The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in United States history and is the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, as part of the Coal Wars, a series of early-20th-century labor disputes in Appalachia.
For five days, from late August to early September 1921, 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers (called the Logan Defenders) who were backed by coal mine operators during the miners' attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields when tensions rose between workers and mine management. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired, and the United States Army, represented by the West Virginia National Guard, which was led by McDowell County native William Eubanks, intervened by presidential order.
Since the founding of the United Mine Workers union, a trade union founded with a focus on coal miners, in 1890, coal mines in Mingo County, West Virginia and its surrounds hired only non-union workers, and strictly enforced employment contracts that included union membership as grounds for immediate termination. As miners in the area lived almost exclusively in company towns, termination also meant eviction. Company homes were all that were available, so evicted workers were forced to live in tent colonies along the Tug Fork River. Rows of company houses were boarded up, and the miners and their families, including in one instance a woman with a newborn, were thrown out and had to live in tents or board houses with no sides.
In 1920, the UMW's new president John L. Lewis sought to finally end the three-decade resistance to unionization in the area. He was under increased pressure to do so from both miners elsewhere participating in the United Mine Workers coal strike of 1919, and from affected mine operators who were now being undercut by nonunion mines in West Virginia. One of the workers from the Keystone Mine said miners from Illinois and Pennsylvania had put up fliers about joining the union. The miners were paid very little: "You could go in the mines and load five or six cars of coal and couldn't come out to the company store and get enough food to feed your family till you worked another day."
This unionization push included efforts from Frank Keeney, president of the local union district, and Mother Jones, who gave fiery speeches at the age of 83. An eyewitness stated that Mother Jones would "come up to the head of the creek ... and call out for all the men that wanted to be let out of slavery to follow her. And they did, scores of them." Over 3,000 Mingo County miners joined the union—and were summarily fired. The coal companies then hired agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to evict the families of their former employees.
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