This Date in History

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Matewan is a coal town in West Virginia where in 1920 workers battled the company for their rights. John Sayles made a film about that struggle. “Matewan Massacre. May 19th, 1920. On the morning of the 19th day of May, 1920, Albert C. Felts, who was connected with the Baldwin-Felts Detectives, Incorporated, and who was also a deputy sheriff of Mingo County, West Virginia, with twelve other men went to Matewan to evict about half a dozen men who were unlawfully holding possession of some houses belonging to the Stone Mountain Coal Corporation. These miners had been repeatedly legally notified to surrender possession of the premises occupied by them, but had refused to do so. Under the direction of Mr. Felts, the household effects of these men were carefully and peaceably removed....” These actions led to the ‘Battle of Blair Mountain,’ “the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history.” The dynamic of White West Virginian, African Americans from Alabama, and immigrant Italian, miners finding a common foe is accurate.

John Sayles made a film about these events. Just below is the trailer.





Some content on the events: Matewan Massacre (U.S. National Park Service)


Hazel Dickens (RIP) sang in Sayles' film.





"During Matewan"The 1912-13 events at Paint & Cabin Creek are known as the first of the Coal Mine Wars of West Virginia. There was a march of 5,000 miners in 1919. Then the Matewan Massacre in 1920 led to the shooting of Chief Hatfield. The only movie made about this was filmed in 1987 by John Sayles. Finally with the help of Mother Jones and Bill Blizzard, apx. 15,000 armed miners attacked apx. 1,500 Company thugs, State Police, & 2,000 U.S. Military units in the Battle of Blair Mountain. The "RedNeck Army" (named for red cloth around their neck) surrendered when the U.S. Air Force threatened to bomb them.In 2005, the West Virginia Archives and History Commission voted unanimously to recommend to the National Park Service that 1,600 acres of Blair Mountain be included on the National Register.Coal mining companies and nearby landowners promptly sued to overturn the nomination. The Sierra Club moved to join the suit, and in May 2006 a West Virginia judge granted the Club's participation. That same month, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the Blair Mountain battlefield on its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Places. The United Mine Workers union also came out in support of the National Register listing because of its importance to the labor movement.
 
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I am presently reading The Devil is Here in These Hills, by James Green
It is a rather detailed history of all the slaughter surrounding the Coal strikes in these times Coal company trains with Gatlan Guns mowing down campgrounds of coal miner families...Governor and the POTUS ignoring it at many levels
I am not sure I will finish it........
 
A few years ago my good buddy from Wva took me Trout "feeshin" on Paint Creek
 
mpaer said:
I am presently reading The Devil is Here in These Hills, by James Green
It is a rather detailed history of all the slaughter surrounding the Coal strikes in these times Coal company trains with Gatlan Guns mowing down campgrounds of coal miner families...Governor and the POTUS ignoring it at many levels
I am not sure I will finish it........
Click to expand...


Biplanes Over Blair: Calling in the Air Force for the Mine Wars​


expatalachians.com

Biplanes Over Blair: Calling in the Air Force for the Mine Wars - expatalachians

A crowd of onlookers in Charleston, West Virginia gazed upward as the first series of black dots appeared on the horizon on September 2, 1921. As the dots crept closer, they became biplanes roaring toward the makeshift air strip in Kanawha City, then a small community on the eastern outskirts of...
expatalachians.com expatalachians.com
 
I once worked at a power plant that used the same access road as a coal mining operation (one surface mine and one strip mine.) When the miners went on strike, the strikers set up a picket line on the access road near where it interesected the main road. I would pull up to picket line, roll down the window and say, "I work at the power plant." Then I would be asked, "Are you salary or hourly?" And I would respond, "Salary." Then he would say, "OK, go on through," followed by my first name. This was always with someone who I usually interacted with several times on a weekly basis. Everytime that happened, I thought, well there's five minutes of my life I'm never getting back.
 
#OTD in 1861 North Carolina became the last state to secede and join the Confederacy. They changed the flag too.

IMG_8937.jpeg

They did not remove the date of secession until 1885.

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Stephens, John "Chicken" Walter​

Date: 1994
By; Trelease, Allen W.


14 Oct. 1834–21 May 1870​



A 2009 photograph of the Caswell County Courthouse, Yanceyville where John Walter Stephens was murdered. Image from Flickr user Natalie Maynor.

A 2009 photograph of the Caswell County Courthouse, Yanceyville where John Walter Stephens was murdered. Image from Flickr user Natalie Maynor.
John Walter Stephens, Republican state senator from Caswell County assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan, was born near Bruce's Cross-roads, Guilford County, the son of Absalom and Letitia Stephens. As a child he moved to Wentworth and later to Leaksville, Rockingham County, where his father, a tailor, died about 1848. John received only the most rudimentary education and went into the harness-making business in Wentworth. In 1857 he married Nannie E. Walters (or Nancy Waters); she died two years later, leaving an infant daughter. In 1860 he married Martha Frances Groom, of Wentworth, who also gave birth to a daughter. An active Methodist, Stephens was an agent for the American Bible and Tract Society for a year or so. Then he became a tobacco trader, moving to Yorkville (now York), S.C.

When the Civil War broke out, Stephens went to Greensboro and for a time served as a press agent commandeering horses for the Confederate army. He avoided military service until near the end of the war, by which time he had returned to Wentworth and resumed the tobacco trade. Following his army service he got into a quarrel with a neighbor over two of the latter's chickens, which had strayed onto his property. After spending a night in jail for killing the chickens, Stephens retaliated by caning the neighbor and then shooting two by-standers who tried to interfere. Thus originated the slurring political epithet, "Chicken" Stephens, by which Democrats referred to him in later years.

In 1866 Stephens moved to Yanceyville, Caswell County, where he continued in the tobacco business. Subsequently he served as an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau and became an active member of the Union League and the Republican party. In these capacities he associated frequently and freely with local blacks, who outnumbered whites in Caswell, and they accorded him a position of political leadership. As a result he was elected to the state senate in 1868 over Bedford Brown, a former U.S. senator and an elder statesman. Stephens came to be hated by the white community as a racial and political renegade, and no accusations of incendiarism or perfidy were too extravagant to win credence. He was socially ostracized and expelled from the Methodist church. As a result of repeated threats, he insured his life, fortified his house, and took to carrying three pistols on his person.

In truth, Stephens threw his influence on the side of political and racial moderation. He consistently advised blacks against physical retaliation following white terrorist attacks. In May 1870, while observing a Democratic county convention at the courthouse, he was lured to his death by Frank Wiley, a former Democratic sheriff whom Stephens was urging to accept the Republican nomination for reelection. By prearrangement with other waiting Klansmen, Wiley persuaded Stephens to leave the court-room and accompany him downstairs to a small room, where the others quickly overpowered and stabbed him to death, leaving the body on a woodpile to be discovered the next day. The details of the murder were not revealed for sixty-five years, but Klan involvement was suspected from the outset. It was in response to this crime that Governor William W. Holden called out the militia under Colonel George W. Kirk, leading in turn to Holden's impeachment and removal from office by a Democratic legislature.

www.ncpedia.org

Stephens, John "Chicken" Walter

www.ncpedia.org www.ncpedia.org
 
I loved the reruns of Broderick Crawford’s ‘Highway Patrol’ when I was a kid but I didn’t really want to meet him or any of his cohort. I only recollect my Deddy being ‘pulled’ once and he did not receive a citation. I’ve always been convinced that the ‘Amran Temple’ front plate on our Mercury sedan had something to do with that. I, on the other hand, had only just gotten my license when I had my first Smokey encounter. Topping a hill on Old 421 heading back to Bonlee from Siler City one August afternoon in 1974 I met the Trooper. He tracked me at 73 mph. No doubt I was going to exceed that on the crest’s downside. It was the kind of dumbness that tends to envelope a 16 year old boy. I was grounded and the State took its pound of flesh as well as Judge Don Lee Paschal made sure. Deddy made me go to court and stand before the judge where I got a severe ‘talking to’ as well. I’m pretty sure there was some conspiracy there between Deddy and the judge.

We all knew that the Highway Patrol was not something to be trifled with and any encounter spelled trouble. Still does. Little did I truly understand how dangerous a law enforcement stop could be. For a white boy like me, or middle class white folks like my parents, the danger was nigh on to zero, but for young men and women of color the percentage chance of being ‘stopped’ or even simply ‘noticed’ for deadly mayhem skyrocketed.

To be sure, while guns have always been ubiquitous in places like #DeepChatham, the proliferation of ‘easy-to-use’ firearms has raised the hazard level across the board. Everyone, most definitely law enforcement, is on edge - personal Doomsday Clocks for so many are now set at 11:55 pm. Guns have taken a dominant place in society. There is a barbarism afoot that challenges the very meaning of civilization. I’m not saying that violence is new or even historically particularly characteristic of the United States - global narratives of the past and present attest to humanity’s penchant for brutality.

In ‘Democracy in America’ — an 1830s survey of life in this country written by the traveling Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville — he found that all across the land persuasion was a practiced habit. That persuasion was born of an agreement on our national starting point. Today that founding and the thinking around it has become the very seed of our polarization and abandonment of persuasion. That happened once before in the mid-eighteenth century over the definition of the breadth and depth of human-ness — and greed and prejudice drove us into Civil War. Today practically all of the principles once agreed upon at least nominally are contested and persuasion is dead. So-called “originalísim” has doomed us to self-serving prophetic divination in the name of filthy lucre over even the simplest awareness of our common welfare. Public Health literally suffers. And violence grows. And guns and shootings, one-on-one and mass, plague us, one-and-all.

Todays violence calls me back to my youth and the nightly reporting on the war in Vietnam. The reporters were often brought to us mid-firefight and we at home were not spared the carnage. Those stark images helped to end that fool’s errand (note that the public no longer gets that type of story ‘back home’ — thus, war without end). I had hoped that the cell phone’s omnipresent camera might do the same with the violence, especially the kind that has always made the police stop deadly for so many. Perhaps it has - one has to imagine in a world where persuasion no longer has a place just how bad things <could> be. I cast no aspersions on any specific individuals in law enforcement, though doubtless some are deserving, but rather a kleptocracy that has taken on aspects of an idiocracy.

When, 96 years ago, a Highway Patrol was established to guard and police the roads of North Carolina, things weren’t perfect on those byways and backroads and racial and class-based violence was a fact - guns were even abundant though not nearly in models as deadly as today - but some degree of persuasion did seem to be hanging on. Unfortunately the quality that de Tocqueville detected as so fundamental appears to have evaporated in the face of the heat and glare of greed-driven violence.

#OTD (May 20) in 1929, 67 men reported to the 1st State Highway Patrol training camp in #MoreheadCity-27 were chosen-3 each for 9 Districts with 9 Lieutenants commanding each. In July the 36 Troopers, plus statewide chief, Charles Farmer, toured 1028 miles of the state-Beaufort to Asheville to Raleigh to raise support/awareness. https://www.ncdcr.gov/.../highway-patrol-outfitted-in...

IMG_8977.jpeg
 
NC folk finding success in NYC Theater! This is an intriguing story of a young woman from The Tar Heel State who moved to the City and found work for The Theater Guild. #OTD (May 24) in 1923 Moore County, & #Asheville’s, Lula Vollmer’s ‘Sun Up,’ opened on Broadway. She was a graduate of Asheville College, Class of 1918 (not UNCA) —‘ Sun Up’ depicted Appalachia, moonshine, isolation, and suspicion of government. Vollmer is 2nd only to Paul Green among Tar Heel playwrights for NYC productions. Dramatist Lula Vollmer, Acclaimed for “Sun-up” Much more at THIS LINK: LULA VOLLMER’S SUN-UP
 
donbosco said:
I loved the reruns of Broderick Crawford’s ‘Highway Patrol’ when I was a kid but I didn’t really want to meet him or any of his cohort. I only recollect my Deddy being ‘pulled’ once and he did not receive a citation. I’ve always been convinced that the ‘Amran Temple’ front plate on our Mercury sedan had something to do with that. I, on the other hand, had only just gotten my license when I had my first Smokey encounter. Topping a hill on Old 421 heading back to Bonlee from Siler City one August afternoon in 1974 I met the Trooper. He tracked me at 73 mph. No doubt I was going to exceed that on the crest’s downside. It was the kind of dumbness that tends to envelope a 16 year old boy. I was grounded and the State took its pound of flesh as well as Judge Don Lee Paschal made sure. Deddy made me go to court and stand before the judge where I got a severe ‘talking to’ as well. I’m pretty sure there was some conspiracy there between Deddy and the judge.

We all knew that the Highway Patrol was not something to be trifled with and any encounter spelled trouble. Still does. Little did I truly understand how dangerous a law enforcement stop could be. For a white boy like me, or middle class white folks like my parents, the danger was nigh on to zero, but for young men and women of color the percentage chance of being ‘stopped’ or even simply ‘noticed’ for deadly mayhem skyrocketed.

To be sure, while guns have always been ubiquitous in places like #DeepChatham, the proliferation of ‘easy-to-use’ firearms has raised the hazard level across the board. Everyone, most definitely law enforcement, is on edge - personal Doomsday Clocks for so many are now set at 11:55 pm. Guns have taken a dominant place in society. There is a barbarism afoot that challenges the very meaning of civilization. I’m not saying that violence is new or even historically particularly characteristic of the United States - global narratives of the past and present attest to humanity’s penchant for brutality.

In ‘Democracy in America’ — an 1830s survey of life in this country written by the traveling Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville — he found that all across the land persuasion was a practiced habit. That persuasion was born of an agreement on our national starting point. Today that founding and the thinking around it has become the very seed of our polarization and abandonment of persuasion. That happened once before in the mid-eighteenth century over the definition of the breadth and depth of human-ness — and greed and prejudice drove us into Civil War. Today practically all of the principles once agreed upon at least nominally are contested and persuasion is dead. So-called “originalísim” has doomed us to self-serving prophetic divination in the name of filthy lucre over even the simplest awareness of our common welfare. Public Health literally suffers. And violence grows. And guns and shootings, one-on-one and mass, plague us, one-and-all.

Todays violence calls me back to my youth and the nightly reporting on the war in Vietnam. The reporters were often brought to us mid-firefight and we at home were not spared the carnage. Those stark images helped to end that fool’s errand (note that the public no longer gets that type of story ‘back home’ — thus, war without end). I had hoped that the cell phone’s omnipresent camera might do the same with the violence, especially the kind that has always made the police stop deadly for so many. Perhaps it has - one has to imagine in a world where persuasion no longer has a place just how bad things <could> be. I cast no aspersions on any specific individuals in law enforcement, though doubtless some are deserving, but rather a kleptocracy that has taken on aspects of an idiocracy.

When, 96 years ago, a Highway Patrol was established to guard and police the roads of North Carolina, things weren’t perfect on those byways and backroads and racial and class-based violence was a fact - guns were even abundant though not nearly in models as deadly as today - but some degree of persuasion did seem to be hanging on. Unfortunately the quality that de Tocqueville detected as so fundamental appears to have evaporated in the face of the heat and glare of greed-driven violence.

#OTD (May 20) in 1929, 67 men reported to the 1st State Highway Patrol training camp in #MoreheadCity-27 were chosen-3 each for 9 Districts with 9 Lieutenants commanding each. In July the 36 Troopers, plus statewide chief, Charles Farmer, toured 1028 miles of the state-Beaufort to Asheville to Raleigh to raise support/awareness. https://www.ncdcr.gov/.../highway-patrol-outfitted-in...

IMG_8977.jpeg
Click to expand...
My first speeding ticket was in Kansas. Sometimes while in college I had a short break either just after school ended but before my summer job started or just before school started but after my summer job ended. In these breaks I would call up some relative and ask if I could spend a few days with them. Then I would contact a service in Raleigh that delivered people's cars to them when they moved. There was always one going to near where I wanted to go. All I had to do was pay for half the gas and drop the car off at the owner's house. The owner would reimburse me for his half of the gas. And do the reverse on the way back. When I got the speeding ticket, the trooper made me put fine amount and court costs, in cash, in an envelope and mail it to the courthouse. That night I wrote a letter to the same address admitting I was spending, admitting that I had been lulled into a sense of serenity by the endless beauty of Kansas plains, profusely apologized for my regrettable lapse in attention, and complimenting the state trooper for his professionalism and courtesy. By the time I got back home there was letter waiting for me that contained a check refunding my fine and court costs, in full. I would not advise this tactic for anything more serious than a speeding ticket.
 
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The joke goes, “Tar Heels will vote NO on alcohol as long as they can stagger to the polls.” What great satire that the first southern state in that sotted region to take out the legitimate business of making and selling strong spirits over its self-image of piety should be dubbed by so many as the ‘Moonshine State.’ ‘Tis one of history’s greatest challenges to Esse Quam Videri I think.

Because my Deddy ran a hardware store he knew from the consistency of certain purchases alone who in our part of Chatham was ‘making.’ It wasn’t just a few. For decades and decades you couldn’t buy beer, wine, or liquor in Chatham or most counties. (I believe the entire drive from Charlotte to the Triangle was dry as a bone in those days — a point of much distress to cosmopolitan Mecklenburg-settled State and Carolina fans on college football Saturdays) By the 1960s Wet Spots dotted the Tar Heel landscape and in the summer of 1967 the NC General Assembly passed a law permitting “brown bagging” of liquor (and set-ups) in restaurants and private clubs. Governor Dan K. Moore signed the bill into law. County-by-county then chose whether or not to permit ABC stores in their jurisdiction. Eventually municipalities might do the same. VFW Huts could sell to Vets, of which a half-century of world war had produced a goodly number (and there were many nods, winks, and side-door hand-offs perpetrated by way of that ‘patriotic’ loophole to be sure), and of course 1,000s of bootlegger joints and drink houses had long existed across the state.

Still, public drinking was deemed evil and churches backed the power of that basic tenet of Tar Heel Life. Imbibing went on as always but opprobrium demanded that in most places those who partook should slink and sneak around to do it. State-run liquor stores were not to be found in so-called ‘dry counties’ like Chatham. When traveling to besotted cesspools like Raleigh, Greensboro, Sanford, and Oak Island my parents always told me the letters on the signs spied out the window (ABC) stood for “Apples, Bananas, and Candy,” leaving me to wonder why, when we liked all those things, we never stopped!

Eventually enough folks moved in from ‘other places’ that Chatham got an ABC Store in Pittsboro on a municipal vote. That hurt the bootleggers and liquor houses only a little I suspect. It has always been interesting to note that the Pittsboro store was close to the Courthouse AND had hidden parking around back. I’ve heard tell that some ABC Stores purposely put up such ‘Deacon Walls’ for the carefully covert parking they afforded. Of course some places weren’t under the thumb of the Southern Baptists (or was it the moonshiners?) — Alamance and Randolph counties went wet long before Chatham making towns like Eli Whitney and Liberty popular with denizens of #DeepChatham in need of legal drink. Lost a good bit of tax revenue too.

It bothered my Southern Baptist parents a great deal that their one-time Sunday School Teaching son turned so hard and fast to tending bar (24 years at the rail by my best count). I think that once they understood the lucrativeness of the trade (Southern Baptists YES, but good Capitalists too) AND that I was actually barred from drinking while working they made their fitful peace with my line of work. Still, if they came by to communicate with me while I was tending at Tijuana Fats on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, with the bar and the bottles so prominent upon entry, they refused to come inside and would send a message with a passerby they corraled that they were in the parking lot and that I should come outside to meet with them. North Carolina’s relationship with alcohol has always shown that tension-the one between the Bible and the Buck.

#OTD (May 26) in 1908 North Carolinians Voted 68-32% for Prohibition, becoming the first domino to fall in the Temperance campaign that resulted in national Prohibition via the 18th Amendment in 1920. When the 21st Amendment passed in 1933, rescinding the 18th, NC was one of two that voted NO. North Carolina Voters Approve Prohibition
 
donbosco said:
IMG_9017.jpeg

The joke goes, “Tar Heels will vote NO on alcohol as long as they can stagger to the polls.” What great satire that the first southern state in that sotted region to take out the legitimate business of making and selling strong spirits over its self-image of piety should be dubbed by so many as the ‘Moonshine State.’ ‘Tis one of history’s greatest challenges to Esse Quam Videri I think.

Because my Deddy ran a hardware store he knew from the consistency of certain purchases alone who in our part of Chatham was ‘making.’ It wasn’t just a few. For decades and decades you couldn’t buy beer, wine, or liquor in Chatham or most counties. (I believe the entire drive from Charlotte to the Triangle was dry as a bone in those days — a point of much distress to cosmopolitan Mecklenburg-settled State and Carolina fans on college football Saturdays) By the 1960s Wet Spots dotted the Tar Heel landscape and in the summer of 1967 the NC General Assembly passed a law permitting “brown bagging” of liquor (and set-ups) in restaurants and private clubs. Governor Dan K. Moore signed the bill into law. County-by-county then chose whether or not to permit ABC stores in their jurisdiction. Eventually municipalities might do the same. VFW Huts could sell to Vets, of which a half-century of world war had produced a goodly number (and there were many nods, winks, and side-door hand-offs perpetrated by way of that ‘patriotic’ loophole to be sure), and of course 1,000s of bootlegger joints and drink houses had long existed across the state.

Still, public drinking was deemed evil and churches backed the power of that basic tenet of Tar Heel Life. Imbibing went on as always but opprobrium demanded that in most places those who partook should slink and sneak around to do it. State-run liquor stores were not to be found in so-called ‘dry counties’ like Chatham. When traveling to besotted cesspools like Raleigh, Greensboro, Sanford, and Oak Island my parents always told me the letters on the signs spied out the window (ABC) stood for “Apples, Bananas, and Candy,” leaving me to wonder why, when we liked all those things, we never stopped!

Eventually enough folks moved in from ‘other places’ that Chatham got an ABC Store in Pittsboro on a municipal vote. That hurt the bootleggers and liquor houses only a little I suspect. It has always been interesting to note that the Pittsboro store was close to the Courthouse AND had hidden parking around back. I’ve heard tell that some ABC Stores purposely put up such ‘Deacon Walls’ for the carefully covert parking they afforded. Of course some places weren’t under the thumb of the Southern Baptists (or was it the moonshiners?) — Alamance and Randolph counties went wet long before Chatham making towns like Eli Whitney and Liberty popular with denizens of #DeepChatham in need of legal drink. Lost a good bit of tax revenue too.

It bothered my Southern Baptist parents a great deal that their one-time Sunday School Teaching son turned so hard and fast to tending bar (24 years at the rail by my best count). I think that once they understood the lucrativeness of the trade (Southern Baptists YES, but good Capitalists too) AND that I was actually barred from drinking while working they made their fitful peace with my line of work. Still, if they came by to communicate with me while I was tending at Tijuana Fats on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, with the bar and the bottles so prominent upon entry, they refused to come inside and would send a message with a passerby they corraled that they were in the parking lot and that I should come outside to meet with them. North Carolina’s relationship with alcohol has always shown that tension-the one between the Bible and the Buck.

#OTD (May 26) in 1908 North Carolinians Voted 68-32% for Prohibition, becoming the first domino to fall in the Temperance campaign that resulted in national Prohibition via the 18th Amendment in 1920. When the 21st Amendment passed in 1933, rescinding the 18th, NC was one of two that voted NO. North Carolina Voters Approve Prohibition
Click to expand...
Great story Don. Guilford County had liquor by the drink way before Alamance County did. We would go to Kembers in Gibsonville or Brightwood on US 70 right before you get to Sedalia. Brightwood’s most famous customer was Elvis. He ate there after leaving Burlington after performing at Burlington Williams’ auditorium.
 
Patb78 said:
Great story Don. Guilford County had liquor by the drink way before Alamance County did. We would go to Kembers in Gibsonville or Brightwood on US 70 right before you get to Sedalia. Brightwood’s most famous customer was Elvis. He ate there after leaving Burlington after performing at Burlington Williams’ auditorium.
Click to expand...

I suspect there are a great many "crossing the county line" stories associated with alcohol in North Carolina History.
 
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