BIRTHPLACE OF

THE UNITED MINE WORKERS--

As I stood in New Straitsville that day and pondered its history, Tennessee Ernie's song lyrics from Sixteen Tons, "...I owe my soul to the company store," ricocheted through my memory.

The town was founded in the early 1870s by the local coal mining company as a place for its employees and families to live while grandfathers, fathers and often sons worked the mines.

Houses were plopped everywhere on the steep hillsides. They were nothing more than shanties and mine wages were low. Workers had little choice but to buy their food and supplies from the overpriced company stores.

Constant poverty kept the miners at their trade. They had little opportunity for education higher than grade school.

The Hocking Valley Railroad came along about two years later and the town grew rapidly over the following ten years to a population of some 4,000 residents.

But, there is a breaking point for everyone and labor organizing meetings were held early in the town's history. Those meetings needed a place to secretly accommodate a large number of men close to town.

The perfect place was Robinson's Cave and meetings were held there for years until 1884 when miners, fed up with working conditions and a cut in wages, went on strike, filled coal cars with wood, soaked them with kerosene, set them afire and pushed them into the mines.

The fire caught deep in the mine and is said to be still burning.  It is believed it has burned nearly two hundred square miles in the mine's coal seams.

That ended coal mining activity around the town.

But, this growing labor dispute led to the Ohio Miners Amalgamated Association which by 1890 joined the newly established United Mine Workers of America; thus giving New Straitsville legitimate claim to being a source of national mine labor organization.

Lady friend Sue Brooks and sister Patsy Love (left in the top photo) study some history boards of Robinson's Cave shown behind them in a natural amphitheater on the south edge of New Straitsville. The bronze lettering is from a historical marker at the site.

The sisters, both born in a nearby town, are shown in the smaller photo, descending from the cave's amphitheater, a view miners would have had as they worked on the earliest history of organized labor in the mining industry (without the concrete steps, of course).