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Bluefield West Virginia, 1889-1989: A Centennial History

C. Stuart McGehee

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Dec 26, 2011 Werner rated it liked it

Shelves: history

This is another book which was shelved for bathroom reading in my son-in-law's house, and which was one of the few books there that I was interested in enough to read. (It's actually an extremely quick read, because it only has nine pages of text, making it really more of an historical essay than a full-length narrative history; the bulk of the book, pp. 14-128, is made up of black-and-white photographs.) For some time, I hesitated to bother reading and reviewing it because I thought it might no This is another book which was shelved for bathroom reading in my son-in-law's house, and which was one of the few books there that I was interested in enough to read. (It's actually an extremely quick read, because it only has nine pages of text, making it really more of an historical essay than a full-length narrative history; the bulk of the book, pp. 14-128, is made up of black-and-white photographs.) For some time, I hesitated to bother reading and reviewing it because I thought it might not be of interest to anyone outside the local area; but I now think it actually could be of broader interest.

I've had some experience with local (city or county) "histories," and they're typically amateur productions, hodgepodges of anecdotes, family and oral history and recollections, strung together with no unifying narrative thread and no sense of historical context. (And usually no sense of what's significant and what isn't.) However, the author of this one, the late Stuart McGehee (whom I actually knew personally, albeit not very well), was a professional historian with a PhD in the discipline, who taught history for years at Bluefield College. He was also the archivist at the Eastern Regional Coal Archives (which may have commissioned the writing, though that isn't said) in Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield WV's public library. Though his essay is short, it's a serious overview of local history, focused overwhelmingly on Bluefield WV, but touching on other parts of the area, especially the WV/VA coalfields and the sister community of Bluefield, VA. It's also an overview, in microcosm, of the history of the whole Appalachian coal region: from pioneer beginnings, through the burgeoning of a coal-mining centered way of life that began in the late 1880s with the arrival of the Norfolk and Western Railroad (with Bluefield WV as its terminus) and reached the peak of its prosperity in the 1950s, to stagnation and decline beginning in the 1960s, with the decline and fall of the coal industry's labor market. It's also a story with significance for the broader American historical narrative: in its peak years, 40% of America's coal passed through Bluefield, and it mirrors the larger context of American economic history from the Second Industrial Revolution to the beginnings of economic collapse.

Being a resident of the area from 1992 on, who expects to live here for the rest of my life, I have a real interest in local history, so I found this fascinating; some of it I knew already, but I learned a lot of detail that was new to me. Unlike many local histories, this one also doesn't completely gloss over the darker side of the past, such as the inequality and exploitation the city's sizable black population was subjected to, and the fact that the crash of the labor market in the coal industry was driven by a deliberate decision to replace human labor with machines. That's not to say that there isn't some significant glossing here; I would say that McGehee treats the coal companies with kid gloves in many particulars. (That may be because, if I understand correctly, the industry supports the Eastern Regional Coal Archives.) There isn't any mention of the coal companies' use of fraud, bribery, land theft, terrorism and murder to consolidate their regime of lawless power, or of the full scale of horrific exploitation and abuse the miners who actually dug the coal were subjected to. The "feared" Baldwin-Felts "detective agency" (so-called), headquartered in Bluefield, is mentioned in one sentence, but we aren't told why it was feared. (It supplied the mercenary army of gun thugs who kept the miners and the rest of the population subjugated.)

The bulk of the book, as noted, is made up of photographs drawn from the above-mentioned archives, mostly captioned, and arranged in a rough order of chronological significance. While the provenance and dates of specific pictures aren't usually noted, a large proportion of them are from the early 1900s, with some even from the late 1800s. They cover a wide range of subject matter: broad views of the town and the area, significant buildings, important persons, mining processes, street scenes, insides of stores, etc. IMO, the quality of most of these are pretty good, and they'd be of interest to any history buffs who like this kind of thing. (I found them fascinating, and naturally could pick out occasional physical landmarks that I recognized.) ...more

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