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Mountaintop removal: Series home page

Cameron Davidson | Aerial Stock

New battle for Blair Mountain

Stories

• Mine it or enshrine it?
• Stopping the miners
• Roanoke proudly plays a bit role in the battle
• The Battle of Blair Mountain

Videos

• The Battle of Blair Mountain
• The Battle over Blair Mountain

Graphics

• Timeline: See a day-by-day breakdown of the battle (.pdf document)
• Map: Locate Blair Mountain in West Virginia
• Graphic: Did the battle create the term "redneck?"

Special series

• Moving the mountains

Message board

• Talk about mountaintop removal and this series

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because of John Sayles’ 1989 movie “Matewan,” which dramatizes events that led to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Sayles took some liberties with history, but the core of the story remained. The Matewan Massacre made Sid Hatfield a miners’ hero.

Matewan was a pro-union enclave in an anti-union county. Hatfield — Smilin’ Sid, Two-Gun Sid, the Terror of the Tug — was the town’s chief of police.

On May 19, 1920, 13 operatives from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency came to Matewan to evict miners from their company-owned homes. Hatfield and Mayor C.C. Testerman confronted the agents.

It’s not clear who shot first, but more than a score of miners joined in the gunfight.

When the shooting stopped, Testerman, two miners and seven Baldwin-Felts agents — including brothers Al and Lee Felts — were dead.

Hatfield and 22 others were charged with murdering the agents. No one was charged in the deaths of the miners or Testerman. No one was convicted.

But Tom Felts, whose brothers died at Matewan, wouldn’t be denied his idea of justice.

As Hatfield walked up the steps of the McDowell County courthouse in Welch on Aug. 1, 1921, Baldwin-Felts men opened fire. Hatfield and his friend Ed Chambers died, the Logan Banner reported, “with the roar of 'six guns’ echoing in their ears and with powder smoke eddying around their heads.”