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Oral History Project - Kinder, Harold 1980
Transcript
Interview NRGNPP 003
File NRGNPP 003-T
TAPE THREE
Mr. Harold Kinder Interviewer :
Lay land, W. Va. 25864 Paul J. Nyden
Beckley, W. Va. 25801
August 19, 1980
P N: Mr. Kinder, maybe you could start off by mentioning a little bit about -when you were born, and where you grew up.
HR: Yes, 1 was born October the fourth, 1914 at Vanceburg, Kentucky.
My father came up to Landisburg, which is about eight miles north of
Sewell, in 1915, and worked part of the summer. And then he came back to Vanceburg, Kentucky; and at that time, I was about two years old . This would have been in the, he came back and* got my mother and one other brother; that's all, that included all of the family at that time. And we caught the train from Vanceburg up to Sewell; and he told me that he
and my mother carried us two children —— in other words, my brother and
I —— about eight or ten miles from Sewell, on the river, up to this Landisburg location which is, which was a large lumber camp, owned and operated by the Babcock Lumber Company out of Pennsylvania.
PN: What was your father doing? Was he working…
HR: Yes, he was working there. He was driving team, a team of horses, in other words, logging, so to speak. You know, hauling logs out of the
woods into the mill to be cut up into lumber.
PN: Where was the mill?
HK: The mill was at Landisburg, which is about eight miles north of
Sewell. They had a little railroad line that came up that they used
to haul the lumber back down to the C&O Railroad at Sewell, you know,
put it on the main line. And he came, as I was saying, they walked up
that, this little spur line up, which is seven or eight miles, to Landis—
burg and he had rented a house. The Babcock Lumber Company were building
houses there for the men, their employees, to live in. And he rented a
house, and we started residing there in 1916. As they cut the timber in
and around Landisburg, they moved eastward about 20 or 25 miles to keep
cutting the logs, you know, because you run out of the timber. And then
they'd have to keep moving. And they had those camps, what they called
lumber camps. And they would number those camps and call them, run them in sequence, you know, one through ten. And he would move from one of
those camps to the other as they moved, progressed through eastward out
to pick up the logs and then haul them back. They had a, one of these,
what they call these little trains, a small train with a sort of a flat
bed on it, I mean the cars, they used the old steam engines. They were
small, they wasn't like they used on the C&O Railroad; they were small,
maybe one—fifth as big as the regular C&O, what they called the O'Malleys,
you know, that hauled the coal on the main C&O Railroad. These were small.
PN: They were called Malleys?
HK: No, they were called, some called them “dinkeys”.
PN: These are the little ones you're talking about?
HR: Yea. And they were made to where they could go out on a little spur line; the tracks weren't very solid and the road bed wasn't as good, so they had to use something lighter, you know. But they had fairly good success with them. Then my father cut logs, or made cross—ties for the railroad. This lumber company cut those. And he would use the, what they called the old broad axe, something where you could score the side of a log, and square it off almost as, you know, next to what a saw mill would cut it, and square the length, or position you might say [sic] . And he worked, well, he started in 1916 and worked there until that mill ceased, partly ceased operations in about 1923 or 1924.
PN: You and your family lived in Landisburg?
HK: No, we moved out of Landisburg into these camps.
PN: Oh, the whole family moved?
HK: Yea, we moved closer to the work. See, you would get a long ways from work, and it was hard to get to and from work at that time. There wasn't any automobiles or anything, so you either stayed close to the job or you had to do a lot of walking.
PN: In these camps, the Babcock Lumber Company would build…
HR: More. or less what they called “shanties”.
PN: I was going to ask you what they looked like.
HR: Little wooden shanties, just a rough two— or three—room building, built out of, most of the time, just green lumber sawed from the mill; it wasn't seasoned lumber.
PN: Just green lumber?
HR: Just green lumber.
PN: And there were two or three rooms in these houses.
HR: Yes, they built two or three, or in some cases, four. It depended on the size of the family that needed to live in [sic].
PN: What did you use the different rooms for?
HK: One was a kitchen. And then you had to have a bedroom naturally.
And if you wanted to call it a living room at that time, you could, but. Generally three, three rooms was what they referred to as a shanty. That's the old expression for just, you know, a roughly—built small building.
PN: Would the children usually sleep in the living room?
HK: Yes, they generally, as a general rule, there wasn't any such thing even. We burnt wood, used the old wood stoves at that time. We always used the limbs and things that were, you know, we were picking limbs off the trees, off the logs, so to speak. Then we'd take an axe, and cut that up, and we used the old—time wood stoves, little small, smaller types.
It was not the large type. At that time, it's a little small wood stove, very small. Of course, you know at that time it kept you pretty busy keeping wood in there to keep everything going. Wood burn up real fast, you know. It didn't have the, any draft system much on t ern like these new stoves we have now, the wood stoves you know. They kind of bottle them up, you know, and hold the heat in. But you couldn't do that; it all comes out at one time, you know. Most of the time you either had too much heat or not quite enough with a wood stove, wood—burning stove.
PN: you were talking about the camps moving, you said they moved about 20 miles east of Landisburg. What was the furthest point? Is there any town still standing?
HR: No, they wouldn't; there's one place out near where these campsites were; it was called Danese. You know where that is, Danese. Now that was one of the locations that's still around, Danese.
PN: Was that originally a lumber camp?
HR: No, it was just a little, a sort of a community or village, grown up, you know, over a period of time, not very large.
PN: It wasn't connected with coal or lumber particularly?
HK: No, just a rural, what they say, a rural district.
PN: None of these camps would still be around in any way, would they?
HR: No, no, no. I would think probably that the camps didn't stand long because the wooden buildings after, not any important use for them. Then they would be torn down sometimes, moved, and rebuilt again, you know, sold to the employee after everything's over with. So I’d say almost for sure there wouldn't be any trace at all of any of the old camps.
PN: Do you remember what you did for fun or recreation when you were living in the camps?
HR: Well, we, about the only recreation that you had was just to get out and run, do a lot of walking. One of the things that kept us fairly busy was, through the summer months, was picking fruit, blackberries, and all types of fruit you know, wild fruit that grew out, especially black— berries. Of course in the winter time, we used the old sleds to sleigh ride. That was practically all the winter sport that we had at that time was sleigh riding.
PN: Did your father get to grow a garden when you lived in these camps?
HK: Oh yes, my mother, she was very frugal, and she would always tend the garden. He didn't have much time; my mother especially took interest in the garden. One thing I can remember very vividly was the fact that my brother next to me, which is about, approximately two years younger than I was at that time, she’d get us out and make us hoe the garden. And then we would, through the summertime, we always kept a cow or two, and my mother always churned, made her own butter. And through the summer, we would deliver into the, some of the camps around, some of the smaller places there, like Landisburg, you know, the main part down there where the
houses were built to start with. People would buy the milk and vegetables
out of the garden; you could take corn on the cob, tomatoes, cabbage, and
sell it, and in turn, take that money and buy groceries.
PN: You would sell in Landisburg?
HR: Landisburg was a fairly good—sized camp at that time. I would think
probably, I don’t know the exact amount of houses that were built there
starting in about, well, I think, this lumber company, as I understood it, my father told me, started somewhere around about 1908. So they'd been
in existence something like maybe six or seven years before he came in
there and started working for them.
PN: How many houses were there would say?
HR: I would say that there was approximately 30, or between 30 and 40 houses all together.
PN: In these little lumber camps, how many shanties would be there?
HR: In most cases you wouldn’t have over about five, six, or maybe, possibly could be ten. But they were limited. They didn't build them, they didn't have that much need because a crew of men that was working in the woods would generally take about, would come to about six or seven families. So each one would have his family at that particular, as close
to the job as he could be. So in those little camps I was talking about, they were somewhere between, l t d say, five and ten shanties around each location.
PN: Did they have a foreman in each of these camps.
HK: Yes, yes, they had a foreman. They had a general office and a general superintendant. And then they had, what you’d call, might refer to as a section foreman under, at each camp, who was responsible to the general foreman.
PN: And the general foreman would be in Landisburg?
HK: Yes, his office was at Landisburg, right.
PN: If you went from one of the camps down to Landisburg, would you walk, or how would you get there?
HR: No, most of the time you would ride the train, so to speak. You was limited to a certain extent; you just couldn't catch a train, one of those trains that haul logs, you know. I t m talking about the ones that came up there; it wasn't a regular passenger train; it was just a, what you r d say, just the engine with the cars. Another thing that is probably almost for— gotten was what they called the t 'wheel car." They had a car on there that had, something on the order of a bicycle. It wasn’t that either. It was called a hand car; it had levers on it, and you would pull, sort of like a sprocket. And you could propel yourself with those wheels, mostly referred to, more so than anything else, hand cars they called them. They had
steel wheels on them. And they were a little bit rough to, if you had much of a grade, sort of like riding a bicycle. As long as we’re going down hill, fine; but up hill, a little bit disadvantage to you. But now, a lot of the men could have permission to get those cars; the lumber company had those cars. And some of the men that needed to go to work, to and from, they just loaned them out to them, and they were responsible naturally. The only thing about the hand car, you used the main railroad, the track, so to speak. And if you'd meet a train or something, you had to get off. You had to watch pretty fair, close schedule on it, because you certainly had to get out of the way of that train. And that t s another reason that they weren't used as much as you would think, because of that. But they sure did beat walking quite a bit, you know, a lot faster, especially on level ground or downgrade.
PN: Did people, when they lived in the camps, go to church much?
HR: No. They didn't, because basically there wasn't any churches around as you moved out from, now there was one church, as I remember, only one church at the, in the main part of the lumber camp in Landisburg. But as you moved out, maybe 15 or 20 miles away from the main lumber camp, there wasn't any churches built. Naturally nobody had time much to build them; they was moving from one location to another. And for that reason, there wasn’t, most of the teaching that went on, my mother she read Bible quite
a bit. And she liked singing, and we started out together and sang quite a bit, you know, the old Gospel songs, the religious songs, the old—time songs. My father, he was pretty much interested in singing, you know, and of course, as we grew up, my brothers the three of us we formed
a band, a string band. And we played around, over parts of the country later on, on up in the thirties. We moved around, and had a little band you know, and go around to what they called, some of the old social gatherings around the old rural districts, out in the farm country, you know. And we had, well, I called it a real good time.
PN: What did you play?
HK: My brother played the violin, or the fiddle; I played guitar; and I had another brother that played the mandolin. They all, they went pretty well together, you know.
PN: What did you sing, mainly gospel songs, or country music?
HK: Well, we refer to it now as bluegrass; but that wasn't the title at that time. It was just what you'd call good old country music; nothing fancy. Most of it was the old gospel songs. There wasn't any such thing as, you know, all your other types of music that you have now, like your rock 'n’ roll and all that type. That wasn't nothin'; that wasn't in style yet. So you just had one, just one type of music at that time, that was just what you'd say good old fashioned country music, string music.
PN: Where did you learn to play, when you were growing up?
HK: When we were growing up. My father
never did a harp, a French harp. He was fairly good on it. You say anybody could play a French harp, but that's a little bit out of play a guitar; he played You say anybody could line, because there‘s a whole lot of people that thinks they can. If you really can play a harp, just like everything else, there's a certain amount of talent, you know, that has to come. You have to have some practice, and then some people are talented to it. But you know the old harp is about gone. And I'll tell you another type music we had at that time was the Jew's harp •
Do you know about that?
PN: Yea, I’ve seen them.
HK: It's sort of a wind, I'd think it'd be classed as a wind instrument. But it was a little dull; it didn't have the sharp tones in music, like all the other type of music a little bit more dull. But nevertheless, it was a type music that was fairly common at that time.
PN: Where did your father get the French harp that he played?
HK: He generally ordered them, at that time, from the Sears and Roebuck, out of the old Sears and Roebuck catalog.
PN: Is that you got the mandolin, the fiddle, and the guitar that you and your brothers played too?
HR: The first guitar that we bought was in 1927, and we paid about $5.95 for it. We ordered from one of the mail—order houses. I T m not sure whether it was Speigel, or some of the other mail—order houses at that time that carried those guitars. And the violin, the same way; bought it through, about everything at that time was ordered through mail—order houses. Anything
like that, musical instruments or anything, you didn't see them in the store anywhere. Nobody stocked them at that time. Most of the stores at that time were grocery stores and some clothing; that's about all they carried in the stores. There wasn’t anything like, like the modern things like we have now, you know, that you go to the store and buy. Mostly when you went to the store, you bought groceries and clothes, and that was it.
PN: Let me ask you another question about the lumber camps. Were most of the people that worked there, were there many immigrants that came in?
HR: No, they seemed, that was the type work that you didn't seem to have too many of the immigrants or different nationalities coming in like you had around the coal mines. Now the coal mines were the type work that they brought in all types of people, different nationalities, but the lumber business seemed to be sort of a, it was more or less of a country profession. And the people that came into these lumber camps were mostly farmers, had been reared on a farm.
PN: Oh really?
HK: Uh, huh. And I think that explains why you didn’t have too many different types of nationalities of people that came into the coal mines, you know. So it was, and most of the time the people that worked in these lumber camps sort of came in from one locality. For instance, out of Kentucky, there was several people migrated out of Kentucky, Vanceburg, right below Ashland, you know, it's not very far down the river, came up there with my father. One person would go out and find a place where there was work
like that and then he'd call back, or not call back, but get back to 'em —at that time telephone were almost, you know, almost nil. But they'd get word and, of course, they'd start coming in, these people that lived in a community. Just like Vanceburg; I would say probably there was maybe ten or 15 people that worked on that, in that lumber camp that came out of the same region that my father did. Because if there was an opportunity, at that time, you found a job, that was something unusual. You take a lumber camp just starting up. It sounds a little bit out of line now to say that; it would be. But at that time, it was a very common thing for people to kind of move in the direction where, they found out where a new location was starting.
PN: Was Vanceburg a farming area?
HK: It’s a little railroad town on, just on the Ohio River, almost, well not exactly opposite from Portsmouth, Ohio . But Portsmouth's on the Ohio side and Vanceburg was on the Kentucky side. It was more or less of a little, I don't know just what you would call it today, they raised tobacco in there quite a bit in Kentucky, around in there. And they brought it in there to ship it out, move it on by rail, which was about the only way you could get anything moved at that time.
PN: Did most of the other people that worked in the lumber camp come from places like Kentucky and West Virginia?
HR: Yes, most of them from rural districts, mostly farming, because they had cut, a lot of them drove team, horses, you know. There was a lot of horses being used to move these cross ties that they built for the rail— roads. They cut ‘em way out in the country, and then haul them in on a wagon to the station, where they could pick them up and take them on down where they were laying new road beds, when the C&O was building some of their, you know, they kept adding on. Of course, the main C&O line was laid long before I 'm talking about, but they kept adding on spur lines, you know, and double, some places they had double lines, and these yards, where they stocked their coal, you know, storage.
PN: Did they cut timbers for coal mines too?
HR: He did, my father cut timber for the coal mines starting in 1925 and 26, on up till about 1930, when the big Depression hit. He cut mine posts mostly, what, you know, they set under the slate, to keep slate from falling in the mines. That was basically what the timber was used for when you took it to the mines. And there was a lot of it used at that time.
PN: You said that the Babcock Lumber shut down in 1923?
HK: Yes approximately, it ceased operation there somewhere along about '23 or ’24.
PN: What happened then? Did your father move to another lumber camp?
HK: No, there wasn't but one other big lumber camp that he, let's see, I t m trying to think of the, Meadow River Lumber Company —— that was another big
lumber company, on up at Rainelle, West Virginia. Do you know where
Rainelle is?
PN: Yes.
HK: Well now, that was a bigger lumber camp than the one at Landisburg. But he more or less got away from the lumber business, driving team, and so forth, which was associated with this type work, and went mostly to the farm. Never did own a farm, but just rented, or leased, or sharecropped. We had a pretty rough time, never owned anything. And he was a good worker; my father was a real hard worker. You can’t accomplish much when you are on a farm. You never have a payday coming in. You r re always sure of something to eat. It’s, it was a good life, no doubt about that. It gives you the basics of the good part of anybody's life, I think, if you've gone through that. I really think that. Nobody'd go back to it now; the only way you go back to the farm, is have machinery. And we don't have much of that type farming in this part of the country now.
PN: Where were the farm that your father worked at? Mainly in Fayette County?
HK: Fayette. Just around in a radius of probably, oh maybe, 40 miles.
PN: And he worked on farms until he finally retired?
HK Yes , he just followed that work; course we got a lot of work too, all the boys. I had five brothers and two sisters. And we all worked right along
with him, and worked hard. My mother was a good manager, and we got by. Came out of it, didn't have everything we wanted, but we were always satisfied. I mean as far as, nobody's ever satisfied, I don't think, to the extent that you get everything you want. But what I'm talking about is the basic part of a let-son's life. You get satisfaction when you're working on a farm and, like I say, grow your own food. The only bad thing about it —— there's not any payday ever coming in every two weeks or every month.
PN: Did your father ever work in the coal mines?
HK: He started to work in 1922 at Bellwood. And that was during the time when one of the big strikes came on.
PN: Oh yea, in 1922.
HK: Uh huh. And he worked about six weeks; the strike came on, and naturally everything shut down and he just got away from it. I guess it's a good thing he did because he lived to be 86 years old. And he 'd probably be living right now; he's been dead five years; he got hit by an automobile crossing the road. He had fairly good health for his age —— 86; he was getting around good.
PN: Where is Bellwood?
HK: Bellwood's near Rainelle; it's about, probably eight or ten miles south— east of Rainelle. It was a big operation there at one time —— the Peabody Coal
Company, which was one of the larger ones in the business at that time it was originally started over there.
PN: I didn't know it was there. It's the biggest today still.
HR: Yes, they were in there, they were in there at Bellwood.
PN: Were many of the mines union at that time?
HK: No, that was what, that was basically, that's what the strike was over. And they still didn't gain anything at that time. They didn't gain anything in their striking up till about 1932 or 33. That's when they got their union. They never could come up with anything very substantial until 1932 or 33. You know, remember when they started organizing and got their union started.
PN: When the lumber camps were working, was there any type of union that people that worked there belonged to?
HK: No, never. No union. No sir, no union, they were glad to get the job. They were paid fairly well, I suppose, at that time. I heard my father talk about three dollars, three dollars a day at that time. Course, that was fairly good wages, three dollars a day at that time. Top wages at that time was around three dollars.
PN: Was that more than the miners were paid at the time?
HR: As I understand, the way the miners that I had talked to later on, probably was in some ways more than what the miner was earning, because the amount of work the miner put in. Sometimes, he would go in and be away from home from the time he went to work till he got back maybe 18 hours. You figure that up, the person working in the lumber business at that time, they generally put in about ten hours.
PN: Ten hours?
HK: Yes. Eight hours didn’t mean anything at that time; you didn't pay any attention to that. It was just a matter of getting in a day! s work. They called it a day's work. I mean ten hours was what was considered a good day's work.
PN: In the lumber camps, did people work longer in the summer than in the winter? And how was the work in the winter? Pretty rough?
HK: Oh, it was. Real rough. You know, you wonder how they went out in these woods and used the crosscut saws. Now there wasn’t any such thing as a chainsaw. And cut those logs, that timber in that heavy snow. They didn't slow down for the weather very much. It could get bad enough, you know, to stop anybody; you know if the weather gets bad enough, it can stop anything or anybody. But generally speaking, they didn't pay any attention to it. They were toughened into it; they'd just get up and go right on, and just seemed to be the way of life. You get toughened into things, you know, you just, what you have to do you can do it fairly well
There's a lot of things you think you can't do, but there's a whole lot of things you can do when you have to.
PN: Did you ever work in the lumber industry itself? Or have you ever worked in the coal mines?
HK: No, I never did. I just worked on a farm with my father. I never had any trade of any kind. I never worked in the coal mines. When I got out of high school in 19, graduated in '35, I would have gone in the mines if I could have gotten a job. But I couldn't get a job. My father—in—law was —— my future father—in—law at that time tried to get me on. You know, if you got a job in the mines, you had to have somebody to help you, to recommend you and take you in with him, you see. But at that time, the mines, everything was so bad right in the middle of the Depression, you might say, you couldn't do much with it. The first job I had was a paper route. It sounds a little bit off key for me to tell you this, but I bought a job. I gave a, I had a ‘32 model Chevrolet car. And I couldn't buy tires for it, I couldn't buy gas, it wasn't doing me any good, so I gave it to the boy that had this paper route. There was four or five other people wanting it. It wasn't like just walking off and quit— ting and somebody take it. If you got hold of a job then, it was worth something to you. And I took it over in 36; I started this paper route in '36.
PN: In Fayette County?
PN: Where did you graduate from high school?
HK: At Nuttall. Nuttall High School. Old Lookout. You 've heard of it?
PN: There was a high school right in Nuttall?
HK: It had been there quite a little while before I started. I think the school may have started somewhere about '27 or '28, the best that I could find out. Some of the old teachers that were there had been there maybe six, seven, or eight years before I started. So I would assume that the school was probably created somewhere about 1927 or '28.
PN: What kind of a town was Nuttall?
HK: It was close to the coal mining business. Winona. It was down the road about two miles; a great big coal camp. I mean it stretched out quite a bit. And then right on below there, getting on down into below the old Sewell country, we 're talking about, down on the C&O railroad , you had Nuttallburg.
PN: There was Nuttall and there was Nuttallburg?
HK: This Nut tall High School, that's at Lookout. Lookout was the name of the little place where Nuttall was, where Nutta11 High School was. As far as I know, the name Nut tall came from this Englishman that came over from England and put this coal mining operation in at Nuttallburg. You 've heard of Nuttallburg? Well, I suppose you know about where it is, don 't you? It's on below Sewell quite a bit, way on down the river. That flourished in there for quite a while, the coal business around there. The old man Dave Boone had part of those holdings in there at that time. I might say this, it might be a little bit interesting. When I was carrying those newspapers, I was going down to Chimney Corner picking those up. You know where Chinmey Corner is?
PN: Toward Ansted?
HR: Below Ansted. Old man Dave lived there at Lookout at that time. He was an old gentlemen, probably up around in his seventies, probably about 75 at that time. And he was riding down to Ansted; he had some relatives living down there. And he told me that at one time that he owned all of the Hawk's Nest State Park area and had title to it. And this Depression came on, and the real estate taxes at that time were about a dollar an acre. And he had 300,000 acres, and he was planning on developing that park and putting an aerial tramway across there, which they finally done. But he told me that the state took that for delinquent taxes. He couldn't, no way he could come up with it. He lost his coal business; his coal business went down on him. Everything in the 1930s went down real bad.
PN: David Boone?
HK: Uh huh. David Boone. Oh he was a huge man, almost, well typical English you know. He was a real nice old fellow to talk to. He was telling me, you know, the misfortunes you can have. One time he was king in that area there, had those coal mines going. And then this great Depression come along, and everything died out; everything fell apart.
PN: Did he own mines in Nut tall?
HK: Yes, he owned some in that area down in there and then some back in, back in towards this Landisburg area, back in there. There was another area in there, he had several holdings in there on the coal, the coal business.
PN: Then it just collapsed right from under him?
HK: Yea, right out from under him, which it did in about every case everywhere else too.
PN: When you graduated from high school in Nut tall in 1935, or Lookout — was that the name of the town?
HK: Nuttall High School at Lookout.
PN: And Nuttallburg was a little bit below that?
HR: Yea, Nuttallburg was on down, I 'd say Nuttallburg was down the river. It probably could be possibly six or seven miles on down the river from up there. See, Lookout's quite a bit a ways up the world, you see.
PN: And Lookout was what kind of a town?
HK: Just a little village of farmers and so forth. It wasn't, really wasn't any mines. Winona was the mining camp, below Lookout about two
miles, down the hollow, going down towards the river toward Nuttallburg.
See, Winona's about, maybe five or six miles above Nut tall burg.
PN: In Nut tall burg at that time, about how many homes were there?
HK: Well, it was sort of a, not exactly a railroad town, but there wasn't very many houses in those places, about like Sewell was. See, there never was a whole lot of houses at Sewell. There wasn't much place to put 'em, to tell you the truth about it. You 've been down at Sewell, haven't you? Well, Nut tall burg's about on the same order no area to build houses. so I'd say probably there wasn't over, maybe, oh I don 't know, I'd just be a' taking a guess on it, I'd say maybe there could have been ten to 15 residences there right at Nut tall burg. And of course, they had the coal tipple there and so forth.
PN: Did most of the miners live up on top of the mountain?
HK: No, no, a lot of them lived right in there on the river bottom. There wasn't too much way, that thing there at Nuttallburg, I doubt if you could get up the side of those hills, because they were almost perpendicular, just like it was down there at Sewell. Not much room. Just a railroad bed, and that's about it.
PN: And Sewell was about the same size? How many homes did you say were in Sewell.
HK: I would say probably about, possibly could have been a few more at
Sewell than there was at Nut tall burg. V d say at Sewell, there probably
could have been as many as 25 or 30 homes there at Sewell. You know, I
think about, somewhere around 1875 I read this article about the Long
Dell Mine and Ore Works were in there at Sewell. They came in there, I
guess that coke, they used to have coke ovens there at Sewell, you know.
It was quite a thing along the railroad towns at that time. This Long
Dell, I think that was, I 'm not sure whether this company was out of Pitts—
burgh or out of Virginia. I read that article some time back on that, but
that's been a long time ago, that's probably before any of the coal was
developed very much.
PN: What kind of ore did they have?
HK: They shipped that in. It had a smelting, whatever you call it, you
know to. They used coke I understand, you know, well, for steel, ore
and s teel, you know. Coke is very much in demand for melting steel; it
gets so hot and so forth. So that's the reason.
PN: Did they do that right in Sewell? Did they melt the ore there?
HK: Evidently they did, because this Long Dell Ore and Mine, or Steel, they called it, or something. Evidently, I wouldn't be certain about that,
but they were in there, they had to be doing some type of remanufacturing
or something with the iron and the ore there. But that was shipped in, the
ore was.
PN: But they processed it there?
HK: That's right.
PN: This is when, back in the 1870s?
HK: I believe it was 1865 on up to somewhere along about 1875 or '80. This person that writes for the Beckley Post—Hera1d, Shirley Donnelly, had a pretty good article on that once before too. He picked up quite a bit of the things that was in there at that time.
PN: Let me just ask you a couple of more things about these lumber camps? When you lived there, what did you generally eat? Did you eat food from your garden?
HK: I'd say 75%, well, maybe 90%, 90% from the garden. About the only things that we bought was the flour and sugar. My father generally kept some hogs, butchered them during the year. We kept a cow or two; we had our own milk and butter. So basically we had everything, except just the sugar and the flour.
PN: Did you buy meat of any kind, or did you just use the meat from the hog?
HR: About the only way, if you didn't raise your own meat, hogs and your cattle —— a lot of people had cattle; my father didn't go into that much, mostly pork from hogs you just didn't buy anything from the store at that time. They didn't have any refrigeration process. At that time, refrigeration was almost unknown. Of course, winter time is all right, meat [sic]. The butchering that you do in the fall of the year, you 'd salt it down with this salt, and it would keep. But you didn't go to the store and buy any meat to speak of at all; they didn't have any way to handle it or keep it, you know.
PN: You were saying before that many of the people who came into the lumber camps were farmers, whereas many of the people that went into the mines, some of them came from Europe or different places around the country. Do you think that the people that worked in the lumber camps raised more animals and food because they 'd been farmers than the miners did?
HR: Right, and like I said a while ago, the farmers, people that had been used to being reared on the farm, didn't look for a pay day. In other words, they looked far enough from one year to the next for their own food. They didn't go to the store and buy. The coal mines generally had a company store set up where you could come right out of the drift— mouth of the coal mines and go right into the store and take your food home with you that night. You used the scrip system, you know, where you would cut scrip and draw your pay day; you didn't draw any money, you'd just draw it out through buying your food. So basically, I think that's where the big difference is. Some of the foreign elements that came in did tend to raise gardens, you know, and then a lot of them didn't bother with it. Most of them didn't have much room around a coal camp to put out a garden, or do anything, you know, you didn’t have the area, the room, the land space. But at the lumber camps, you generally had the wide, open spaces. You wasn't crowded that bad; you could just move out; about the only thing you had to do was clear out some new ground.
PN: So that was different from the coal camp too then. But there was no company say, that Babcock Lumber
HK: Yes, they had a store; they certainly did.
PN: Where, at Landisburg?
HK: Yes, they had a company store.
PN: Could you buy food there?
HK: Yes, just basically, like I said a while ago. No meats to amount to anything at all. No refrigeration or any way to handle it but they had the other things that you, like flour and sugar and, of course, they had lard if you didn't raise your own, kill your own hogs, and butcher them, and had your own lard and everything. You could buy that. Basically you could buy about anything in the food line except the meats, and that wasn't available very much on account that they couldn't keep it, no way to handle it and put it where they could keep it any length of time.
PN: Where did you buy your furniture?
HK: The furniture was, these company stores carried some of the furniture, a line of furniture. Nothing fancy, just mostly, it was the old—time rocking chair, the old split—bottom chairs, and things like that. No sofas, no couches, or nothing like that at that time. That was out.
PN: Did you have a radio?
HK: No, we didn't. The radios at that time, let's see, the radio didn't come in till about thirty—, about, let's see, the first radios came into style, when, about, somewhere around about in the twenties, early twenties, didn't they. At that time, when first came in there, the radio was un— heard of . It may have been in some other parts of the country, but we didn't know anything about a radio. The closest we got to a radio was 1927, when we had the old Edison gramaphone, you know, that had the speaker. My father bought one in 1927. That's one way we got to play music. We'd turn a record on, and then get the guitar and the violin, and pick up the tune, and follow along with the song, some of the old You'd be surprised how fast you can catch on; you have to have something to lead you on, you know, if you get into music and do any good with it.
PN: Where did you play? Did you play like in churches and at social gatherings?
HR: Yes, and they'd have, maybe, what they'd call a log—rolling, or some— thing like that. And the old—time farms, you never had any trouble, every— thing was social and everybody got along good. Maybe stay all night. But anymore, things have changed so much, if you find a place where you can have a good time, sometimes a little bit of trouble develops around where there 's music and big—timing.
PN: Let me ask you one more question; I think the tape's about to run out. Did people drink much beer, or moonshine, or alcohol in the lumber camps.
HR: There wasn't any beer at all, and the moonshine was about the only thing. And they weren't bad about, the people that worked steady didn't let that bother them. It seemed like the people that were idle, the people that didn't have anything to do was the ones that went to extremes on it. The people that worked, they would go along and drink some over the weekend, and no big problems like we have now, you know, with getting out of hand or something. Yes, the drinking went right on, mostly moonshine whisky at that time.
PN: Did people make it, or buy it?
HK: Made it.
PN: Right in the lumber camps.
HK: Well, you know, Prohibition stopped that, at one time there. They didn't make it out in the open; you had to slip around and buy it. Prohibition come in when, nineteen and twenty— , somewhere in the twenties, they prohibited you from making moonshine.
[END OF TAPE]
Description
Landisburg, Lumbering, Babcock Lumber Company, Meadow River Lumber Company, logging camps from Landisburg to Danese
Date Created
08/19/1980
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