"Never a Time So Bad"

This mining town I live in is a sad and lonely place

Where pity and starvation are pictured on every face.

--Harlan County Ballad

The pine-backed Cumberland Mountains walling off Kentucky's Harlan County from the rest of the world breed into the Harlan-born a primitive defiance. In years past, Harlan moonshiners disdained to dodge revenuers; safe on impenetrable hilltops, they patted rifles and taunted federal agents with doggerel. Harlan justice was rudimentary; seldom was a killer hanged, but often one murder was avenged with another. And when the United Mine Workers set out 30 years ago to organize Harlan's prosperous coal mines, pitched battles between "Bloody Harlan's" miners and company police brought out the National Guard so often that guardsmen were on first-name terms with miners they tossed into jail by the scores.

But Bloody Harlan's defiance has long since given in to chilling despair. As the U.S. puts recession behind it, most cities and towns are speeding up production lines or hunting up new industry. Harlan County's one industry--mining--is dying; because of geography the county is unlikely to find others. Hundreds of unemployed coal miners are in privation's clutch, haunted by the specter of expired unemployment compensation and dwindling food supplies. Kentucky's Governor A. B. ("Happy") Chandler has declared Harlan an emergency area. President Eisenhower was informed of the distress last week by Kentucky's two Senators, John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton. Private agencies make the rounds regularly with minimum food and clothes.

Prosperity's Victims. Harlan's crisis has a combination of sources. For one, demand for its rich bituminous coal will never again match the good old days of the '20s, when production zoomed to 14.5 million tons a year. For another, Harlan's miners, members of the U.M.W. for the past 18 years, are in a sense victims of other miners' prosperity. Rising labor costs (Harlan operators have so far refused to sign a new U.M.W. contract under which miners would get $14.25 a day to enter a mine, 76-c- more per ton to load coal) have spurred mine owners to mechanize. But Harlan's shallow (32 in. to 48 in.) seams make mechanization impractical. A third reason: rail costs from the heart of the Appalachian soft coal field have soared.

Ten years ago, 32 big mines were operating; today there are nine. The number of working miners has dipped from 12,500 in 1950 to 5,000. Few other jobs are available. Harlan is all hill and hollow, and the hollows are too narrow for farming or factories.

Rusty Red Dog. Despite the billion tons of rich bituminous coal still underground, conveyors and tipples are being sold for scrap metal; white-frame company towns such as Red Bud, Golden Ash and Kenvir are boarded up and rotting; in Closplint and Punkin Center, streets rust-colored from a half century of "red dog"--slate and clinker dust--are quiet and deserted. Miners who could afford to have gone off to Paducah, Louisville, Cincinnati or even Chicago. Others, who could not, are in worse trouble than in the Depression '30s. In Kenvir (pop. 800), where the Peabody Coal Co. closed its mine a year ago and left 450 jobless, Miner Orville Gibson, 44, stays behind because he cannot afford to move his ten children. Hoping to find work in one of the smaller mines still operating, Gibson meanwhile feeds his family U.S. surplus rice, flour and cornmeal, gets clothes and shoes from the Baptist Church.

Says Levi McGeorge, pastor of the Closplint Church of God: "I've been preachin' the gospel for 25 years, and I've never seen a time so bad." Adds 63-year-old Ben Middleton, a third-generation Harlan resident and a power in county Republican politics: "I watched this county build up, and now I'm awatchin' it go down. I don't see no hope."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.