FAIRMONT – Before she became a public-school educator, Allyson Perry was a park ranger and Civil War interpreter at the Gettysburg battlefield.
After that, Perry, who teaches West Virginia studies and language arts at Barrackville Middle School, became active in the union.
She was president of the Marion County’s West Virginia Education Association chapter in 2018 when teachers stopped work in a protest over low pay – a movement that sparked others fronting classrooms across the U.S. to do the same.
Perry has been observing and considering houses divided for the whole of her career.
In West Virginia in the 20th century, a “house divided,” generally meant the socioeconomic gap between coal miners and the management of the companies that sent them underground, to toil in a profession that then couldn’t have been more dangerous and deadly.
By the 1920s, labor activists observed that being on a World War I battlefield of then recent history would have been less dangerous – statistically so – than being in a West Virginia coal mine of the same period.
The wrenching prevalence of cave-ins and explosions weighed more than bullets, bombs and mustard gas.
Perry, in the meantime, is taking her teacher role statewide as a new associate of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.
She was recently named to the education advisory panel of the museum, located in Matewan, Mingo County, in the heart of the state’s often embattled southern coal fields.
The region has often come under fire as coal miners and coal company owners have gone at it over the generations.
That’s not just a figurative description.
It became literal in Matewan in 1920, when simmering anger between labor and management of the Stone Mountain Coal Co., blew like a spark in a methane-choked mine shaft.
Seven detectives hired by the company were killed in the shootout, along with two miners and Cabell Testerman, the town’s mayor.
Then came Blair Mountain, a year later, in neighboring Logan County, in the aftermath.
Bullets snapped the air, breaking branches and kicking dirt.
Biplanes droned overhead, dropping pipe bombs.
Many of the miners on the ground had fought on those battlefields in World War I, upon which they were statistically safer.
For them, it was the Argonne Forest, all over again.
President Warren G. Harding would eventually summon 2,100 U.S. Army troops and a squadron of U.S. Army Service planes to quell it.
The miners who were combat veterans couldn’t stomach the thought of firing on active-duty soldiers.
A battle was lost, but the United Mine Workers of America won the war – as it kept organizing and fighting for on-the-job safety measures that at least tamped down some of the workplace danger.
Perry and a group of other teachers on an advisory panel are in the process of developing courses that will go deeper into that period of West Virginia labor and social history.
Those classroom walkouts six years ago made her do some homework, she said.
“My initial interest in Appalachian history began in college, but my desire to learn more about labor history stemmed from my involvement in the WVEA,” the teacher recalled.
“I was inspired by the stories I heard of previous labor struggles.”
The Mine Wars especially, she said.
