Ginny Savage Ayers spent ten years organizing, researching and completing her late father’s book on Mother Jones and her part in the West Virginia coal mining rebellions.
Monday night she told and showed a full audience at the Salem Museum what she found along the way to publishing “Never Justice, Never Peace – Mother Jones and the Miner Rebellion at Paint and Cabin Creeks.” Her dad, Lon Savage, was a muchloved local Salem-area historian and former president of the Salem Historical Society published “Historic Salem” magazines for the society for several years before he died in 2004. He was a former reporter for the Richmond Times~Dispatch and bureau chief for the United Press International. He is also known for his first book, “Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Mine War, 1920-21”. Ayers explained how Mother Jones, born Mary Harris in Ireland, was a seamstress who became involved in the cause of the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek striking miners and their families after tragedies in her own life. Her husband and their four children died within a week during the Yellow Fever epidemic in 1867. Three years later she lost her seamstress shop in the Great Chicago Fire.
Photos in Ayers’ book that can be seen on the Mother Jones Museum website show the tiny silver-haired woman in a black Victorian dress and often, a hat, working with children and mothers in the camps. Mother Jones had joined up with the UMWA in Pittsburgh and was first sent to the West Virginia coalfields in 1900 to assess conditions. There she found miners and their families living in company-owned shacks they rented, often getting paid in script instead of money which could only be used at the company-owned store, where they also had to buy their mining tools, Ayers said. Transcripts of a talk she gave in 1912 show Mother Jones was already a fiery orator, who had been jailed a number of times. She compared miners’ living and working conditions to those in Czarist Russia. When the miners made good on their threat to go on strike in 1912, they and their families were tossed out of their company-owned houses. The UMWA brought in tents for them to live in, Ayers said, and provided some food and supplies.
“The flash point was when the Bull Moose Special train shootout happened at the tent colony on Paint Creek at Holly Grove in February 1913,” Ayers explained. The armored train carried mine guards with rifles and two machine guns which fired on the tent colony.
Miner “Cesco” Estep and guard Cleve Woodrum were killed in the firing by Baldwin-Felts mine guards. She showed an image of Estep’s marker with the UMWA seal. Miners were ordered back to work, with no resolution of many of the grievances. That led to another strike ten years later, Ayers said, which was the subject of her father’s first book. One of the advantages Ayers had that her father did not, she said, was the internet. “I used Ancestry.com to find family members of miners.” One was a man who had recorded an oral history with his grandmother in the 1960s who remembered strike battles and wars. He transcribed those for Ayers. Several of the 56 audience members at Ayers’ talk had questions about living conditions of the miners, and observations related to mining life. One woman asked about healthcare and schools. Healthcare, except for the company doctor, was “really rough,” Ayers told her. Children got whatever education their parents could teach them. Ayers’ stepmother, Ginny Savage, mentioned that guards hired by Baldwin-Felts had a tie to the Baldwin-Felts agency in Roanoke.
In answer to a question about how much of the book her dad had written, Ayers said he had written “a bunch of chapters.” She took the first year to take apart different versions of chapters Lon Savage had started, and putting it back together. “A lot of the later chapters were not really developed like the first chapters,” she said. She added, “Material I recovered was on the old floppy discs. He lost some of what he had saved on the hard drive when his computer crashed.” Ginny Savage pointed out that Ayers “has done the most wonderful thing for the state of West Virginia,” referring to getting accurate historical information on the miners. “This story is now there.” Ginny Ayers Savage is a former research biologist who wrote “Never Justice, Never Peace,” while teaching biology and environmental ethics as an adjunct professor at Maryville College in Maryville, Tenn., where she and her family live. It is published by West Virginia University Press, and available at the Salem Museum gift shop, as is Lon Savage’s first book, “Thunder in the Mountains.”
