By J. R. Crockett
By an act of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, passed on February 20, 1858, the large county of Tazewell was divided and its western half was constituted a new county, named for James McDowell, a distinguished former Governor, recently deceased.
This act, whose anniversary we celebrate this year, was not a major piece of legislation for the assembly of 1858. The irrepressible conflict was but a few months away, and over Virginia lay the heavy clouds of Civil War. In a few short months were to come John Brown’s raid, the election of Abraham Lincoln, the firing on Fort Sumter and the great fratricidal war between the states.
All of this was as far away from the peaceful primeval forests of the new county as Tug River was from the harassed legislators on the banks of the James. The new county was located in a wild and inaccessible area. The waves of immigration had by-passed the vast area south of the Great Kanawha River and west of Flat Top Mountain and Stoney Ridge. In these narrow valleys lived a handful of mountain people isolated from the rest of the nation, taking little part in the great debates that were rocking the country. In McDowell County the virgin forest was scarcely touched. Game was plentiful and the streams abounded in fish. Here and there in a wild place in the valley was a clearing with a log house and barn, where lived a small farmer and his family.
In 1858 these scattered cabins sheltered the McDowell Countian. In the entire county there was no village, no town, not even a wide place in the road. In truth there was no road. The backwoodsman lived by the sweat of his brow. With an axe he cleared the land and built his cabin. He produced his own food and made his own clothes. He gave little to the outside world, asking nothing in return but to be left alone. Unlettered, his school was nature. Few could read or write and the leading citizen was the man who could, with some accuracy, run a line and make out a description that could be sent to Richmond for a patent, a grant by the state of title to the acreage he had wrested from the great forest.
These grants were mere scraps of paper sold for taxes, and moldering in far-away offices in Philadelphia and New York, as far from McDowell County then as Tibet is today. The land belonged to him who lived on it and there was plenty for all.
In the new county a government had to be organized. In the race for sheriff Quentin A. Murphy opposed Michael Cline and the result was hotly disputed. After a contest Murphy was declared elected as the first sheriff. The first land book showed a gross assessed value of $163,585.00 and a levy of $655.34 was made. The chief expense was $100.00 a year paid Archibald Peery of Tazewell to serve as Prosecuting Attorney.
On August 23, 1858, Judge Samuel Fulkerson came from Abingdon to hold the first term of the Circuit Court of McDowell County. He sat at the home of George W. Payne on Dry Fork near English and adjourned after one day, there being no business to transact.
Although the Civil War was to bring about great changes in McDowell County, the county actually took little part in it. Judge Fulkerson exchanged his judicial robe for a colonel’s uniform in the Confederate Army and met a hero’s death leading a brigade of Stonewall Jackson’s division. A few of the mountain men served as volunteers or draftees in the Southern Army, but at home, life went on much as before. The decisions that made McDowell County a part of West Virginia rather than Virginia were made in Wheeling and Washington, not in the hills of McDowell. Probably the true sympathies of the people are found in the only reference to the Civil War in the local records.
Following the Civil War, McDowell County was a small isolated county in the new state of West Virginia and life went on much as in the past. The chief political issue was the location of the Court House, with two sites being advocated. One was the location that is now Wilcoe and the other was Perryville, now English. In 1866 the Legislature fixed the county seat near the mouth of Mill Creek (Wilcoe). A log house there became the first court house. The county was also divided into three townships—Elkhorn, Sandy River, and Big Creek. These became magisterial districts after 1872. In 1874 the Court House was moved to the mouth of Reedy Springs Branch in Big Creek District. Here were laid off the first town lots in McDowell County. The village of Perryville grew up around the new Court House and became McDowell’s first “town.”
Other than the fact that he was now living in West Virginia, the citizen of 1885 could see little change in McDowell County resulting from the Civil War. But outside the rugged hills it had caused great changes that would soon break down the isolation of the little mountain county. A rural nation was now becoming an industrial giant. The great steel mills of Pittsburgh were being built and the demand for coal was growing each year.
The coming of the railroad began a new era. Through Elkhorn Tunnel came a vast army of men to exploit the richest coalfield on earth. Capitalists and engineers from the East, business and professional men from the South, Negroes from the cotton and tobacco fields and immigrant labor from Europe flocked to McDowell County. A new land was being developed and showy men from all over the world headed for it. Its forest rang with the woodman’s axe. The miner dug into its rich seams of coal. New towns mushroomed overnight—Welch, Northfork, Keystone, Kimball, War, Iaeger, Anawalt, and many others.
The county boomed with a wild and reckless prosperity. Fortunes were made and lost overnight. The gun man, the saloon, the gambling den, and the bawdy house, and all the other hallmarks of a raw frontier civilization soon were present. Where ten years before had been the peaceful mountain cabins in small clearings in a primeval forest, there were now coal camps, railroads, tipples, bone piles and coke ovens.
The typical community of those days was the mining camp. A man obtained a lease on as much acreage as he could. He built a tipple and a spur track. Beehive ovens, like great snakes, twisted through the narrow valleys. Row after row of houses, either of one design or four or five scattered indiscriminately, housed the miners. All trade was through a company store, and pay was in scrip.
The Colonels ruled the camps with an iron hand. Unionism was as feared then as Communism is today. Mine safety was little thought of and little understood. The toll of dead and maimed each year was large.
On the other hand there were compensations. Labor was scarce and if a man didn’t like one place there were forty or fifty other mines, all seeking men. Wages were high by the standards of that day.
After 1910 the frontier slowly and imperceptibly passed. The raw young man seeking adventure and fortune married and settled down. The home, the church and the school grew and prospered as the saloon, gambling den and bawdy house declined. The smaller coal camps were consolidated and great companies with headquarters in distant cities replaced the colonels. The woodman’s axe stilled as the great forests were depleted and timber ceased to be an important industry.
After World War I the automobile was introduced in great numbers and the network of roads that served our county was built in the early 1920’s. New processes and techniques in the coal industry replaced the beehive oven and mining pony. Each year increased safety consciousness cut the toll of dead and injured.
The happy days of the coal boom died in the great depression of the 1930’s. What started as a stock market panic in the fall of 1929 soon became a great depression grinding the wheels of industry slowly to a stop. In the coal fields a mounting supply of coal and a rapid fall in prices tested the free and easy practices of the past.
The people of McDowell County were in dire need. Jobs were few and wages low. The golden dreams of the past were now replaced by desire and want. King Coal was very sick and times were hard.
Bluefield Telegraph
Tuesday Morning, Aug. 2, 1921
Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers Shot to Death at Welch
Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were shot to death in a pistol fight on the steps of the McDowell County Court House at Welch yesterday morning at 10:35 o’clock.
Hatfield, the former Matewan police chief, had gone to Welch for trial. He, with nineteen others, had recently been indicted in McDowell County for shooting up the mining town of Mohawk about a year ago.
Hatfield, accompanied by his wife and Ed Chambers and wife, arrived in Welch yesterday morning on train No. 4 from Matewan. Leaving the station they went immediately to the Ellwood Hotel and remained there until about 10:30 o’clock when they started for the courthouse.
Upon reaching the steps leading up to the courthouse, Chambers and his wife stepped in front and immediately behind them walked Hatfield and his wife. They had just reached the first landing when the shooting started.
Chambers and Hatfield were well on the landing when the shooting occurred. Chambers was several feet to the left of Hatfield and when he fell his body remained on the landing. Hatfield tumbled backwards and his body rolled down the steps almost to the bottom.
Welch Fire Department
When the town of Welch was organized, there was no department of fire protection. Gradually there was formed a Volunteer Fire Department. There were not many fire hydrants but they were at places where they could reach houses in a particular area.
They had a two-wheeled cart on which a hose was kept. When a fire broke out, the alarm was given by firing pistols; and these volunteer workers would go to one of these houses, or all of them, and roll out, by hand, the cart with the hose to fight the fire as best they could.
Early Pioneer Days — 1750–1800
By J. N. Harman III
McDowell County was a wilderness with heavy virgin timber, many springs and creeks, and drained by a river, later named “Tug.” There were fish in the creeks and rivers, and much game such as turkey, deer, bear, elk and buffalo in the forests.
The terrain was too rough for real farming, but for hunting, fishing and trapping it was excellent. The white hunters usually went to these mountains in companies of eight or ten, using pack horses.
Their equipment consisted of a rifle, powder, ball, a hatchet or tomahawk, knife, and blanket. The hunters also carried salt and enough provisions to last them two days, or beyond the settlement, from which time the forest yielded a plentiful supply.