CULTURE, CLASS, AND POLITICS IN MODERN APPALACHIA: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF RONALD L. LEWIS

The Matewan Massacre: Before and After

166 The Matewan Massacre: Before and After Rebecca Bailey “The Worst Has Come”1 MAY 19, 1920, dawned dreary and overcast. Though rain drizzled from the clouds intermittently throughout the day, the small town of Matewan in Mingo County, West Virginia, teemed with miners, as union relief funds were being distributed. In the midst of the activity, at 11:47 a.m., a party of Baldwin-Felts agents disembarked from train #29, having come to Matewan to enforce eviction notices for the Stone Mountain Coal Corporation. According to Walter Anderson, one of the surviving agents, Albert Felts contacted Mingo County Sheriff G. T. Blankenship seeking his help in processing the evictions. He was denied, but managed to secure authorization from a local justice of the peace. Chief of Police Sid Hatfield and Mayor Cabell Testerman confronted the Baldwin-Felts agents as they made their way through town. Both Hatfield and Testerman contested the agents’ authority to process the Stone Mountain evictions. Their primary arguing point, Hatfield later asserted, was that because the houses in question lay within Matewan’s municipal limits, he and Testerman possessed the jurisdictional sovereignty to halt the evictions.2 At this point, the confrontation ended and the Baldwin-Felts agents crossed the railroad tracks and proceeded up Warm Hollow to process the evictions. THE MATEWAN MASSACRE 167 Hatfield and Testerman left to telephone county officials. Testerman allegedly called Mingo’s prosecuting attorney Wade Bronson to enquire about the legality of the evictions. After Bronson read him “the Red Man’s Act—the riot act,” Testerman authorized Hugh Combs, a Methodist “exhorter” and local miner, “to obtain reliable men to protect the town.” One of Matewan’s two telephone operators later testified that Hatfield told either Blankenship or Deputy Sheriff “Toney” Webb that “those sonsabitches will never leave here alive.” Throughout the afternoon, armed men arrived in Matewan, and the town became “a powder keg.” The situation grew so tense that Matewan Grade School let out early, and the children were sent home to get them off the streets.3 Hatfield, Testerman, and a crowd of miners, men, women, and children spent the afternoon watching the Baldwin-Felts agents carry out the Stone Mountain evictions. At one point, Hatfield allegedly approached Albert Felts, who raised his gun and told Hatfield he was trespassing on private property. Smiling, Hatfield replied, “That’s alright, I’m a private man,” and continued his advance on Felts. When Hatfield drew near, Felts told Hatfield that he had been shot at during an ambush at Paint Creek but had refused to back down or be “bluffed out.” Hatfield assured Felts that if there were any trouble, “here, no one will go to the hills on you . . . They will come face to face.” Testerman again asked Felts to desist. Felts refused but offered to stop and return to town if Testerman could prove that he was acting illegally.4 At approximately 3:30 p.m., the Baldwin-Felts agents completed their work, came back across the tracks into Matewan, and checked into the Urias Hotel. Although miners and Police Chief Hatfield had observed the six evictions , there had been no more confrontations. A surviving Baldwin-Felts agent later recalled that the proceedings had gone smoothly, citing as proof the agents’ transfer of one family’s belongings to another location at the evictee’s request. In contrast, local recollections of the evictions present the agents’ actions as the primary stimulus for the gun battle. The agents allegedly arrived heavily armed and proceeded to bully everyone they encountered , callously and haphazardly piling the belongings of a miner’s sick wife in the rain, for example. However the agents comported themselves, they made their way to the Urias unmolested.5 CULTURE, CLASS, AND POLITICS 168 Once at the hotel, the agents disassembled and repacked their large firearms , a legal necessity since only three of them (the Felts brothers and C. B. Cunningham) possessed the required licenses to carry pistols in Matewan. Several individuals reported to Albert Felts that trouble was brewing and that armed miners were milling about the town. Felts gathered his men and told them that if a conflict erupted, they were not to fight or resist arrest but to go quietly because bail would be posted and the situation resolved peacefully. After repacking their weapons...