Vintage shots from days gone by!

This image depicts a bridge over the Connecticut River connecting Bellows Falls, VT with Walpole, NH. The bridge was built in 1905 and at 540 feet long, it was America's longest through arch for many years

 

Straining my eyes, that resembles a Stevens Crackshot or Favorite
the fella at left is holding. Any other opinions out there?

 

Coal mining underground was -- and is -- a hard, dirty, dangerous way
to make a living. But with railroad jobs scarce in the hill country, and with
limited bottom land for profitable farming, mining was often to only way
for a common man to feed his family. Until advanced mechanization in
the second half of the 20th Century, the age-old formula for getting "King
Coal" out of the earth was simple: muscle and steel, along with plenty of
sweat and a few swear words to grease the rails!

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The crew of Ages Ridge Mine, Harlan County, Kentucky, takes a breaks to pose for a post-
card cameraman, about 1914 or 1915. The photo is from an informative, enriching site
created and maintained by Elva Nolan Morgan, the daughter of a coal miner. It is titled
Kentucky Coal Miners and is hosted by RootsWeb in association with Ancestry.com. See
the whole site and read the memories at: KENTUCKY COAL MINERS, www.rootsweb.an-
cestry.com/~kycoalmi/ .

 

Little coal town of Vivian, McDowell County, WVa, and company housing, 1935

 

Mine refuse dump at Berwind, WVa, 1935

 

Inside a company store at Berwind, WVa, 1935

 

Same store from a different viewpoint. They may have only taken company scrip, BUT
they had Christmas layaway plan! Wow. HOW lucky to be a coal miner for a living!

 

Company store at Upland, WVa, 1935

 

Crane Creek, WVa, company store, 1935.

 

Interesting to see the marketing approach for COAL in the '40s! This was
in the days before the EPA and the Green Movement, mind you! LOL









Check how FAR away a lot of Coalwood, Wva (Olga Company) coal was sold by the '40s!
This from Coalwood's own site, which can be accessed from this WIKI site:

Coalwood, West Virginia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalwood,_West_Virginia -

 

Siding and big tipple loading coal for far-flung destinations. Cardiff Mine, Imperial Coal Corp.
Wonder how many tons of coal in each car???

 

Particularly in remote company-built, company-owned towns -- or "coal camps" -- miners were often paid in company-issued "scrip" instead of cash. Worked okay, to some extent, since most wages were going to be spent at the company-owned general store anyway -- about the only game in town. If a family needed U.S. currency for a journey to the outside world, companies sometimes exchanged less than a dollar's worth of cash for one dollar of their own script.

With a virtualy captive workforce, company stores often allowed families to "buy ahead" on credit, with tabs to be paid with future wages, supposedly. But many well-meaning miners never, ever caught up their bills in this arrangement, prompting Ernie Ford to release a realistic song, "Sixteen Tons," on Oct. 17, 1955 The song is sung as if in the first-person, and the bottom lines of the chorus -- pretty accurate -- are:

"Saint Peter, don't ya call me, 'cause I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store!"

 

looks kinda like a Remington model 6 but hard to tell

 

Here's a hand-tinted photo, postmarked Bluefield, WV, 1934. The cryptic address
side blurb says: "Highway Over Coalwood Mountain, Looking East, Near Welch,
W. Va." I had to show this because I felt it illustrates what I previously stated about
the remoteness of hill-country, backwater coal towns and camps. When I saw it,
I said, "Highway? THAT's a highway?!?" Given that it's in the '30s, I would imagine
there was also a rail "spur" off the main line to haul coal out of Coalwood, but
maybe someone from the area would know confused:?). I can't say for certain, but that
was often the norm up in Wayne County where my family stock is from.



Anyway, I sort of gravitated to the village of Coalwood because it, in some ways, typifies
the many hundreds of coal towns in coal-producing states over the years. Today, many
former coal towns as ghost towns, abandoned when coal seams played out.

 

You may have it there, Hiboy. I hve a Winchester, and that rifle seems to have a lighter look, thinner handle, etc. So, Remington? Maybe!

 

Vintage shot of company-owned housing in Coalwood. The burg was founded
by George L. Carter in 1905 after he arrived by mule and, finding coal seams,
bought 20,000 acres of land. He founded the Carter Coal Company and built
offices, houses, a schoolhouse, a company store, a church and other "public"
buildings. Carter also hired a dentist and doctor to provide service to his miners.
So, Coalwood residents may have had life better than those in some other coal
towns and camps!

 

In the late 1930s, the "club house" and doctor's office, Coalwood, McDowell County, WVa,
between Pikeville and Beckley. The Coalwood-Carter Coal Co. became Coalwood Consoli-
dated Coal in 1922 and, then, the Olga Coal Co. from 1947 'til it closed in 1982. At the ex-
treme southwest corner of the state, Coalwoodr emains an unincorporated town of about 900
today.

 

An alternate angle shows what's apparently the rest of Coalwood's "business district."

 

Nice, sharp pic of a tipple of the Coalwood-Consolidated Coal Co., Coalwood, WVa,
about late-'30s. Coal production reached a peak in the '60s with some 100-million
tons a year and a town population of around 2,000. (Incidentally, the town is the
setting of the best-selling memoir, Rocket Boys by local-boy-made-good Homer
Hickam, Jr., and the movie "October Sky," based on the book.)


If anybody would like to read more, here are some good sites:
www.coalwoodwestvirginia.com
www.coalwoodmemories.com
www.wvgenweb.org/wvcoal/edkins4.html

 

X2...its tragic that so much of our history is being lost to time. Nothing like those buildings will ever come again....sadly.

 

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A pic for a beautiful day