I don’t have any family there (my coal country relations are in Pennsylvania, Molly McGuire central so to speak) but I lived in Harrison County for a year.
At that time Hope Gas was capping all the methane wells and drilling new ones into the same gas pockets on the closest neighboring property, because Reagan had deregulated new holes but not old ones. I used to run the deer trails looking for 1800s oil rigs I could pull apart for real wrought iron* to sell to blacksmiths. Good times.
I had some interesting conversations with elderly coal miners** who could vacillate between condemning coal companies’ exploitation of the poor and praising their creation of dependable jobs for unskilled labor in the same sentence.
Talking to those old guys is also how I learned about the Coal Wars, which had been “dehistoried” by the time I was in US public schools, and even now are only slowly being brought back into the official narratives. Most Americans today don’t know about the armed rebellion of the West Virginia coal miners which President Harding*** put down in 1921.
* true wrought iron hasn’t been readily available to small smithies since the Bessemer process supplanted the blast furnace.
** one of whom professed to love mining, and spoke longingly of his time at the coal face, and regretfully of the accident that crushed his spine and pelvis and prevented him from working for most of his life. Which was weird to hear, really, for a kid from a small Right Coast college town.
*** regarded by many historians as the worst US president of all time, surpassing even Buchanan and George W. Bush.
