WV Mine Wars Tour Revives Labor History

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

If you’d like to see the streets of Matewan where ten men died in a running gun battle in 1920 when Police Chief Sid Hatfield and striking miners fought the notorious Baldwin Felts Detectives, you’ll want to sign up for the inaugural West Virginia Mine War Tour coming on June 16-18. “People need to know the struggle and sacrifices labor has suffered to make life better for those who toil and the generations that followed,” Coal Country Tours’ Doug Estepp tells Union City. “I don't think that this important history has been forgotten as much as it has been suppressed.” The jam-packed 3-day tour includes a visit to “the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse where the Baldwin Felts men exacted their revenge when they assassinated Hatfield and his boyhood friend Ed Chambers a year later” as well as a chance to “tour the jail where union leader Bill Blizzard and other miners were incarcerated and the same, adjacent courthouse where he and fellow coal miner Walter Allen were tried for treason as was the famous abolitionist John Brown half a century before.” Click here for details and to sign up. - photo courtesy Coal Country Tours LLC