MORGANTOWN — Henry Russell knew he was going to die, as he crouched in the damp and the smoke and the darkness.
So he did the only thing he could.
He tore a scrap off a paper bag of concrete, picked up a chunk of coal, and scrawled a message to his wife.
It was a haiku of heart and horror:
“ … Still alive, but the air
is getting bad. Oh, how I love
you Mary …”
In the three hours or so that it took for the air to become completely, and fatally, fouled in the ruined coal mine, he wrote other messages, as well.
Through coal smears and wood pulp, he told his wife she should stay in America with their children.
He told her he wasn’t in pain and that he had made his peace with God.
He told her he would see her in heaven someday.
And, after he told her all of that, he carefully arranged the notes by his side so they could be found, should any recovery efforts be made.
Then, he reclined as best he could, and waited for death to come.
Wall of fire
On this day in 1927, an explosion ripped through the Federal No. 3 at Everettville, in outlying Monongalia County.
Federal No. 3 was a sprawling enterprise, owned and operated by the New England Fuel and Transportation Co.
April 30, 1927, was a Saturday. The mine was pulsing as its riches of coal were scooped out by workers such as the author of the above wrenching messages.
Like most mining operations in the Mountain State then, production, and not necessarily safety, was paramount.
Mass fatalities in mine disasters here were so common then that labor analysts began digging out a grim analogy of their own, even before the Jazz Age was over.
If you were given a choice, they said, between spending a day on a World War I battlefield or in a West Virginia coal mine in the 1920s, you’d be better off staying up top.
That’s because your odds of survival were better, they said — and never mind the bombs, bullets and mustard gas.
Still, coal was king.
And coal offered a chance for immigrants like Russell, born in 1895, to carve a purchase of the American dream.
He was a coal miner in his native Scotland when he and Mary — pregnant with their third child — steamed across the Atlantic for opportunity.
It didn’t take long for Russell to get hired at Federal No. 3. He was on the job that day when the explosion ripped the mine at 3:20 p.m.
Eighty-six of Russell’s co-workers died instantly.
Six more on the surface were killed when a 250-foot wall of flame decimated the coal tipple, leaving twisted girders like an old-time ERECTOR set tossed by a long-ago child on Christmas morning.
Only nine of the 100 miners underground at the time of the blast were able to escape.
The others could only wait for their fate.
According to most accounts, 111 died that day.
Their descendants and others who reside in the now-former Everettville coal camp don’t forget them.
Mules over men
Sunday afternoon, in the tiny Friendship Bap-tist Church, on Pickhandle Hill Road, they gathered to remember.
A 7-ton slab of granite sits on a hill below the church, following the path to the portal of the mine Russell and the others took on this date 91 years ago.
It carries the names of those who died in 1927, plus the separate who were killed in other accidents during the mine’s years of operation from 1918-’51.
A total of 149 names are etched onto its surface.
Wally Hood, who put 20 years underground in the mines, wanted to show a visitor one name in particular: His uncle, Ralph Wright, who perished with Russell and the others in 1927.
“He was supporting his mother and other family members,” Hood said, as sunlight and the shadows from tree branches played over the name. “He was 19 years old.”
Hood, who is black, chided the coal companies then for looking the other way on safety measures, while enforcing what he said was a kind of institutionalized racism in the coal camps at the same time.
“They kept the Italians on one hill, the African-Americans on another, and the Poles and Hungarians on another after that. They didn’t want them learning each other’s languages.”
If they talked, Hood said, they would organize.
Which meant they would also lobby for better wages and safer working conditions other than the one that made a wartime battlefield seem like a better deal for survival.
And that, he said, wouldn’t sit well with a business model that stressed the safety of mules over men.
The workhouse animals were also part of the crew, and the company mantra was that while one could always hire a replacement miner, one had to buy a replacement mule.
Henry Russell’s last words
Carol Thorn, the president of the Everettville Historical Society is modest about what she does — even if she can take some credit for a 7-ton memorial and Grammy-nominated album that sings its history.
“I just didn’t want people to forget about our miners,” she said.
She lobbied state lawmakers and others for the funding that paid for the memorial.
She even approached Diana Jones, a Nashville singer-songwriter after a performance a few years back to tell her about Henry Russell and Federal No. 3.
The resulting song, “Henry Russell’s Last Words,” was primarily just that.
Jones set those words scrawled from that coal on that paper and gave them to Joan Baez to record. The song received international acclaim, as it was performed by an artist who is no stranger to the labor movement.
A musical trio on Sunday did that same song in Friendship Baptist Church while people closed their eyes, or blinked tears, as they listened.
‘I have to provide’
Then there’s Michael Singleton. He’s a genial 43-year-old who grew up in the Everettville coal camp and comes from a family of miners.
“My grandfather, my dad and my uncle,” he said. “Coal mining is what my family does.”
It’s what he does, too. He works at the nearby Marion County Co., and went underground in 2008.
Not that he necessarily wanted to. He doesn’t romanticize mining. It’s hard work, and it’s also dangerous, he said.
While he earned a degree in criminology from Fairmont State University, he couldn’t pass the allure of a miner’s paycheck.
That’s because he has two daughters in his house. He wants to raise them in West Virginia.
“So, I went in the mines. I have to provide for my family.”
