Marion, North Carolina: The Massacre the Mountains Forgot

Marion sits at the foot of the Blue Ridge in McDowell County, a town built by two railroads and sustained by cotton mills that drew mountain families out of subsistence farming and into industrial labor. It is a place most travelers pass through. In nineteen twenty-nine, it became briefly famous, and then was almost entirely forgotten.

Marion was incorporated in eighteen forty-four, named for the Revolutionary War guerrilla Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. It grew slowly until the Clinchfield Railroad punched through the Blue Ridge in nineteen oh eight, placing Marion at the intersection of two rail lines and connecting it to national markets. Cotton mills followed quickly. By the late nineteen twenties, the town's economy ran on the rhythm of looms.

Mill workers in Marion in nineteen twenty-nine worked twelve-hour shifts for about thirteen dollars a week, before deductions for company housing and the company store. New hires went unpaid for their first thirty days. The United Textile Workers union began organizing, and in the summer of nineteen twenty-nine, workers at the Clinchfield and Marion Manufacturing mills walked out.

The strike lasted until October second. That morning, a group of sheriff's deputies confronted workers on the picket line and opened fire. Six men were killed. Dozens more were wounded. No deputy faced criminal prosecution.

The Marion Massacre of nineteen twenty-nine occurred in the same summer as the more famous Gastonia strike, and both were part of a wave of textile labor unrest that swept the South as workers pushed back against conditions that the rest of the country was just beginning to recognize as intolerable.

The mills eventually closed. Marion is still here, a small city of fewer than eight thousand people, living beside rivers the railroads once followed. The names of the six men who died on October second are not on any monument in the center of town.