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Scotts Run
America's Symbol of the Great Depression in the Coal Fields
RONALD L. LEWIS

Arthurdale's 60th anniversary slogan proclaims that "The Dream Lives On." The story of this New Deal community is affirmative and inspiring, a tale of triumph against the odds, the kind of story Americans embrace. The dream of Arthurdale was born out of the chronic despair that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt found upon personal investigation into the living conditions along Scotts Run in 1933. But the nightmare of poverty on Scotts Run, which spurred New Deal reformers in the first place, has faded during the last half-century of relative prosperity. Nevertheless, the dream and the nightmare are interdependent, and so, as a preface to the chapters which follow in this volume, it is appropriate to reflect briefly on the historical significance of Scotts Run. The rapid rise and dramatic fall of King Coal in this five-mile-long coal hollow located in Monongalia County, West Virginia, is a case study of how the unrestrained capitalist development of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries triggered explosive economic growth, on the one hand, and unrelenting human misery on the other.

Poverty was not always associated with the Scotts Run coal field. Coal companies and speculators began to accumulate mineral rights there in the late-nineteenth century. However, the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy did not make any significant headway until World War I stimulated the demand for coal to fuel the national war machine. Monongalia County produced a mere 57,000 tons of coal in 1899, and only 400,000 tons in 1914, but by 1921, tonnage soared to nearly 4.4 million tons.(1) Most of this expansion was attributable to the development of Scotts Run where, during its peak years in the mid-1920s, coal companies owned 75 percent of the taxable acres and thirty-six mines extracted coal from underground. In fact, the narrow five-mile hollow was one of the most intensively developed coal districts in the United States, with a minimum of seventy-three coal companies in operation between 1917, when the field opened, and 1942, a period of intense coal company consolidation.(2)

Scotts Run coal was developed against a background of unrestrained boosterism. I. C. White, the state geologist and Morgantown resident, was unabashed in his writing of the potential for the coal industry in the Morgantown field. In a 1923 issue of Black Diamond, a leading coal trade publication, White observed that in the four commercial coal seams of Scotts Run, located on the west side of the Monongahela River across from Morgantown, were found twenty-five feet of coal; on the east side of the river were another four seams of fifteen feet, totaling forty feet of coal. "These eight seams of minable commercial coal, all being operated from Morgantown as a center, give this favored region the unique distinction of having more coal in its immediate vicinity than any other city of the world," White proclaimed.

How is it possible to exaggerate the wonderfully prosperous future that unfolds itself in the horoscope of Morgantown.... What the future has in store for this remarkable coal field remains to be seen. It has made history in the coal industry since the day it was opened.(3)

This was more than mere boosterism, however, for Black Diamond informed its subscribers in that same year that "in no section of West Virginia's many mining districts has the development of a coal field been more phenomenal than in the history of Scotts Run."

While boosterism helped, it does not fully explain the rapid development of Scotts Run. There were several important strands of economic reality which converged at this moment in this previously obscure rural hollow. Most importantly, geology determined that Scotts Run would be the place that provided easy entry into the Pittsburgh seam, considered by many experts to be the most valuable mineral deposit in the world. At Scotts Run, the seam was exposed at 170 feet above the Monongahela River. The Sewickley seam, located about ninety feet above the Pittsburgh, was considered the best quality locomotive coal in the nation.(4) While less economically important, two other minable seams added to the value of coal properties along the run.

Nature played an important role in capturing the attention of coal producers, but World War I unleashed the pivotal chain of human events which made development possible. Coal prices in the national market doubled under wartime stimulation, and it is significant that the first commercial mine on the run dates from 1917. Transportation was another key factor. Scotts Run flows into the Monongahela River, which already carried more freight originating along its banks than any other.river in the hemisphere.(5)

With the rapid development of railroads, the transportation infrastructure for shipping coal to market was in place. In 1910, the Morgantown and Dunkard Valley Railway, an electric trolley line, was completed from Morgantown to the mouth of Scotts Run, and up the run to Cassville in 1911.(6) The Morgantown and Wheeling Railway took over the line in 1913 with plans to complete the line to Blacksville, in the western part of the county, to connect with steam trains, and then to continue on to Wheeling. The following year, the Buckhannon and Northern Railroad, built south from Brownsville, Pennsylvania, connected with the Morgantown and Wheeling at Randall at the confluence of the run and the Monongahela River. Between 1915 and 1925, and after a complicated financial history, these various lines were purchased by the Monongahela Railway. In 1921, 175 coal cars per day originated from Scotts Run mines and were transported over two sets of double tracks; by 1924, that number had reached an average of two hundred cars a day and the markets reportedly were slow.(7)

Finally, Morgantown, whose businessmen were deeply engaged in Scotts Run, was a full-fledged service center for industrial development. The Monongalia County seat, Morgantown had a well established and diversified business community serving 16,000 people in the early 1920s. Moreover, it was the hub of an emerging transportation nexus of road, river, and railroad traffic with power plants to supply electricity for coal mines. According to I. C. White, however, the greatest advantage offered by Morgantown was the proximity of six excellent banks which helped to finance the development of Scotts Run and assisted in "the growth of Morgantown as the greatest coal center in northern West Virginia."(8)

One of the most significant and unique features of development along Scotts Run was its density. Generally, developers leased their coal lands by the acre, but on the run they leased both by the acre and by the seam. As a result, two operations standing side by side might be mining two different seams, a practice which encouraged the multiplication of coal companies with access to these rich seams in a very confined space, and which subsequently would have dire social and economic consequences. The potential for legal conflicts, and danger to working miners, is illustrated in the unusual suit brought to court in 1924 by Chaplin Collieries, which mined the Sewickley seam above the Pittsburgh seam being mined by Pursglove Coal Mining Company. Chaplin charged Pursglove with operating the mine in a manner which threatened Chaplin's mine and the safety of his employees. The court apparently agreed and ordered Pursglove to change his method of mining in order to protect Chaplin's operation in the Sewickley seam. Black Diamond, which carried a regular weekly column on coal news from Monongalia County, observed that "practically all of the land in Cass district in the coal belt has both Sewickley and Pittsburgh coal under it and in most instances the veins are owned by different parties."(9)

Rapid industrial development on Scotts Run brought an equally profound social transformation to this rural hollow as mining replaced farming as the chief means of earning a livelihood along the run. Farmers and farm laborers comprised 66 percent of the heads of household in Cass District in 1880 and mining only 2 percent; by 1920, coal mining was 63 percent and farming had declined to 21 percent. What this meant to people who had lived there for generations is suggested by an item published in a 1923 issue of Black Diamond, which described Cassville as:

…a sleepy little village that has been there for years. Its residents do not yet comprehend what has taken place in their little community to transform it into a great hive of industry, with rows of dwellings, stores, schools, churches, power houses, generating stations, and tipples that lie in an almost unbroken line for five miles.(10)

As in southern West Virginia, coal development on Scotts Run required more workers than the local labor market could supply. Therefore, companies imported foreign-born immigrants and African-Americans from the South and thereby precipitated a rapid increase in the population. An exact calculation of the population inot possible because the run is a geographical rather than political sub-division of Cass District, and the censuses do not always indicate the exact location of residents. Also, the decennial censuses for 1920 and 1930 did not record the surge in population which peaked during the 1 920s at about four thousand.(11) Nor is it likely that census-takers differed in this case in their reluctance to search out coal camps hidden from view or considered "too tough" for the census-takers to enter. Moreover, although the actual number of workers who commuted to jobs at Scotts Run mines is unknown, a significant proportion of the work force fell into that category.

Mirroring the pattern reflected in other West Virginia coal fields, and indeed the American coal fields generally, the importation of workers also resulted in a racially and ethnically diverse population. In fact, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the population of Scotts Run during the boom years was the diversity of its composition. The 1920 manuscript census identified the following foreign-born ethnic nationalities among the adult (voting age) residents of Scotts Run: Austrian, Bohemian, Canadian, Croatian, English, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Scottish, Serbian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and Welsh. Approximately 60 percent of the population were foreign-born, 93 percent of whom were either southern or eastern European, with native whites and blacks divided about equally at 20 percent for each group.(12)

The year 1923 was a momentous watershed in the Scotts Run coal industry. That year was probably the high-water mark in production at 4.4 million tons, but it also was the beginning of a downward spiral which ultimately led to the depopulation of this hollow community. The boom lifted the run to prominence in coal production, but it lasted only seven years before larger social and economic forces reversed the process. The "war to make the world safe for democracy" ended in 1919, and with it government regulation of the industry. In order to maintain war production, a government brokered agreement between industry and labor recognized the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) as the miners' agent, but that grudging compromise was retracted by industry after the war.(13) In northern West Virginia, coal operators adhered to a non-union policy prior to the war, and after the armistice was signed, they awaited their opportunity to return to the status quo antebellum. One obstacle blocking their immediate return to prewar conditions in the Fairmont Field was the fact that C. W. Watson of Consolidation Coal Company, the dominant producer in the region, had recognized the union in 1918 in hopes of carrying the miners' votes during his campaign for the U. S. Senate. Watson failed in that quest, but he was forced to accept the union until there was an appropriate pretext for rejoining his non-union colleagues. That pretext came in 1922. By then, the war-heated demand for coal had cooled significantly, and President Warren G. Harding lifted federal regulation of the industry, thus opening the way for an "open shop" drive by the coal producers.(14) In 1923, officers of the UMWA and the Central Competitive Field fashioned, and then early in 1924, signed the Jacksonville Agreement which maintained the 1922 wage scale Shortly thereafter, the Northern West Virginia Coal Operators' Association met with UMWA representatives in Baltimore and ratified the national accord. Both contracts were to last until 1927.(15)

In West Virginia, the Fairmont field operators were alone among the state's coal operators in signing the agreement, convinced that their companies could compete with non-union labor in the southern West Virginia fields. They were wrong, and as coal prices plummeted to their lowest level in the market, the northern operators abrogated the Jacksonville/Baltimore Agreement, thereby precipitating a seven-year coal war in northern West Virginia. This disastrous series of strikes and lockouts lasted from 1924 until 1931. The northern West Virginia mine war was the longest strike in the state's colorful industrial history, and it cast the miners and their families into destitution and misery, and many of the operators into bankruptcy.'

In 1928, with the UMWA in ruin, President John L. Lewis granted the districts the power to negotiate their own separate contracts. This left the door open for the National Miners Union (NMU), a stalking horse for the Communist Party, to organize the miners. Under the NMU banner, Scotts Run miners went out on strike in 1931 against further wage cuts that already sagged below subsistence levels. An American Red Cross report called this strike "the most peculiar strike in history" because it was directed against consumers who paid too little to sustain a living wage, rather than against the operators. After a month's stoppage, the Scotts Run operators recognized the UMWA, presumably rather than risk legitimizing the NMU, a strategy followed by operators in the adjacent southwestern Pennsylvania coal fields, and the long, bitter, and frequently violent strike came to an end. The strike settlement proved to be the beginning of the UMWA's resurgence. The end of the seven-year coal war did not bring a return to prosperity, however, for by 1931, the Great Depression also had tightened its hold on Scotts Run miners, many of whom had been without real work for years. Thus weakened, the economic landslide fell on them with a merciless fury that drove most of them into abject poverty.

It was in this pitiful condition that Scotts Run became America's symbol of the Depression in the coal fields and set a new standard for measuring human suffering in the country which saw itself as "the last best hope of man." To what degree life was worse here than in other coal hollows is difficult to determine, but there was plenty of misery to go around. Ironically, Scotts Run received much more attention than other depressed coal communities because it was far more accessible to outside photographers, reporters, social workers, and government agencies.

This begs the question of just how "isolated" Scotts Run actually was in the 1920s and 1930s, a perspective tightly linked to its public identity. It should be noted that the run was easily accessible by bus, auto, trolley, or train during this period, and it was only a few miles from the county seat of Morgantown. The commercial center of the county, Morgantown itself was linked into the national transportation network which connected the hinterland with major metropolitan centers. Even though outside observers usually portrayed Scotts Run as "isolated," its spatial relationship to the rest of the world is more accurately understood as "stranded," a term frequently employed by contemporary relief workers to describe the condition of people trapped on economic desert islands and powerless to alter their condition. Most of the people were trapped not by geography, but by the lack of resources, employment options, and by their culture--many could not speak English and had customs which imposed a social distance between them and native-born residents. A significant percentage were African-Americans, and racism must be added to culture as an explanation of why many were stranded" on Scotts Run.

Undoubtedly, the personal attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt did more than anything else to focus national attention on Scotts Run. Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt's personal confidante and emissary, was sent into the Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal fields on a fact-finding mission in 1933, and was escorted by Morgantown relief workers to Scotts Run. There she "came upon a gutter along a village street filled with stagnant, filthy water used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable by the inhabitants of ramshackle cabins that most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs," she reported to Harry L. Hopkins. "Within these shacks, every night children went to sleep hungry, on piles of bug-infested rags spread on the floor."

Lorena Hickok's cry of despair promptly brought Eleanor Roosevelt for a personal examination of conditions in the mine camps near Morgantown, and she too was appalled by conditions on Scotts Run. In her autobiography, Mrs. Roosevelt related a story similar to that reported by Hickok regarding the unsanitary condition of the water supply. "The Run in Jere, like all the others that, ran down the gullies to the larger, main stream," she observed, "was the only sewage disposal system that existed. At the bottom of the hill there was a spigot from which everyone drew water. The children played in the stream and the filth was indescribable."(20 ) Another experience which distressed her occurred in a company house where a man showed the First Lady his weekly pay slips. After the usual deductions for rent and the company store, he was left with less than one dollar per week to feed his six children. "I noticed a bowl on the table filled with scraps, the kind that you or I might give to a dog," Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, "and I saw children, evidently looking for their noon-day meal, take a handful out of that bowl and go out munching. That was all they had to eat." Eleanor took many people to see Jere, "for it was a good example of what absentee ownership could do as far as human beings were concerned."

These interrelated themes of paralyzing poverty, unsanitary living conditions, absentee ownership, and corollary problems such as poor education, were taken up during the 1930s by reporters for national publications, who detailed a prose picture of Scotts Run as the symbol of the destitution to be found in the coal fields. One article, in particular, has been referred to so many times since 1935 when it was published by the Atlantic Monthly that the phrase "the damnedest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America" has become synonymous with Scotts Run.(22)

Even before Mrs. Roosevelt threw her considerable influence behind the struggle to improve living conditions on the run, others had long been busy in that same enterprise. The Coal Relief Campaign of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was already on the scene when Mrs. Roosevelt called Clarence E. Pickett, executive secretary of the AFSC, about inspecting conditions in the coal fields first hand. Pickett and Alice O. Davis, director of the Morgantown district, met with Mrs. Roosevelt and helped to establish the itinerary which brought her to the county and Scotts Run. With her came the inevitable corps of newspaper reporters, soon followed by some of America's most famous photographers, such as Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Marion Post Walcott, and Ben Shahn: Their photographs captured the human face of the Depression and I provided the visual images which confirmed the written text. They heightened the nation's consciousness about Scotts Run, and while it became easier for social agencies to justify their work and to raise scarce resources for the relief effort, the symbol also became a fixture in the iconography of the public imagination.

The American Friends Service Committee, and the various federal relief agencies, brought a strong presence to Scotts Run, but it would be a mistake to interpret the appearance of these national organizations as the first demonstration of concern for the plight of these stranded miners and their families. In fact, local agencies, particularly the Council of Social Agencies and the County Welfare Board, had been struggling for years to improve the human condition on Scotts Run. The burden simply had proven too great for local agencies alone, and Monongalia County was virtually bankrupt. A National Red Cross report on Monongalia County for 1931 outlines the scale of the problem confronting local relief agencies. Of the 50,000 people in the county, 16,000 lived in Morgantown, 15,000 lived in the coal mining sections, and 20,000 lived in the rural farm sections. According to the report, "a vast amount of miner's [sic] children are being fed by charitable organizations." A nutritional survey undertaken in the mining sections revealed that in "some instances as high as 40 percent of the children were found to be suffering from malnutrition with an average of 26 percent. Quite a few of the children are without sufficient clothing and shoes." Compounding the problem was the closure of every bank in the county. According to the Red Cross report for 1931, "the county funds have been tied up in the closed banks and it looks as if tax collections for the fiscal year are going to be considerably short." (23)

The problem of tax revenues became even worse in 1933 after the Tax Limitation Amendment of 1932 was passed, which reduced and limited property taxes.24 This left much of the relief effort to private agencies, such as the American Friends Service Committee, which served 128,692 meals to children in the mine camps of Monongalia County between the Septembers-of 1931 and 1932. One half of its twenty-four feeding stations in Monongalia County were located in the Scotts Run area, and by far the largest majority of meals were served there.(25)

The earliest, and most personalized, local relief efforts drew their inspiration from the Bible School Movement and the Settlement House Movement. The Bible School Movement depended on trained lay-workers and volunteers to teach the principles of Christianity to the "religiously needy" but gave primary attention to the children. Most ofthe workers were young women who followed this avenue to leadership roles unavailable to them within the conventional structure of the church.(26) Young women also played a major role in the Settlement House Movement, the best known example being Jane Addarns's Hull House in Chicago. Settlement houses attempted to assist in the "Americanization" of newly arrived immigrants by promoting English literacy, citizenship, hygiene, and other basic adaptive social and life skills. (27)

The goals of both movements converged on Scotts Run during the 1920s, when Methodist and Presbyterian churches in Morgantown expanded their work among the mining families on the run. The Scotts Run Settlement House began in 1922 when the Women's Home Missionary Society of Wesley Methodist Church established a Bible school for children under the direction of Deaconess Edna L. Muir and Pearl E. Shriver. In addition to Bible school and Sunday school, the settlement house gradually expanded its program to include classes on naturalization, cooking, motherhood, and other life skills. A permanent building for the settlement house in Osage was completed in 1927 and continues to this day to offer assistance to those in need.(28)

The Morgantown First Presbyterian Church also sent a Christian worker, Mary Behner, to establish a missionary project on Scotts Run. Ms. Behner began her work at Pursglove in 1928, almost exactly one year after the Methodist Settlement House was completed. Programs similar to those at the settlement house were initiated in a local school, but in 1931, a mine building was converted into a community center for Ms. Behner's work. Local residents called it "The Shack," and the name stuck.(29)

In 1938, the Reverend Franlclin Trubee, the first ordained Presbyterian missionary to be stationed on Scotts Run, became the director of The Shack. He built a new and larger Shack and readily adopted the methods and philosophical approach of the American Friends Service Committee, developing local leadership, and promoting rehabilitation (helping people to help themselves) through cooperative exchanges of labor and goods. The unemployed needed no cash when they participated in the Scotts Run Reciprocal Economy, The Shack's cooperative. Most residents could not practice supplemental farming or extensive gardening as they did elsewhere in the coal fields because acrid fumes from the smoldering "gob" piles killed all the vegetation in the hollow, and congestion from over-development precluded other uses of the land. However, through the co-op they exchanged their labor for produce raised in the hilltop community gardens or for reconditioned clothing from the recycled clothing shop. Now in its third building, The Shack, like the settlement house, has adapted to the circumstances of modern life and continues to serve people in need.(30)

The residents of Scotts Run survived the Great Depression through imaginative coping strategies, but the 1930s marks the beginning of a long slide into historical obscurity for this once teeming hollow. A number of explanations account for Scotts Run's short life and slow agonizing decline. The Great Depression, of course, was a national calamity, and Scotts Run residents probably suffered more than most Americans from the debilitating effects of unemployment, ignorance, ethnic and racial prejudice, and the other manifestations of abject poverty. Many left the area in search of a better life. As elsewhere in rural America, World War II took many of the young men from Scotts Run, and after the war they found little incentive to return.(31)

Technological change also played a role in the decline of Scotts Run. The development of diesel engines for locomotives eliminated a major source of demand for Scotts Run's famous steam coal, and the rapid loss of market share to other sources of energy also helped to insure that most of these mines were not reopened. In the face of these market changes, the entire mining industry began a long process of restructuring. By the 1950s, the numerous coal tracts on the run had been consolidated into a few large parcels, most notably those controlled by Consolidation Coal Company. Mechanization of the mines took a heavy toll on the labor force everywhere, and Scotts Run was no exception. With little chance of employment, miners and their families moved elsewhere in search of a better life. Their departure was facilitated by the construction of better roads and by the widespread ownership of automobiles after World War II. Finally, the construction of Interstate 79, which was opened in Monongalia County in 1974, displaced many residents where it wrapped around Connellsville Hill, dissecting Scotts Run between Pursglove and Liberty.(32)

There was one additional reason for the decline of Scotts Run: the federal government resettled hundreds of the native-born white, and most assimilated, residents. According to one authority, Eleanor Roosevelt could not solve all of the problems she found in the coal fields, "but because she had actually seen Scotts Run" the First Lady felt compelled to do "something more." Something more resulted in the conception and construction of Arthurdale, in nearby rural Preston County.

Arthurdale was the first of approximately 99 experimental communities established by federal agencies to relocate redundant industrial workers from the squalor of slums into the more forgiving rural countryside. The first lady described the desperation she found on Scotts Run so compellingly that President Roosevelt ordered his aide, Louis Howe, to cut through the red tape and purchase the two thousand acres of farmland for the resettlement community that Mrs. Roosevelt had in mind. In the end, 165 families moved to Arthurdale, two-thirds of which originated from Scotts Run.(33)

Arthurdale represented a uniquely American response to a social problem, and much of the community spirit still resonates sixty years later as testimony to the power of the original dream. Scotts Run was unique too, but in the public imagination, it represents the dark side of the American Dream captured forever in haunting photographs, icons of the human misery wrought by the Great Depression in the coal fields.

ENDNOTES

I. "West Virginia Output Shows Decrease," BlackDiamond 68 (28 January 1922): 85.

2. "Wonder Coal Field of West Virginia," Black Diamond 71 (11 August 1923): 180-181; "Sewickley Coal is Premier Steam Fuel," BlackDiamond71 (11 August 1923): 185.

3. I. C. White, "Morgantown's Wealth of Fuel," Black Diamond 71 (11 August 1923): 178-179.

4. Howard N. Eavenson, The First Century and a Quarter of the American Coal Industry (Pittsburgh: By the Author, 1942), 418; West Virginia Geological Survey, Characteristics of Mineable Coals of West Virginia, Vol. 8, A. J. W. Headlee and J. P. Nolting, Jr., eds. (Morgantown, W. Va.: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1940), 9-10; Phil Ross, "The Scotts Run Coalfield from the Great War to the Great Depression: A Study in Overdevelopment," West Virginia History, 53 (1994): 22.

5. White, "Morgantown's Wealth of Fuel," 178-179; A. B. Brooks, Forestry and Wood lndustries, Vol. 5 (Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia Geological Survey, 1911), 28.

6. Morgantown (W. Va.) Post-Chronicle, 15 September 1910; Earl L. Core, The Monongalia Story: A Bicentennial History, Vol. 5 (Parsons, W.Va.: McClain Printing Company, 1982),386, 400-401. On the subject of transportation, I have been guided by Billy Joe Peyton, "Transportation Nexus on Scotts Run," unpub. Seminar paper, 1993.

7. Morgantown (W. Va.)Dominion-News,12 December 1971; Morgantown (W.Va) Post, 19 September 1972, and 18 December 1972; Earl L. Core, Chronicles of Core (Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1975), 192; Morgantown (W. Va.) Post, I November 1921; Black Diamond 72 (15 March 1924): 315.

8. White, "Morgantown's Wealth of Fuel," 179.

9. "Suit Held Vital One," Black Diamond 72 (8 March 1924): 273; "Denies Endangering Sewickley Seam," Black Diamond 72 (24 May 1924): 619.

10. Matthew Yeager, "Scotts Run: A Community in Transition," West Virginia History 53 (1994): 14; U. S. Census of Population; The quotation is from "Sewickley Coal is Premier Steam Fuel," Black Diamond 71 (11 August 1923): 185.

11. 1920 Manuscript Census, Cass District, Monongalia County, West Virginia.

12. Ibid.; "Report of Missionary Survey in Scotts Run, W.Va,," Scotts Run Community Center, A & M 652, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University, Morgantown, W.Va. (hereafter WVRHC).

13. James P. Johnson, The Politics of Soft Coal: The Bituminous Industry from World War I through the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

14. Michael E. Workman, "The Fairmont Coal Field," in Michael E. Workman, Paul Salstrom, and Philip W. Ross, Northern West Virginia Coal Fields: Historical Context, Technical Report No.10 (Morgantown, W.Va.: Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology, 1994): 36; Coal Age 21 (29 June 1922), 1099.

I5. Workman, et al, "The Fairmont Coal Field," 36.

16. Ibid.,36-37.

17. George E. Smith to Walter Davidson, 22 May 1931, Records of the American National Red Cross, 1917-1934, File 868, Box 701, RG 200, National Archiives (hereafter NA).[Thanks to Sandra Barney for this item].

18. Linda Nyden, "Black Miners in Western Pennsylvania,1925-1931: The National/Miners Union and the United Mine Workers of America," Science and Society 41 (Spring 1977) For strike conditions and the NMU on Scotts Run, see Stephen Edward Haid Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933-1947, West Virginia University, 1975), Chapter 1.

19. Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980), 143-144.

20. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper & Row Publishers - 949), 129.

21. Ibid., 126-129.

22. William E. Brooks, "Arthurdale--A New Chance," Atlantic Monthly 155 (February 1935), 199.

23. Narrative Report, April-October 1931, Records of the American National Red Cross, 1917- 1934, File 1310, Box 73, RG 90, NA. [Thanks to Sandra Barney for this item]. For health conditions on Scotts Run, see Sandra Barney, "Health Services in a Stranded Coal Community: Scotts Run, 1920-1947," West Virginia History 53 (1994): 43-55.

24. Charles H. Ambler, A History of Education in West Virginia from Early Colonial Times to 1949 (Huntington, W.Va.: Standard Printing & Publishing Company, 1951), 607-609.

25. American Friends Service Committee, Report of the Child Relief Work in the Bituminous Coal Fields, September 1, 1931 - August 31, 1932 (Philadelphia: AFSC, 1932), 27.

26. Marcia Clark Myers, "Presbyterian Home Mission in Appalachia: A Feminine Enterprise," American Presbyterians 71 (Winter 1993): 253-264. For the Bible School Movement, see Virginia Lieson Brereton, Training God 's Army: The American Bible School, 1880-1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

27. For the best contemporary account of the urban settlement house movement, see Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: The McMillan Company,1910). For the best modern assessment of the movement, see Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

28. Edna Leona Muir, "Scotts Run Settlement Work," n.d., and Lena Brookover Barker, "The History of Scotts Run Settlement House," Autumn 1938, both in the Settlement House Collection, WVRHC. Pearl E. was the wife of Frank C. Shriver, president and General Manager of the Monogahela Supply Company in Morgantown. Morgantown City Directory 1927-1928, WVRHC.

29. Scotts Run Scrapbook, WVRHC; Bettijane Burger, "Mary Elizabeth Behner Christopher, 1906- ," in Missing Chapters 11: West Virginia Women in History (Charleston, W.Va.: West Virginia Women's Commission, 1986), 51; See also, Christine M. Kreiser, "'I Wonder Whom God Will Hold Responsible?' Mary Behner and the Presbyterian Mission on Scotts Run," West Virginia History 53 (1994): 61-92.

30. "'Why Don't You Bake Bread?' Franklin Trubee and the Scotts Run Reciprocal Economy," interview by Ronald L. Lewis, Goldenseal 15(Spring 1989): 34-41.

31. For an example of this process, see the autobiography of a former Osage resident, Sidney D. Lee, And the Trees Cried (By the Author, 1991).

32. Earl L. Core, The Monongalia Story: A Bicentennial History, Vol. 5 (Parsons, W.Va.: McClain Printing Company, 1984), 479-480.

33. Haid, "Arthurdale," 68-70; Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok, 146.

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