Matewan, Nineteen Twenty, The Day the Shooting Started

The town of Matewan sits at the foot of a mountain where the Tug Fork River bends. On May nineteenth, nineteen twenty, a gunfight broke out on its main street that lasted less than two minutes and killed ten men, including the mayor and the chief of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency's local contingent. It became one of the most scrutinized episodes in American labor history.

The detectives had come to Matewan that day to evict miners and their families from company houses. The miners had joined the United Mine Workers of America, which was illegal under the terms of the yellow-dog contracts many had signed. Chief of Police Sid Hatfield, a local man with deep roots in the coalfields, moved to arrest the detective agents instead. What happened next is still disputed in its precise sequence, though the result is not: seven Baldwin-Felts men were killed, as were the mayor and two miners.

The event is called the Matewan Massacre in union tradition. Sid Hatfield became a hero to the miners and was murdered on the courthouse steps in Welch the following year by agents he recognized from the same detective firm.

The immediate consequence of Matewan was not peace but escalation. Miners across Mingo County went on strike. The operators declared martial law. Federal troops arrived. And the following summer, thousands of armed miners marched toward Logan County in what would become the largest armed labor uprising in American history after the Civil War. The shooting at Matewan was not an ending. It was an ignition.