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LOGAN, W.Va. — Eighty-five years ago this weekend, the U.S. Army marched onto Blair Mountain, separating two makeshift armies fighting over the future of West Virginia’s coal mines.

State police, Logan County deputies, volunteers and conscripts shot it out with thousands of armed miners who wanted to bring the United Mine Workers of America to mines in Logan and Mingo counties. The five-day fight ended when federal troops and federal planes invaded southern West Virginia’s coalfields.

Now the federal government is in the middle of a fight about the fate of Blair Mountain itself.

One side sees the mountain as hallowed ground, a battleground with a vital place in American history. The other sees it as a repository of billions of dollars worth of energy-generating, profit-producing coal. The first group wants to put the mountain on the National Register of Historic Places. The second wants to tear it down to get at the coal inside.

The place where West Virginia’s mine wars came to an end is being demolished by mountaintop-removal mining. And the battle over how far that mining will reach has been running for years.

“We thought we had laid to rest any controversy over Blair Mountain well over a decade ago,” Greg Wooten, chief operating officer of Dingus-Rum Properties, told a meeting of the West Virginia Archive and History Commission more than a year ago.

Mining companies twice reached agreements with the United Mine Workers of America that would have set aside about eight acres of the mountain to commemorate the battle and coal heritage. The plan included little more development than an observation tower.

“From this viewpoint, tourists will be able to link the past with the future,” a 1991 agreement said, “through a combination of signs and photos depicting the past while watching state-of-the-art surface mining equipment in a present day mine setting.”

The agreement would have allowed mining under the commemorative area.

The union continues to endorse a monument at the battle site and calls for the road that crosses the mountain to be renamed Blizzard Highway in honor of Bill Blizzard, a leader of the 1921 miners’ army.

Preservationists want more. They want to set aside 1,600 acres of the mountain without an observation tower and without any mining to observe.

Those visions collided at the May 2005 Archive and History Commission meeting at Chief Logan State Park, in a conference center built on a former strip mine. The parking lot was filled with pickups and cars bearing competing bumper stickers. “Friends of Coal” F-150s were parked beside “Save Blair Mountain” Subarus.

Hundreds of miners in fluorescent -striped uniforms packed the meeting. Tony Toth, a bearded fourth-generation miner not quite 30, asked that they be allowed to strip-mine the mountain where his grandfather fought.

“Build a commemorative and let these people mine it,” said Myron Jones, a Logan equipment salesman . “Real coal miners would mine Blair Mountain, even the ones in 1921.”

While the argument drags on, there’s only a roadside marker on West Virginia 17 at Blair to commemorate the battle — and it took a while to persuade the state to put that up. That’s quite a contrast to what’s built up a little more than 30 miles away in Matewan. That’s where Police Chief Sid Hatfield and some townspeople shot it out with 13 Baldwin-Felts agents in 1920, an event that helped ignite the Battle of Blair Mountain. The shootout was the inspiration for the movie “Matewan” and has fueled the local tourism industry. The Hatfield-McCoy feud and the area’s coal mining and railroading history contribute, too, but the Matewan Massacre is the cornerstone. The town stages re-enactments of the fight.

“We’ve had people come from pretty far distances to see it,” said Sheila Blackburn, director of the Matewan Development Center. Her office is in a replica of the train station that was the scene of the shootout.

People come for the walking tours, the driving tours and the museum, too. This summer, a couple of groups came from Australia.

Blackburn said she hasn’t calculated the head count lately, but the flow of visitors — and their dollars — is steady. She said she thinks the Battle of Blair Mountain could attract tourists, too.

“If they can preserve a little something for people to see, they can get tourists over there,” Blackburn said. But some say mining, not historic preservation, is driving the latest Blair Mountain fight.

“It’s simply an attempt by the Sierra Club to stop mining while cloaked in the robes of historic preservation,” Wooten said.

Stuart McGehee, a historian who helped mining companies develop strategies to commemorate the battle while mining the mountain, agrees.

“There has been no ongoing effort by anybody,” McGehee said. “There is no Logan County Historical Society. There is no Friends of Blair Mountain. … They’ve never mounted any effort to do anything at Blair Mountain.

“In fact, the only people who proposed to do any interpretation there are the coal companies — albeit after they’ve knocked the mountain down and got the coal out.”

Indeed, the Sierra Club and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition have been deeply involved in efforts to get the mountain recognized as an historic site. And a 2000 internal memo at West Virginia’s Division of Culture and History described the local preservation movement as “minimal to say the least.”

Only three people attended a public meeting about the mountain in November of that year.

But that minimalist group has been at work at least since 1991. That’s when Kenny King, working with a state-sponsored study of the area, began to turn up artifacts of the battle: cartridges; buttons; bullets embedded in wood; a rusting revolver.

King, who had forebears on both sides of the 1921 battle, lives in Stollings, on the Logan side of the mountain. He works with James Weekley, who lives on the Blair side. Weekley formed the Blair Mountain Historical Organization in 1998. He organized a re-creation of the miners’ 1921 march from Marmet, just outside Charleston, to Blair Mountain.

“What I am doing is for the miners who have lost their life in the mines and in the Battle of Blair Mountain,” Weekley, a retired miner, said at his home outside Blair.

For the first time after more than a decade of trying, the preservationists won that May day at Chief Logan. The commission voted to send the nomination on to the National Park Service. But the park service sent it back.

The historic importance of the battle is unquestionable, the service said in a letter to the West Virginia commission.

“However,” the letter continued, “the struggle to define the locations, extent and comprehensive assessment of the physical integrity of these places continues.”

The West Virginia Archive and History Commission had rejected earlier requests of historic designation of scattered sites associated with the battle. The federal government wants to know what changed that made the commission approve a 1,600-acre historic area .

Meanwhile, the companies that want to mine Blair Mountain sued the commission, saying not all landowners in the area received proper notification about the plans for the historic designation. Other lawsuits, some long in the court system, contest the mining permits those companies have and are seeking on and around Blair Mountain.

And in the past year, another mine has begun operations within sight of the mountain.

In January, the West Virginia Archive and History Commission put Blair Mountain on a list of 27 endangered historical sites in the Mountain State. In May, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the mountain one of the 11 most endangered historic sites in the nation.

The commission is waiting on a revised application from King and his compatriots. Most of the revisions the commission requested are procedural and presentational, said Susan Pierce, deputy state historic preservation officer. The commission meets again Sept. 29, but Pierce said she has no idea if the revisions will be ready by then.

“They don’t have a clock,” she said. “They don’t have a time period. They could take as long as they want.”

King has spent much of the summer on the mountain with an archaeologist, documenting more sites involved in the battle, building evidence for the next rewriting of the application for historic status. He’s confident this time he’ll succeed. But he knows the forces opposing the designation are powerful and patient.

“They got the land,” he said. “They got the coal rights. They can sit on it for years, I guess.”

Even if the keeper of the National Register decides Blair Mountain deserves to be on the Register, it can’t go on the list if a majority of the landowners don’t want it there. Putting Blair Mountain on the National Register would make it more difficult to strip mine. It wouldn’t make it impossible.

McGehee, the historian, believes the mining companies will eventually win.

“It’s their mountain, after all, anyway,” he said.