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109 In January 1945, as Allied forces pushed into Germany, Gomer Gower reminisced about his turn-of-the-century experiences as resident, worker, and labor activist in Thurber, Texas, a coal-mining town owned and actively operated by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company from 1888 through the 1920s. Alluding to resistance fighters in war-torn Europe, Gower wrote: “We in Thurber, too, had our underground forces . . . in supposedly free America .” He continued, “[I]t was due to the silent and patient activity of this band of underground patriots that Thurber was transformed from a ‘Bull-Pen’ in its early history, into one of the most . . . pleasant mining communities in the entire country.”1 To accomplish this transformation, Thurber’s miner labor activists emphasized such traditional forms of collective action as unionization, work stoppages, and solicitation of funds and aid from local and distant allies. But it was the employment in 1903 of a device that the company could not outmaneuver— worker/resident emigration—that forced officials to recognize that not only were workers dependent on the company, but the company needed its workers. In the end, this success resulted, as Ruth A. Allen has accurately concluded, in the appearance of “a powerful and militant organization” that enforced the closed shop in the Texas mining district for over twenty years.2 It also provided a bridge for Texas labor between the militant, but often unsuccessful, strike activity across the state in the 1880s challenging emerging industries’ monopolistic control over markets and workers and the move in the early twentieth century, which James C. Maroney’s work on organized labor in Texas identifies, toward labor’s steady growth, public acceptance, and effective use of legislative lobbying as an additional means of achieving the movement’s goals.3 The factors that incited Thurber’s ethnically and racially mixed coal miners to the underground agitation that resulted in total unionization of the town in fifteen years included coal-weighing procedures, wage scales, and working hours deemed unfair by the workers, as well as difficult and dangerous work “Underground Patriots” Thurber Coal Miners and the Struggle for Individual Freedom, 1888–1903 marilyn d. rhinehart 110 Marilyn D. Rhinehart conditions. Equally significant in generating resentment among the population , however, were features of company-dominated life that limited personal freedom. Paternalistic and autocratic under the management of Col. Robert D. Hunter, a native of Scotland who made his fortune in the American West as a prospector, cattleman, and mining entrepreneur, the company owned and administered almost all community enterprises. It thus touched every aspect of its workers’ lives from working conditions to entertainment and, under Hunter, its first president and general manager, created a virtual serfdom.4 As a result, in action strikingly similar to that of miners in southern Illinois whose early twentieth-century activism Eric D. Weitz has analyzed, Thurber’s native and foreign-born miners, motivated by an individualist urge that the solitary nature of their underground work and preindustrial habits encouraged, and united by shared grievances that overcame ethnic, racial, and religious divisions, turned to union organization as the collective expression of their individual aspirations.5 Although management’s capitulation to the miners’ demands in 1903 did not terminate the company-town concept in Thurber, it facilitated the introduction of a strong counterforce to bring “democracy to the mines” and to give the workers a greater measure of control over their daily lives.6 Thurber Village developed in the far northwestern corner of Erath County in the arid, infertile western reaches of north-central Texas along the line of the coal-dependent Texas and Pacific Railroad. In the mid-1880s Harvey E. and William W. Johnson discovered evidence of coal deposits there and established the original mining camp, known simply as Johnson Mines, within a surrounding wall of small hills covered in low vegetation.7 The “pencil” vein of bituminous coal that the Johnson brothers struck and on which Thurber’s future would depend, averaged eighteen to twenty-eight inches in thickness and extended some sixty-five miles, varying in width from five to ten miles. In 1886, with little fanfare, the Johnson Coal Mining Company opened Mine No. 1 to tap that vein and to supply Jay Gould’s railroad line with steam-producing coal.8 When the Johnsons prepared to open Mine No. 1 in 1886, they recruited miners from nearby Coalville, where from 1884 to 1886 the Gould interests had attempted to operate two mines, with little success, to...

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