicated responsibility would be to refute the meliorist argument that safety is no longer an issue between workers and owners. It will surprise no one that the monument’s funding came from “the coal and coal support industries, private individuals, and local businesses.”
Not all these monuments, fortunately, memorialize dead miners. On July 24, 2006, eighteen miners working in the Quecreek mine in Somerset County, PA dug into an adjacent flooded mine, whose water began pouring into their own. They were approximately 75 meters underground and trapped in a chamber with limited oxygen. Watching the waters creep up, at one point the miners estimated they had an hour left to live. Rescuers drilled a shaft down to the the miners’ chamber just after midnight on the 28th and all the miners reached the surface safely after 77 hours trapped underground. The rescue took place on Bill Arnold’s farm in Somerset. Within a few months of the successful rescue, Arnold and his family—responding, he says, to the visits made by “tens of thousands” of people who wanted to see the site—resolved to create a “Monument to Life” for the rescue workers. Arnold created a 501.c3 nonprofit corporation “with a mission to preserve and celebrate the inspirational story of the Quecreek mine rescue.”
The monument consists of the field in which the drilling and rescue took place, along with a visitor’s center holding numerous artifacts from the rescue as well as educational materials. A cast bronze statue of a seated coal miner stands at the entry. On the frigid and biting early March day I visited, the visitor’s center was closed, so I could only explore the outdoor area—a small field, perhaps half an acre, with a number of preserved items from the original rescue such as the 6” air hole dug the first night, the actual hole through which the rescue capsule descended to the miners, and an airlock that was sent to the site by the US Navy as a backup should the waters continue to rise. At the center of the site is a grove of trees, a red oak to symbolize life and nine smaller evergreens to represent each of the rescued miners.
Rather than echoing meliorism or paeans to “energy,” the rhetoric of the site falls very much into the “celebrate the first responders” theme that became so prevalent in US memorials after 9/11. But nowhere on the outdoor site or in the language of the web site is there any acknowledgement of the historical conflicts between miners and owners about safety (a conflict that, of course, regained salience after Upper Big Branch, which occurred four years after Quecreek). Granted, this accident was not caused by the kind of abject negligence that killed the twenty-nine men in Upper Big Branch, but that safety and profit are opposed in ways that victimize miners is not mentioned here. This is a monument to “life” and to rescue workers, and thus entirely uncontroversial.
Coal mining is, despite what the industry and right-wing journalists like Zito would have us believe, inherently dangerous, and it didn’t stop being so in the 1920s. The Trump administration’s hostility to any regulations, its trollish contrarianism toward anything marked as “green,” and its devotion to serving industrialists threaten more disasters in the years to come. Coal country may see the truce between labor and capital, recently solidified by their mutual sense of cultural grievance, fray. Those old “mine wars” could flare up again, and the UMWA may begin to remember who its real enemies are. And, I can’t help thinking, we might all be the better for it.
