Fairmont: The Coal Barons and Mother Jones

The name Fairmont was a portmanteau, the founders blending fair and mount to describe the town's pleasing view of the Monongahela River from a bluff above the water. When the Virginia legislature established the settlement in eighteen twenty on the farm of Boaz Fleming, it was a courthouse town in a farming county. What transformed it was the arrival of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the eighteen fifties and the discovery of what lay underneath the hills: one of the richest bituminous coalfields on earth.

The man who opened that field commercially was James Otis Watson, sometimes called the father of the West Virginia coal industry, who organized the Montana Mining Company in eighteen fifty-two. His family came to control what became the Consolidation Coal Company, and his son Clarence Wayland Watson served as a United States Senator from West Virginia between nineteen eleven and nineteen thirteen while simultaneously running one of the largest coal enterprises in the country. Watson's brother-in-law, Aretas Brooks Fleming, served as governor of West Virginia from eighteen ninety to eighteen ninety-three. Fairmont was not merely a coal town. It was the home of the men who owned the coal industry.

That concentration of power made it fertile ground for organized labor. Mother Jones, the Irish-born agitator who spent her seventies and eighties descending into coal mines to organize workers, was active in the Fairmont field in nineteen oh two, when she was arrested and taken to Parkersburg for violating a court injunction against union organizing. She returned in nineteen seventeen and again won union recognition in the Fairmont coalfields. Marion County doubled its population between nineteen hundred and nineteen thirty on the strength of coal. When the coal economy collapsed in the mid-twentieth century, it took Fairmont's prosperity with it, but it left behind a remarkable Victorian and Edwardian downtown that still reflects the wealth those black seams once produced.