WINONA — Built by an English-born entrepreneur who began his coal mining career at the age of 11, then sold to industrialist Henry Ford, the abandoned town and mining complex of Nuttallburg was once the home and workplace of Carter G. Woodson, who would later found the genre of Black history.
After working in the mines since childhood following the death of his father, John Nuttall was determined not to spend the rest of his life on the brink of poverty, working for others.
He emigrated to America in 1849, and after working at a factory job in New York, saved enough to buy a parcel of land in Pennsylvania’s coal country, where a new railroad route was about to be built. There, Nuttall opened a small mine and began to prosper, but his sights were set on bigger and better possibilities.
In 1870, after learning the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad was building a new rail line from Richmond through the New River Gorge and on to the Ohio River, Nuttall again bought coal property before the railroad’s completion, starting with hundreds of acres in Fayette County’s section of the Gorge.
By the end of 1870, Nuttall had begun developing a mine and building a company town. When the new rail line opened in early 1873, the Nuttallburg mine was producing coal at maximum capacity — nearly 500 tons per day — and soon began turning a profit.
In 1892, at 17, Woodson joined two of his brothers, who were working at the Nuttallburg mine and living in the Black section of the segregated company town across a creek from the white section.
Woodson wrote little about his work experience at Nuttallburg, other than a reference to nearly being struck by a chunk of slate falling from the roof of the mine. But coal camp life was another matter.
Woodson spent much of his free time in a sweet shop and tea room co-worker and Civil War veteran Oliver Jones operated out of his home. In addition to ice cream and fruits, the shop was stocked with newspapers, magazines and books detailing “the important contributions of the Negro.” It was “all but a reading room.”
Woodson was one of a relative few miners in his section of the company town who could read and write, having briefly attended a school in his native Virginia that operated on a limited schedule, with classes taught by two of his uncles. In exchange for free food at Jones’ shop, Woodson read aloud items from daily newspapers to miners gathered in the shop, which often set the stage for wide-ranging discussions.
“In this circle, the history of the race was discussed frequently and my interest in penetrating the past of my people was deepened and intensified,” Woodson later wrote.
Woodson used money earned over nearly three years of work as a miner at Nuttallburg and nearby Kaymoor to pay for classes at the only high school then open to Blacks in 1895 Huntington, where his parents and several other relatives had moved. Frederick Douglass High School’s faculty at the time included the two uncles, John and James Riddle, who had taught at his childhood elementary school. The school’s principal was a cousin, Carter Barnett.
Woodson graduated in two years, then spent a semester at Berea College in Kentucky, later obtaining enough credits at the University of Chicago to meet requirements for a bachelor’s degree. He returned to Fayette County by the end of 1897 to teach in Winona, about five miles up Keeneys Creek from Nuttallburg, at a school Black miners had established for their children.
That year marked Nuttall’s death. By that time, most of the coal mined at Nuttallburg was converted to high-carbon coke in 80 ovens built along a railroad siding a short distance above the New River shoreline and shipped to steel manufacturing plants across the region.
In 1900, Woodson returned to Huntington, where he taught history and served as principal at Frederick Douglass for three years. From 1903 to 1907, he took part in a U.S. aid mission to the Philippines. During that time, he taught school, instructed teachers and served as a provincial schools supervisor.
Upon his return to the U.S., Woodson obtained a master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago and in fall 1908 enrolled as a doctoral student in history at Harvard, where he became the second African American (following W.E.B. DuBois) to earn a doctorate from the prestigious university.
While teaching in Black public schools in Washington, D.C., after graduating from Harvard, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and the Journal of Negro History, which continues its life as a scholarly publication under a new name, The Journal of African American History.
Meanwhile, in 1919, the Nuttall family discontinued coke production at Nuttallburg and began seeking a new buyer for the complex, who turned out to be Ford Motor Company founder and owner Henry Ford, who assumed operation of the mine the following year.
Purchase of the mine was part of Ford’s “vertical integration” strategy in which he sought to control all aspects of production for his companies to stabilize production costs and minimize supply shortages. Coal mined by Ford at Nuttallburg was used to power Ford-owned steel plants.
In 1921, Ford and his son Edsel toured the operation at Nuttallburg and sought advice from those who worked at the mine on how to improve production. Changes under Ford management included construction of a new, improved tipple able to load three rail cars simultaneously and a new, 1,385-foot conveyor system to feed the tipple. The changes helped the company set an all-time production record for the mine in 1925.
Woodson returned to West Virginia in 1920 to serve for two years as dean of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, now West Virginia State University, before moving back to the nation’s capital, where, as director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, he launched the annual February observance of Negro History Week in 1926 and authored more than 30 books dealing with Black history.
Ford sold Nuttallburg to the Maryland New River Coal Company in 1928, and in the decades that followed, a series of new owners controlled the mine and company town until mine operations ceased for good in 1958 — five years after Woodson’s death.
In 1976, during America’s Bicentennial celebration, President Gerald Ford expanded Woodson’s weeklong Negro History Week observance into Black History Month.
In 1998, the Nuttall family transferred its Nuttallburg holdings to the National Park Service, which has since stabilized and interpreted many of the site’s remaining structures and built a series of trails leading visitors to points of interest. Access is available by following a steep, narrow five-mile road that follows the path of Keeneys Creek from Winona to the historic townsite.
"gorged" - Google News
March 02, 2022 at 12:00PM
https://ift.tt/U4OKQzI
Black history pioneer Woodson once worked in Gorge ghost town of Nuttallburg - Huntington Herald Dispatch
"gorged" - Google News
https://ift.tt/VROjpGP
https://ift.tt/B03LWzj
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Black history pioneer Woodson once worked in Gorge ghost town of Nuttallburg - Huntington Herald Dispatch"
Post a Comment