[Music] we are going to look at industrialization today the Industrial Age so we're actually gonna look mainly at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century but we'll kind of towards the end I guess move very quickly through the 20th century up until about the 1970s and the reason we're doing that is we're going with the textbook of rice and brown so you can of course follow this without the textbook but I'll try to go along with it and add some additional information plus hit the highlights of that as well now so if you are looking at the book it's chapter 18 so let me just give you a little background in general here about what's happening at the end of the nineteenth century so what's going on is this is the time of America's industrial revolution so we've had some industrialization that's going on before the civil war but the civil war out of nestings up in general for everything the united states so we are getting back on track after the Civil War so we had this big push for manufacturing and mechanization after the Civil War and if you think of the Industrial Revolution around the world Great Britain starts it out in the seventeen hundreds and the latter part of the 1700 particularly of course we're behind them because we got to break away from them during the American Revolution established our own country once we're getting into the early republic we start moving along through industrialization the Revolution the Industrial Revolution doesn't take off though because of the Civil War so once things calm down a little bit after the savour we start to see our big boom and manufacturing and mechanization so this big push for industry moving away from agriculture being on predominant economic means and moving away from things being made by hand to things being made by machine the mass production of things is becoming huge in that last twenty five years of the 19th century into the beginning of the 20th century of course it continues but this is where we consider our Industrial Revolution for the United States be taking place so that's a general idea of what's happening nationally in West Virginia is a microcosm of what's occurring nationally and of course we have a lot of movement away from that agricultural setting into an industrial setting now we are more of an extractive state so we're looking more at the minerals and the deposits that are underneath the ground and how we get those out and some of the things that are processed or done here in the state of West Virginia other times though it's just the materials themselves that we find here that are then put out into the nation or even sent out internationally to be processed to be finished so more on that hiraman so if we're looking at our book in general it starts out talking about new types of improvements to river and railroad transportation that is really going to help the coal industry grow because I know we talked a little bit about Paul earlier but the antebellum the coal industry business is nothing compared to the coal industry business we're going to see after the Civil War because now as we start to see a river transportation picking up because we have more and more locks and dams that are gonna be putting into place on the water systems that are gonna help regulate the floods so we don't have this every spring we don't know if there's going to be a high water or if there's gonna be too low of water for our different types of boats to go through and ships to go through so now you can regulate that so you know pretty much every year how much water is going to be in our water systems so you can plan a regular schedule on when you can transport different types of commodities like coal plus we're also going to have different ways that we can adjust the water system the locks and dams if we know that traditionally an area is always low or as always rather dry we can make sure locks and dams it's always higher so not even just worrying about what mother nature sends us but we can kind of adapt it to what human nature needs so that's part of it as well also with the railroads as they improve after the Civil War one big thing I should throw in that helps with the railroad after the Civil War if you remember two things if you remember the Civil War was a big part of it I think part of it was capturing the railroads and you're using them yourself or for or destroying them to see em you couldn't use them well during the Civil War before one of the problems with railroads is that people did not have a standard gauge for their railroads meaning that if you have a railroad you could decide the distance part that she wanted for your tracks so the railroad the ties themselves you can kind of decide how far apart in one of that house why were you on the tracks so let's say the B&O one to have their tracks six feet apart well that's fine but let's say Messina wanted to have theirs eight feet apart come out on range eight feet apart they could do that too so the problem was if you were on the B&O on the smaller tracks rating this with a smaller gauge the distance gauge once you got to the end of the line right that's where you get that get to the end of a line you can't go any further on the B no I might not it can't connect to the C no because you know is larger so you go take all your passengers off all your supplies off and then throw all your passengers on this you know all your supplies on the scene oh well this is a permissible war so many railroads were busted up anyway people started saying it's silly to put these railroads back together the way they were what we need is an interlocking system for the railroads so you see this idea of an interlocking rail root system coming about makes people vastly wealthy beyond belief the Vanderbilts the Rockefellers the Carnegie's all these people get in on Vanderbilt's particularly at the beginning so you have this standard gauge standard gauge everybody's going to have the same width across for their railroads so the B&O then can connect with the CNO then connect with the northwestern so on and so forth they can all connect that way so you don't have to do that let's take everybody off we do the passenger train on the B&O and put them all on to see it pass with your train you don't need to do that now so that works out pretty well so you have that ditch that helps out with the railroad transportation so you don't have to worry about moving your supply from one row or it Plus foreseeing that the railroads themselves are becoming more efficient they're starting to use different types of boilers different types of engines in general improving the engines the steam engines they already have they're laying more track we've seen more railroads in general that are coming through so this idea of the transportation for both the river and for the railroads is helping the coal industry here in West Virginia boo over time towards this end of the 19th century we're also gonna start seeing more and more what else have gonna happen here I should mention just before I forget Oh going along with this whole idea of railroads and tycoons people making a lot of money on them one particular person I should mention in the southern part of the state it's going to be call us P Huntington the city Huntington is named after him actually he needs it after himself I'm pretty sure he's gonna be one of the ones who really puts that CNO Chesapeake and Ohio through and he makes a huge amount of money he'll end up actually pushing his various not just a CNO but other lines Railroad through to the west a little interesting tidbit if any of you watched that Hell on Wheels miniseries TV miniseries popular a few years ago one of the characters that they have depicted at the end of the series is calls P Huntington and I would just say that of course that is a Hollywood show call us behind tune in real life look do nothing like the Collis peanut intended and that TV series you can look up him and just love him or maybe I'll find one and put it up for him you know Hollywood has to make everyone extremely handsome and beautiful not saying that call this was an attractive man maybe he was and he just didn't photograph well perhaps but I always found that amusing when I watch the show but you know again Huntington in a huge amount of money names the city after himself well you know we have a bank named after him so money's still there money's still there in that family well just like it is and the other families as well right it's all been passed down you know from generation to generation these people still have money they're still running things in many ways let's see what else was she mentioned other big names that also have together different parts of our state because of making money in railroads particularly O'Henry Gassaway Davis of course you've probably heard of the name Davis right for the town he also makes a lot of money with railroads at first and then going into the coal industry and the coke industry with that cokes an offshoot of the coal industry is a side product because you would say of coal and it also helps with heating you have definitely a burns very hot Lee burns I guess it does burn hotter than most other types of byproducts of different things like wood wood or other kind of deposits in the ground so the lava prefer to use that coke that you get in the coke ovens they try to use that as well so that's a big thing too you make a lot of money from that as well so Henry Gassaway gave us though you can even heard a gas away I'm sure West Virginia as well so some of the big towns that he gets involved with kind of getting his timber industry kind of tying with the railroad industry and the coal industry all together you get these railroads to connect them all he's good about that so a lot of these small towns now and they were big industrial towns they never became big cities but they are all kind of connected through Henry Gassaway I gave us and his money so Elkins which we're going to see Davis & Elkins are going to connect their families their marriage but we'll see Elkins being the hub of these railroads that go through towns like Parsons and Thomas and Davis again today here they're kind of little out-of-the-way places but at one point in time there were small industrial towns that had a lot of things going with shipping coal shipping coke coke coke as an byproduct of the coal industry someone great it's cocaine he doesn't like cocaine you there without any test not what I'm talking about with it and then the other thing is when we talk about the forest industry there's a lot of lumbering in that area logging in lumbering the railroads will be very influential with that as well one of the most interesting at least I think with these developments with the railroad and try new ideas is The Virginian in that step sorry I touched a laptop it moved The Virginian was an experiment it was the railroad that they tried to use the steam engines and also you push it up the mountain and they use gravity just to have the railroad vote down the mountain was the idea if you were saving costs you were saving fuel it'll be more efficient it was good idea but it didn't go as fast it didn't seem to really it wasn't as efficient as I thought it would be but an interesting idea it was an interesting idea at least if nothing else so we're at 11 minutes so let me stop and we'll do part two here in just a moment Moving on to part two of industrialization. So we're going to talk about coal now. I know a lot of times people, like when they talk about coal, they talk about coal as an industry itself, and then they talk immediately about unionization or labor organizing. So we're not going to do that.
We're just going to talk about the industry itself right now, and then later on we'll talk about the unionization, like the UMW. We'll talk about that later on. So that way you can focus on one aspect of coal as the industry and then one aspect of coal with the organization on its own.
Because I think it gets kind of confusing if you try to put the two together. If you kind of understand the industry and the culture around coal first, it feeds into why the organization occurs, why the immunization comes about. All right. So getting into coal here a little bit. Some of the things that you should know.
I'm not sure if I mentioned some of this before or not, but I will again if I haven't. The idea of mining coal and using coal. Remember at first we were using that canal coal earlier before the war, antebellum times. And at first coal was going to be used in large amounts from eastern Pennsylvania in the anthracite mines.
Now anthracite coal is what people call hard coal. or smokeless coal because it is a harder coal and they call it smokeless coal because compared to what we have our bituminous coal it doesn't have as much smoke to it so it's actually a preferred anthracite coal is the thing is we don't have as much anthracite coal in the united states as we do have by two minutes coal so the anthracite coal mines are going to be going early on and they're going to be the ones who at first fuel the railroads, and the early part of the Industrial Revolution. But as more and more coal is discovered, like here in West Virginia, it's going to be used more and more because we have vast resources of it.
And we're still using it today, right? There's still a lot of it today that's still being mined. So the thing is, in West Virginia and in other parts of the country, bituminous coal is considered the soft coal because it is softer than anthracite.
And it is considered the coal that does have smoke. You know, it's a smoked coal. It does give off more smoke than you're going to see the anthracite coal does. But again, found in large quantities and easy to get to compared to the anthracite coal. At least there's vast amounts you can get to compared to the anthracite coal.
So this is how people make a lot of money because something has to fuel this industrial revolution. So what makes the trains run? Coal.
What makes the factories run? Coal. What makes the mills run? Coal, if they're not by water. I know there's some water mills, and eventually there'll be hydroelectric areas too.
But all in all, coal is really what's making this industrial revolution go. It's kind of the power behind it. So as you can imagine, places like West Virginia make a lot of money because they're set on major coal seams. The Fairmont Field and the Pittsburgh Seam are, well, the Fairmont Field is part of the Pittsburgh Seam, but they are very large deposits of coal.
And you can see what they're named for are the areas where they're at. You can see what they're named for, the areas where they're at. And also there's that mention in your book about that byproduct. So you're not just using it by two minutes coal for itself.
You're using that byproduct that you can melt down some of the coal and then turn it into that coke that you can use also for fuel. So another big thing that's going to happen as well is we're going to see this kind of coal culture coming about. So the socioeconomic structure that's occurring. One thing that's going to come up, and I'm sure you've heard about this quite a bit, is something called a company town. And a company town is just what it says.
The company owns the town. So it's on company land. The company owns the buildings that are in the town.
The company owns, in that respect, the stores. The company owns the school. The company owns the church.
The company owns everything that's within the town. And with that said, a lot of people will say, well, the company owns everybody in the town, too, because the pastor of the church is getting paid in their house. The parsonage, if you want to call it that, is getting paid by the company.
What's being taught in the schools and the school teacher is getting paid by the company and their housing is getting paid by the company. So you can imagine whatever that curriculum is, is what the company wants. those kids to learn.
And of course the people living. The company store, of course, is only selling what the company wants them to sell at the prices that the company sets. And everybody else who's living in that town works for the company whole line, right? They work for the mine.
In some respect, if they're not miners, they're doing something. They're, I don't know, making clothes for the company. You know, they're fixing lights, putting the carbide lights on the helmets for the company.
You know, they're doing something for the company. And so everything's related to the company, even your wages. are coming from the company. Not, I mean, I know if you're getting paid by someone, you get their wages today, but you get your wages in cash.
You get your wages in U.S. dollars. Not so much in the company town. You got something called script, and that's on your handout, I'm sure.
Yes, script. What script is, it's company money. I like to call it monopoly money because it's only good in the game, like monopoly money, right? Only good in the game.
Script is only good in that company town. So If you live in, let's say I have a company town, I have Ryan's Coal Mine, and you all live in Ryan's town, right, Ryan's company town. I'll pay you for whatever job you do.
If you're the school teacher, if you're the pastor, if you're a coal miner, I pay all of you in Ryan's script. So you can go to my company store, Ryan's company store, and buy what you need with Ryan's company script. But you can't go to another town.
You can't go to Smith's company town. and use Ryan's script there. You'd have to have Smith's script to buy anything over in Smith's company store. So a lot of people would say, as time goes on, you're basically tied to the land.
You're tied to that town. You can't leave. You're industrial slaves.
Over time, people will say that, looking at that culture of coal mining. Because if you don't have real U.S. dollars, how are you ever going to get out of there? How are you ever going to get another job?
How are you ever going to move away and look for another job? You're not. You're stuck. You're stuck.
So you can imagine that's going to lead to organization and labor problems later on. Also part of this company town idea, it's kind of strange, and in some ways people say we're still kind of tied with today, is there's this concept of paternal absentee landowners. I think that's how they have it in your book, paternal absentee landowners. So there are people who own the land. But they don't live around here at all.
They're absent, absentee. And at this point in time, they have a noblesse oblige idea towards the people in the company town. Noblesse oblige is a European idea. It's the nobles'obligation to help the serfs, to help the peasants. It's kind of like charity.
It's kind of like a stuck-up charity, basically. At least the peasants thought that. And the coal miners, I think, did too, who lived in the company towns. These people who have all this money, but they're not around.
They don't see what's going on. These Carnadians, these Rockefellers, they don't live near us, but they own the town we live in. And they say that they're here to help us. They say they're benevolent towards us.
Maybe they send us turkeys or something at Thanksgiving. Or maybe they give us an extra 50 cents at Christmas or something. But, you know, they think they're being paternal and helpful.
But they don't know. They don't know. And a lot of people resented that.
They thought it was kind of charity, and they didn't want that. They wanted their lives to be better. They didn't want what they thought was kind of like a charitable handout every once in a while.
Or, if that wasn't the case, there were local coal barons, people who lived right in the area who were owning land and owned the company towns. And some people didn't like that over time, too, because a lot of times they had a paternal attitude as well. A good example of this would be like the Watsons and the Flemings.
I'm sure I mentioned them before in Fairmont with the Fairmont Field. They're the ones who will marry, the families will marry, and they really make, that's their company, it's the Fairmont Coal Company. It eventually becomes Consolidated Coal and then Consolidation International now.
But they live right in town, and they'll walk and see their mines and speak with their managers and some of the miners and things like that. And when they're small mines, it seems all right. But as they become bigger and bigger, people really resented these local coal barons, they called them, that they were kind of lording over the serfs, the peasants that were the miners that had to live off their land in these company towns. So people got upset about that. And there were managers or supervisors in these company towns.
So they were a step above, you know, the miners, the wage earners who didn't own any land at all. And usually the supervisors, unless there was an absentee landlord, they probably didn't own any land. They probably also, if you had a local coal baron, you probably also were landless.
But maybe if you had an absentee landowner that was running the show from a faraway distance, you might own a little bit of land. There's definitely that. stratification between management and regular coal miner.
So you have these weird divisions. And even on top of that, we'll see there's this racial diversity that'll come about as well. If you think about after the Civil War, there's a black flight where you see a lot of freed men are going to leave the South because they don't want to be sharecroppers. They don't want to deal with where they were slaves. And even though we did have slaves in West Virginia, there were areas where...
There wasn't a whole lot of slavery. People only had one or two slaves. In some areas, people didn't have slaves at all.
But with these coal mines opening up, you start to see some of these freed men coming to work in the mines. They saw it as an opportunity. And we saw people who were immigrants coming over from Europe, particularly, and getting jobs in the mines.
It's very easy to do that. You can work there without having to speak English. So you see a great bit of ethnic and racial diversity that are in these mines as well. So that also... at first causes some tension because you have different groups of people who really don't know each other and don't know what to think of each other at first living in these areas.
And these things will change over time. But at first, there's a very strange kind of socioeconomic structure that's going on here. It's very strange. Part three on industrialization. So we left off talking about the racial and ethnic diversity that was occurring in these company towns. So just to give you a quote statistic from your book, by 1912 over 35 percent of the ethnicities that were in the coal mines in West Virginia, they included Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Slavs, Austrians, and Russians.
And to give you a broader view of why this is happening is because over in Europe, particularly, we're starting to see, especially in Central Europe, there are problems with nationalism that's going on. Since the end of the 19th century until, well, 1914, when World War I breaks out that summer, this idea of nationalism is growing. So you have these large empires, particularly in Central Europe, you have the Austria-Hungarian Empire and also the Ottoman Empire. And more and more, you're seeing Different ethnic groups are starting to want to have their own nation states. So these are people who have the same ethnic background that are encumbered by being underneath a large Empire.
And they don't want to be part of Empire anymore. They want to have their own ethnic country themselves, their own nation state. So we're trying to break away from these empires. It'll all come to a head in 1914 and we'll see World War I will come about.
But there's of course all this strife. going on in these empires with these nation states trying to emerge. So people are trying to leave and look for a better place to live. Of course, they hear of the United States where the streets are paved with gold. I'm sure you've heard that expression before.
That's the big thing during the Industrial Revolution era. Over here, how do you get people to come? Well, you tell them how wonderful it is.
There's free land and all kinds of jobs and the American dream. You come here, you become rich, you can have your own home. It's wonderful. So a lot of immigrants come here.
And many of them will come to West Virginia and work in the mines. Now, I know I've mentioned this before, but just to give a brief rehash, a great example is in Fairmont and Clarksburg with the Italians that come here. They come through familial chains, familial immigrant chains or migrant chains. And you've heard of these because recently, President Trump discussed this with, at first he talked about illegal immigrant.
familial chains and then the idea of legal Migrant chains familial migrant chains because of his wife and the idea and it's not a new one Obviously we had it back in the 19th century in early 20th century Is that someone is over here working and our example is the Fairmont Clarksburg area They're working in the Fairmont field of coal and what they'll do is they get a job and then they'll write back home And get other people to come work And then they'll make some money and they'll write back home that they want their families to come over. And the families will come over. And again, you don't have to speak English. Usually what will happen is there'll be an agent for the coal company waiting outside of Ellis Island, whatever their port of entry is, and they'll have a sign that they hold up that says Clarksburg or Fairmont or maybe San Giovanni, something that these people would recognize.
And then they go to the agent and the agent puts them on a train and they go straight to Fairmont or Clarksburg. And they get off, and then their family is there to greet them or whoever made the letter, because they basically bring the whole town over to that region. It takes about two or three generations, really, to assimilate or Americanize.
Usually that first generation does not speak the English language. The second generation usually speaks both languages, the home country's language and English. And then usually by the third generation, they don't speak the mother country's tongue anymore.
They usually only speak English. A few of them might speak both, but usually by that third generation, that old country, often the culture as well tends to be lost in many ways. But we'll still see, at least in the Clarksburg and Fairmont region, we'll see the culture still lives on in festivals that they have, the Italian festival in that region, and religious ties. That's one of the areas that's predominantly still Roman Catholic compared to the rest of West Virginia.
Northern Panhandle as well, because you have a lot of Irish in this area, and some Italian as well. Next on our little list here is we're going to see that, oh, corporate consolidation. Here's where your book's going to talk more about Watson and Fleming and how it becomes consolidated coal over time. But this big idea is we go from the smaller coal companies to let's put them together and use the corporation business model. This is happening throughout.
the nation, people are starting to realize that sole proprietorships and partnerships could be lethal to your person. personal assets. In those types of business models, you put your personal assets on the line as well. So if your business fails, your creditors can take your home.
They can take any money that you have in the bank. So you can go bankrupt right away. You can lose everything right away.
If you put your business into a corporation, you only lose the money that you invest in that corporation. Those are stocks, right? Stocks.
So you can have a non-publicly traded stock. So A lot of these places are family held and they become very wealthy if they are the ones who just own the stock, if the stock in the business goes well. If the business goes well, the stock goes well, they, the family, can become very, very wealthy.
If you have a publicly traded stock, that means the public can buy stock into it. And that's, if you want to expand your business, that's usually what you do. If you want to have an enlarger business, you sell to people outside the family or outside family and friends. And it can become a national or international company.
like Consolidated Energy could do that. But of course you might fail as well. If you fail, the only money you lose is the money you put into the corporation, the money you put buying in those stocks. So hopefully you do well.
Hopefully you invested in Consolidated or you invested at that point at the Fairmont Coal Company. And now if your family did and you held on to those stocks, you probably aren't taking a class at the community college. You probably are going to Harvard or you don't need to go to college.
You're a trust fund baby, if that's the case. But if you invested in something that didn't make it, you're one of us. You're one of the masses.
We're working. We're working people. So it just depends.
But you're going to see that as these people make more and more money by being in these consolidated corporations from the coal companies, they become what we call coal magnets, right? They become so rich, these big tycoons. And they become the people who are controlling the politics in the state. They still control. politics in the state.
And we mentioned, we talked about different governors and political beings and different groups earlier, some of these names, you've heard them before because they were the ones who made sure the state went a certain way. You think of Elkins or Watson, you've heard those, Fleming, you've heard those names before. So that's a big thing that's going to happen as well.
I know I mentioned the big mansions in Fairmont, how one is a funeral home now and cleans up giant sheets. Okay, so another type of coal mining that comes about as well, of course, that's deep underground coal mining we see initially. But we're going to see another type of mining over time in the 20th century becomes more and more popular.
And that's surface mining. And we call it strip mining today. But surface mining, it becomes more and more popular as we get into the 20th century, particularly after World War II. The issue was, as we go deeper and deeper underground, people found it unsafe. You weren't getting as much.
coal, people felt, and they felt there was a lot of coal that could be found within the mountains themselves. But how could you get to it easier? Well, you could lop off the top of the mountain, get to it much easier, and it was safer and more efficient and cost you less money.
So we start seeing first surface mining and then eventually this mountaintop removal that became such an issue in recent times. A good example of a surface mining that's not mountaintop removal, is if you go across the Ohio River into Ohio, where the mountains become foothills and then further into Ohio, of course, is flatland. But directly across the river, there's still some foothills. And what you'll see is surface mining, just the surface strip mining that's done there.
If by chance you go across I-70 or 470, if you go near the Ohio Valley Mall there on the interstates, You can go right outside those areas and see areas that have been stripped and have not been reclaimed. When you see areas that are reclaimed, what they try to do is they conserve the land. They try to make the land usable again.
You can't make it exactly as it was before. You can't make it farmland again, but you can try to make it useful to people. So one of the things they did in that region is, well, they put the interstates through.
That was one thing. Also, the mall is built on reclaimed land. But you can go kind of not very far away from the law and you can see areas that are still strip pits.
You can still see areas and slurry ponds that are still there. If you go a little north of that in Ohio, you'll see a series of lakes, Tappan Lake right around that area. Those are created lakes.
That's also a big strip pit. That area was surface mined and they made it into a recreational area. There's some golf courses and stuff around there as well. So that's a good example of how smirka was put into use. And I'm not sure if you've ever heard of Smirka or not.
In the 70s, under Jimmy Carter, that was passed. It's the Strip Mining or Surface Mining Reclamation Act, that's what it was called, saying that you couldn't just leave these areas strip mined or surface mined. You had to do something with them.
You had to reclaim them. So that's how a lot of these things occurred, how they happened. This area particularly of trying to redo areas that had been, people would say, scarred by surface mining.
Things along those lines were occurring. Now this mountaintop removal bit. How this becomes a little tricky is that it seemed at first that when the mountaintop removal was going on, it wasn't the first layers that were scraped away that you saw the surface mining.
It was pretty much lopping the top off a mountain in several layers and kind of leveling it. And so many activists got involved and said, well, if you push tourism as something that you're doing in West Virginia, people aren't going to have anything to see or ski on or. go across the bridges and, what do they call it, bungee jump from and do all this kind of stuff if you get rid of these mountains.
So you can't do that. So there was a big fight over this. I'm sure you saw all the activists, and they marched on Blair Mountain, kind of like the miners did and all these kinds of things.
And so it became illegal to do mountaintop removal. You can still do surface mining to a certain degree. You just can't go as far down the mountain as they were before for mountaintop removal. So it was a compromise.
The coal companies still feel that they should be able to go further down the mountains and surface mine. And the activists feel that you shouldn't be able to go down the top of a mountain at all and surface mine. But it was a compromise that the government put through regulation that came through.
And this idea of surface mining, just to mention, as your book says, there was a lot of decline just in general of coal mining and surface mining was one way that you could. see the decline in jobs with coal mining as well, because there's a lot of mechanization that comes into play after World War II. And you see this gradually anyway throughout the 20th century. Since we are going through that industrial revolution at the end of the 19th and the 20th century, as we perfect or at least move along with technology, you need less and less people to work in coal mining because you have more and more machines and newer and newer technology. And you hear that as a problem even today with all industry, really.
But you need less and less people to work those jobs because those jobs become obsolete as you get newer and newer machines. And of course, the big thing today is robotics. So a robot can do many people's jobs. So it's great on one hand that you have technology that can do all these things.
You don't have to pay them. They can be they're replaceable parts. They break down, you fix them.
They don't take sick days. They can do a lot more work. They can lift them a lot more. things. They can do all this stuff that people can't do, or they can do the work of many people.
But then, of course, you're putting people out of work. People don't have jobs. You have to retrain them.
So what are you going to retrain them to do? Because everywhere, every type of business and industry have these robots, have these machines, have this new technology in some way. Where's the world going?
It's very hard to kind of see the balance, and if there's a balance. So on that happy note... Let me stop with that and we'll start talking a little bit more about other industries besides mining. Part four of industrialization. I know I said we wouldn't talk anymore about mining, but this goes hand in hand with other industries. We're going to see after World War II, I don't want to say the downfall of industry in West Virginia, or of a nation at all, but we are going to see there is a downward slope in heavy industry and in the extractive industries in the United States. One part of it is with Japan losing, I know this makes no sense in many ways. But when Japan loses the war and after the atomic bombs have been dropped, the United States particularly is going to go into Japan and rebuild it.
Part of it is an apologist, I guess you might say. Part of it is to make sure Japan doesn't come back angry again, kind of learning your lesson from Germany from World War I. When the Allies really punished Germany and they came back angrier than ever. Many people say it started World War II, right, with Hitler. So they don't want to make Japan so mad, or mad in the same way. Whatever the reason might be, the United States go over and they basically rebuild Japan.
One of the things they help Japan do is start new industries. And you're probably familiar with the idea that Japan became a technological powerhouse. So they start. producing a lot of things that we used to produce over here, or we are producing over here.
As they become more and more techno-giant, we kind of, again, go downhill in many things over here in the United States with industry. Plus, you'll see China starting to develop more and more, and they open up more and more and more to start selling things to people when Nixon really comes about and opens up China. So, more worldwide competition. We'll start to see that too. So various reasons, various reasons that the United States will slowly, but they will start to be on the decline.
So one thing that happens is we'll see as the coal mining jobs start to lessen, there's a big flood of people from West Virginia that leave. It's called out migration, out migration, where people leave the area they're from, their home place, and they go to seek jobs elsewhere. At first, you're going to see, particularly in the 50s, people from West Virginia, again, people who can't find jobs, are going to go two places. They either go to Baltimore. It's not too far.
It's close to the national capital. You can get jobs in Baltimore because it's, for one, close to D.C., a booming city because it's also by the ocean. You can find jobs locally with the government or you can find jobs related to something with water. It seems like a good place to be.
The other area where you go. is you go up towards Cleveland because at first, right, there's still the big steel industry that's up in that area. Over time, it'll become the Rust Belt.
And kind of jokingly, people would call these the Hillbilly Highway. People would leave and they would go other ways. Now that's changed over time.
People say it's been redirected. The Hillbilly Highway today, folks will say, goes south. Either it goes to Atlanta or it goes down to North Carolina.
People go south when they leave. So this idea of out-migration, people leaving because there are no jobs or not as many jobs as there were before. So a lot of people leave many of these mining towns, these old company towns. They become ghost towns over time.
One really good example of this popular culture. If you've seen the movie Rocket Boys. No, it's not that. The book was called Rocket Boys. Sorry.
October Sky. October Sky. The book Rocket Boys is by Homer Hickam, who lived through this experience when he was younger. But he talks about growing up in a company town. And then when the book is over, he mentions how that town isn't there anymore.
This coal company town isn't there anymore. And that's a common theme, a common story throughout West Virginia, that as the coal company shut down, people went elsewhere. They left. They left the area.
Other industries, though, that are going to boom and then bust. many of them do here in West Virginia, is the oil industry. That's a big one. We talked a little bit about it before. If you think, again, the oil industry starts in the 1850s, mainly in western PA, and we do have some here, like Sistersville.
They start early. The big boom, of course, as everything is, is during that big industrial era after the Civil War, but hey, we got the first start with it, so that's exciting. We'll see that some of the big areas, at least to kind of get started.
We see we have... fairly large oil fields over here in the east before everybody goes far west and finds the big oil fields. Burning Springs, right, that's obvious because that's where the natural gas is and things.
We see it burning. And then also in Wood and Pleasant County, we see that as well. So around Parkersburg, we'll see that.
We'll also see that, I thought this was neat, that I.C. White, he was actually a geography professor at WVU, and he made all these calculations of where, if you thought of geography and the different levels in geology, too, where there should be oil. He said, you know, there should be something right around Mannington. And so people went and they drilled, and lo and behold, there was. So we'll see that also becomes a big oil area.
And we'll see eventually some of the people from there even become big names and make a lot of money. The Warwick China owners, if you've seen, if you have that China, it's worth a lot of money right now. But it's a wheeling company, and the people who owned that became very wealthy. Interesting tale.
If you can find it, there's an old PBS documentary, The Last Descendant of that Warwick China Company. initially fueled by an oil boom in Mannington. She lived in Mannington, and she had no descendants.
And when she passed away in the late 1990s, early 2000s, she pretty much had this home that was filled with all of these amazing antiques, apparently. And she left some money, I think, to her housekeeper or something. And the rest, they left to auction.
I think she died without a will or something, or she kind of just made an oral agreement with the housekeeper and left her some things. But mainly there were all these things like these old cars and jewelry and things from the company on Spine China. And so we did this big auction, this huge estate sale. And PBS did some kind of documentary on it. If I find it, I'll put the link up.
But pretty wild, you know, that idea that this kind of lived on, this family fortune kind of lived on. And she was kind of a recluse, kind of one of those weird stories, you know, fact is stranger than fiction. So the big boom, though, in oil for us is around early 1890s, mid 1890s. Sistersville, of course, becomes really big usually here by 1895. It was the largest producing one in our nation, some say even the world.
And it became like the transportation center, the supply center, being there on the river. That was pretty big on the Ohio River. And headquarters for a lot of big names for the oil industry.
A lot of strong banks. They put out an influential trade newspaper, so pretty big, pretty good. We'll see by 1900, it seemed that the oil industry, at least in the oil end of the oil industry, at least in popularity and in the business world, seemed more going towards Lewis County, kind of away from Sistersville in a way. And by the 1890s, we're also seeing the reason for this is that idea of refinery starting to consolidate becomes really popular. Standard Oil particularly comes in the area, comes in the state.
If you're not familiar with Standard Oil, the Standard Oil Trust is one of the first big monopolies that we're going to see in the United States. So this idea of horizontal integration is Rockefeller's big plan. So what he would do is he would send agents to other oil companies that were getting into refining.
And he would make them these wonderful offers if they became part of the Standard Oil Trust, part of this monopoly that Rockefeller ran, saying, if we become, not partners, but if you become part of this trust with us, if you become part of my business, we'll set prices for the industry, we'll get kit packs and rebates for each other. You'll have all these perks if you become part of the Standard Oil Trust. And most people joined up.
So this idea was he was trying to control. one aspect of an industry, refining. If you didn't join up with Rockefeller, with his trust, the Standard Oil Trust would just crush you. You would be one of these small companies, refining companies, would just be put out of business.
You'd just be gone. And many people still have harsh feelings towards Rockefeller about this. One person is, it's gone now, it's gone.
The name I'm going to say is going to be wrong, so I won't. throw it out there but there was one newspaper writer who was from Titusville Ohio she's a journalist writer and she ended up writing a book that broke the standard oil trust basically at kind of an expose that came out and her family had been one of these small companies have been crushed and so when this came out people in the government federal government started looking into this and so one of the first antitrust laws is actually geared towards standard oil it's a pretty interesting Michael Benendam, you hear his name thrown about in the state quite a bit today. He is going to make some of his big fortune in oil, and then he'll go into everything else, it seems like. And he's from Bridgeport, West Virginia. And if you've been to Bridgeport, West Virginia, your Clarksburg library is named for him.
Pretty much everything is named for him. If you go to WVU, if you're interested in teaching, one of the big scholarships there, very prestigious, is the Benendam Scholarship, the teaching scholarship. I'm not sure what it is now, but it used to be if you wanted your master's, you could go for five years.
It would pay for your bachelor's and master's in a five-year program. At the time, it was really big because they gave you a laptop, and that was a big thing then. Laptops were something amazing. I don't know what they give you now. I'm sure something amazing.
I don't know what it would be. But it was a big privilege to get that, and it paid for everything. The Benidorm Theater up in Wheeling, the science theater. So name on a lot of things in the state.
Benidorm became a philanthropist. like a lot of these tycoons do. They end up giving a lot of money back to their place of origin, where they came from, or to wherever they settled.
They come back for that. Oh, we're at 11 minutes, so let me go ahead and stop.
And I should mention, because I talked about the company towns and problems for the workers with that, another issue that is the opposite of the company towns is this idea of these tycoons or these coal barons or coal magnets. A lot of them do get into other things besides coal. They're also into other industries and what makes them vastly wealthy.
And they know these other tycoons that also. are involved in different types of businesses and they try to get them involved in them as well. One of the best stories of how they try to get other people to invest in their businesses, these corporations by stock, is there is a railroad track that's laid actually out towards Elkins and that Davis and Thomas area out in the middle of nowhere basically to drag in different tycoons to see.
How logging and lumbering occurs and how the coal industry is doing so well and all the different natural resources that West Virginia has. I have people like Watson and Fleming and they bring people like Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, all these big names in. And the reason they do is they have this giant ancient log basically, or should I say log tree that's cut down. And they put a giant linen tablecloth and all these silver candelabras and this beautiful china down.
They have these servants and they serve this giant meal to them. They get off the train and there's this beautiful meal and they've decorated everything around them and the forest and all to persuade them to invest. And this is very common, this idea in this Gilded Age, this end of the 19th century, to impress. They called it conspicuous consumption to show people that you were very wealthy. You wanted people to see what you had, conspicuous consumption, see what you consumed, what you owed.
So. it impressed people they would go into business with you and then a lot of them turned after they made a lot of money and they did all of this to impress people as conspicuous consumption lavish homes and making their wives wear a variety of jewels every time they went out after they did all of this a lot of them turned toward philanthropy and the reason i mentioned this is because of benedict or if you go to pittsburgh right everything's carnegie right so it's the same kind of idea uh you kind of have different feels as time goes on up Personally, with these tycoons, and if you think of society, there's a different feel with these company towns as they go on. At first, the people live in the company towns, and they accept it, and we're happy we have a job.
As time goes on, even as ethnic groups and the whites and the blacks, at first, they might be in their own enclaves. Eventually, they'll work together, and they'll unionize. So I just wanted to throw that in there, that there is a change in time over how people act and react.
So with that, more on different industries. Natural gas, of course. Before the 1880s, it's going to be kind of a nuisance to the oil drillers and even to the people who are getting the salt out of the ground. It's just kind of something that's in the way. But it starts to begin being used more, especially as people use it for gas lighting.
You start to see that more and more. That becomes a very popular way of lighting your home because, for one, you don't see People getting that whale oil as much, it's not as expensive as getting that, or from people like the New England Nantucket folks, that's really expensive to get that blubber, that whale oil. And it's right here for us, that's great.
And we'll be able to use it more and more. And other people start noticing that around the country as well. So we'll start to see between 1870 and 1900, more and more of this use of gas lighting. And even when electricity starts being used, a lot of people don't trust it. I think it was, don't quote me on this, but I think it was 1887 when electricity was put into the White House.
And even the staff and different people in the White House didn't want to use it. They didn't trust it. They thought if you used it, it was going to burn the house down.
I'm not really sure how that would be different than natural gas and putting a flame next to gas. But in their minds, right, they thought that would happen. If you have an older home, even today, a lot of places have that dual lighting fixture.
You could turn it one way and it would be natural gas. You could turn it the other way and it could be electricity. Not double-wired today, not done, because that would be a huge safety violation. But they still have that fixture. You can see that fixture is still there.
So we start seeing more and more natural gas being an industry in West Virginia. And those big conglomerates, those big consolidated stock companies start coming about over time. And after a while, we see it kind of become passe because it seems that these natural gas fields start, I'll say, drying up, but not being used as much.
They are small compared to ones other places. And then, of course, in the last, what, 15 years, as new technology comes in. People can drill further down and they're finding all these deposits, right?
You hear like Marcella's shale and different ones. So with new technology, they can get that natural gas. They can drill deeper into the earth. And that's why we have the big boom of coming back to the area of that natural gas coming about. Now, of course, we'll talk more about that when we get to current events.
Also, we're going to see the forest industries at logging and lumbering take off big at the end of the 19th century as well. Because not only for fuel. because coal is really taking that over.
But we still are using, you know, logging and lumbering. We're still building things. Even though we're seeing more brick being used for cities so they don't get burned down, people are still building homes, especially set apart from each other, with wood, right? Always need wood for furniture and various things.
And as people are starting to have more material things, and you didn't really have as many material things before the Industrial Revolution in the United States, people want stuff. So you want a lot of tables, you want a lot of furniture, you want a lot of not just seats and dining room tables, but desks and all this kind of stuff, bookcases. People didn't really have that before you had mass production.
So people need all this wood to build all these things. So you need more of this lumbering going on as an industry. So right now, Lindebus becomes huge timber towns in the 1880s and some interesting little things.
The term woodhick comes from logging and lumbering. The idea that you were green, as you know, if a new tree is green on the inside. So these woodhicks, these are people who were young. They were just starting out in the job.
They called them that. And so that's where that term hick comes from. You know, you don't know anything.
You're kind of stupid. You're kind of ignorant. That's where it comes from, from the woodhicks that were kind of stupid and kind of ignorant. They didn't know what they were doing until they learned the job better, until they were a mature worker.
I thought that was interesting. And they sometimes called these people who worked in logging and lumbering Riders of the Flood. Riders of the Flood is a really good book.
Actually, it's called that. It talks about all this early logging and lumbering during this end of the 19th century. And the reason they are called that is because that was part of their job early on.
They would wait for the snow to melt in the mountains. And places like Raynell and Davis, They had been cutting down the trees and, you know, kind of making these big logs, and they just left them there wherever they kind of fell. And they waited for the snow to melt.
And when the snow melted, there was basically a flood that went down the mountains. You know, there's all this water that would come down the mountains. And they would hop on these logs and ride them, basically. You know, stand on them and ride them, like keeping them apart.
You know, they'd have like big poles, and they'd push them apart so they wouldn't get stuck together. and they would push them down these streams that were created from the snow melting to a sawmill town where they would be made into planks and everything. Now, this will stop after a while because eventually as the railroads come through, they can come right to these areas and they don't need to ride the flood, right? There's no need for that because the railroad can come right there.
The sawmills that will be built right there. There's no need to, you know, actually go and ride the flood. There's no reason for them to go down to a sawmill town, the sawmill. little town basically comes to you. You're going to see though by 1920 a lot of this logging and lumbering is going to go away because most of that virgin timber that's timber that hasn't been cut down yet most of it in West Virginia is gone by 1920 and yeah people are going to rebuild or they're going to plant again these different trees but it takes a while to grow a tree as you know.
Right now I think we're on our third reforestation. So it comes and goes, the lugging and lumbering. As an industry, it comes and goes. The only pure virgin timber that we still have in West Virginia is in Cathedral State Park, Cathedral State Park. So if you ever go there, you can see.
And they're huge, you know, huge trees because they've never been cut down. They've never been cut down. So some of the other industries that we're going to see that also take off at the end of the 19th century. And some, you know, just like these others we've had before, but they take off. particularly because, again, of this industrial revolution, the idea that we have better river transportation and we have these giant railroads that are coming through so they can take products different places and sell them different places.
One, let's see what we have here that I wanted to mention first. I don't want to get too off of our little handout here. Oh, one of the big things, too, mentioned the World Wars and that idea of changing manufacturing. Still, that industrialization is taking place more and more, but what do we need? Will we become a wartime industry?
Will we become a wartime country and we need wartime industries? What do we need? So that's why they talk about this rejuvenation of some industries. So clay is a big one. You have brick making, you have pottery.
The idea for some of these things is you need things that are going to be fireproof. If you're going to have certain defense buildings that are going to be built where people are going to be working inside them that have a lot of flames, you need to have that type of thing. Pottery, you need to have something to eat on, right? You need to have different types of flatware. Things along those lines or lamps the base of the lamp or so So you'll have a lot of these types of things going on Sand of course works together with natural gas and limestone so more glass you might use glass for various things like windshields or Again lamps you need the glass to kind of go around the light bulb or the light bulb itself I've seen all kinds of different things with that the big one I'd say is the chemical industry That makes Charleston in that area, the Chemical Valley, nitro.
They even name it nitro from the Dr. Wilson plant that's put there. There's a mustard gas plant that's put in Bell. So, yeah, it's really a World War I area. High explosive plants down in that region.
We'll see a lot of that down around the Canala Valley. Union Carbide, DuPont, they come in after World War I. So. Some of those don't leave, right?
We still see a lot of those chemical industries that are there. Particularly, I don't know if any of you saw it or not, there was a film that came out in the fall called Dark Waters, and it was about the idea of the DuPont chemical company being near Parkersburg. And it was kind of an activist film about the people living so close to it, drinking the water that maybe hadn't been cleaned by DuPont, and problems of people who were farmers and perhaps the city itself. drinking or using that water. Kind of an activist film in some ways.
But regardless, the chemical industry became big. That was something as well. Of course, you're going to have textiles and new types of textiles.
Previous to this, if you think of the end of the 19th century, things like cotton, of course, becomes big, and different types of linens become bigger and bigger because, again, it's mass production. You don't have one person or a family. doing the idea of a cottage industry or putting out systems from their home. Now you have mass production with different sewing machines and many people using the sewing machines at once.
You had calico, which is big if you think of the Stifel family and Wheeling. That was one of their big things, putting forth calico. But now you're gonna see as you get further into the 20th century, things like polyester or rayon, you know, those new synthetic fibers that become big over time. That's gonna be a big thing. We'll see.
Oh, we're almost at 13 minutes.
Speaking of textiles, I'm sure you've all heard the stories after World War II how it was hard to get certain types of textiles, especially women trying to get their hosiery. That's always the big thing. They were always worried.
It was kind of a black market. If you could get some type of pantyhose, that was the big thing. Or they would draw a line on the back of their legs with their eyeliner so it looked like they had pantyhose on, even though they didn't, things like that. So that was a big thing as well. Some of the big heavy industries that also become large during World War I and World War II, of course, are iron and steel and aluminum.
You needed those, obviously, heavy industries to win the war, right? You need those types of metals if you're going to be fighting modern warfare. You need to have those. And you need them for domestic reasons as well.
If you're from the Weirton area for years, I think probably in the last 10 years, they finally took that sign down. Well. Pretty much took the plant down now to the factory.
You know, the steel mills up there, they had the big sign that said, we can do it because it was the idea that they were also making cans for food. Not only are they building, you know, tanks and building large guns and things like that, but they were also making things for domestic life as well during the wars. That's a big thing as well. So we'll see a lot of that happening in this idea of electric power, especially as you see even now.
along the different rivers that we have in West Virginia. If you have a large river, you can have a big power plant. We see those all along the Ohio-Canada rivers. You'll see that.
You just take a drive, you can see them. I had some friends, actually, who visited from out of state once, and they were going along Route 7, and they were trying to tell me where they were at. And one of them said, well, tell her we're by the power plant. And I just started laughing.
I'm like, well, which power plant? I don't know which one you're talking about. Because, again, there's so many, you know, which one you're talking about.
So that was kind of funny. And we're also going to see various transportation changes, of course, as we get further, further right into the 20th century. We're going to see more and more of that when that starts happening.
The big thing is we start seeing money politically being put into U.S. and state roads, especially after World War II. Eisenhower, when he's president, funnels a ton of money into the interstate systems. And the state also will start doing this really during the Depression. FDR does to an extent, too, in the 30s, getting people back to work.
Right. That's the big thing in the 30s. But in the 1950s, Eisenhower is worried. What if we have World War Three? We need a way to mobilize.
And that's really what the interstate system is. Some folks say he wants an autobahn like they have over in Germany. So we can get the soldiers and supplies and even civilians out of the cities as fast as possible or mobilize troops as fast.
possible to get them where they need to be and out of certain camps or certain areas so they aren't hurt right away. So we see that that becomes really big, this idea of transportation changes. So we see new state routes and turnpikes, new turnpikes, right? Interstates, the Appalachian Corridor system goes into effect. We'll also see a big push to attract industry, especially during the energy crisis as we get into the 70s and into the 80s.
And what I thought was probably the most interesting bit with this is two things, that they really look for the same types of businesses to save us as they did today. They look for the same types of businesses to save us today as they did in the 70s and 80s. And really the same types of political pushes and the same types of complaints by activists are going on today. So some things never change, I guess, if you think about it.
So some of the efforts to attract industry tax reform going into effect for businesses and industries, different types of occupation taxes will come in. So we'll give you a break. Tax break will help you out in some way with a business tax. If you bring your industry to West Virginia, it will help you in some way. That's a big thing.
If you remember, there was a big issue in 2018, the teacher strike. where people wanted to tax the natural gas companies. They said, tax them more.
That'll pay for the state employee raise we're talking about. And government officials said, well, it's more complicated than that. We can't do that. And maybe it is. But a big part of it was if you tax the major industry that's coming in, Maybe they won't bring as much business because there's natural gas other places as well.
They could go other places. I mean, they can still come here, but they can go other places and put more business in that area. A big issue was, you know, if an industry comes in, they bring side industries.
So if you don't maybe help them out a little bit by giving them maybe low interest loans or again, giving them tax breaks in some way. They're not bringing in, let's say. hotel business.
They're not bringing in food businesses. They're not bringing in petroleum that they have to put in their cars or automobile shop businesses. You know, something happens to their vehicles. They need to fix them.
They're not bringing that in. So all these little subsidiary things. They're not buying stuff at the local grocery or even at Walmart or wherever.
But they're not putting money into the local economy, all the workers that will be here. So that's an issue as well. We're trying to attract businesses. And just like today, it's the same kind of thing. You want to attract businesses, you want to attract those side businesses as well.
And just like today, there are going to be activists who are saying, we have all these people that are coming in, but they're not from here. And are they, if you're into the extractive industries, are they destroying the state? Are you having problems with water being contaminated?
These same problems in the 70s and 80s. Is the land being torn up in some way? are the people who live here going to be affected when this industry goes away?
So also, you know, you'll see in your book there are some things. There is diversity, right? There are professional and skilled workers who are coming in.
So you have new people who are coming into the area, bringing new ideas. Again, professional and skilled workers bringing in new types of work, bringing in new training opportunities. Had that in the 70s and 80s, have it today.
Look at our school. Look at how many new VOTEC. programs are going into effect that go into natural gas and oil.
Tons more than we ever had before, right? Chemical industry, that kind of thing. And then, of course, you have the people that are upset. If you think of, I live in Moundsville.
One of my houses is in Moundsville. The fracking plant that's supposed to go across the river. The activists are screaming and shouting about that daily, right? They're worried about what's it going to do to the water. How is it going to affect the population if there are too many people that end up coming in, a swarm of people at once.
What's that going to do? Is it going to hurt the people themselves? The people here, are they not going to benefit?
Are these jobs just going to go to people from out of state? The jobs that are being promised, are they just going to be menial jobs? Or maybe not even that at all. Maybe they're going to bring other people to even do menial jobs. Who knows?
And of course, you know, that idea of the pollution, not just in the water, but what's it going to be in the air? You know, who knows? So, A lot of different issues that were the same four years ago are the same today.
We're going to see that as well. So some things to think about, and I know I did a bunch of lectures with this, but there's a lot to say about industry in West Virginia because we have so many different ones. And that's a major idea with West Virginia is this idea that we are a state rich in, I would say, minerals, or just in general, we're a state rich in...
assets, really, even if you think of the people that are here and the opportunities that are here, besides what's in the ground and what can be made. But it seems that they've never been taken advantage of by the people here. They've been taken advantage of, definitely, but not necessarily by the people here. And that's always been a question of why is that? You always hear Appalachianists talk about that.
In such a wealth-filled state, how come the people that live in the state haven't become wealthy? I mean, a couple have, we'll have, but why are most of us poor or at least working poor? So consider that, consider that. And when we return, we will talk about politics.
Speaking of the working poor and some people who've made it rich, we'll talk more about politics.