“A Judicious Mixture”: Elm Grove Mining, Black Labor, and the Multiethnic Underground of Wheeling

The Mine Beneath the City

In the previous installment, we looked at Elm Grove Mining through the unlikely doorway of a federal court case.

That 1918 dispute showed us the company as part of Wheeling’s infrastructure: coal feeding streetcars, electricity, waterworks, wartime production, and the daily movement of the city. It was a story of contracts, fuel administrators, wartime urgency, and the legal machinery of industrial America.

But that was only the top layer.

The deeper story was underground.

The mines around Wheeling were not simply holes in the hills. They were engines of migration. They pulled men from Poland, Italy, Greece, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Russia, the American South, and the Black communities of Appalachia into the same dangerous industrial world. They created neighborhoods, labor conflicts, company housing, union halls, ethnic parishes, racial tensions, and unexpected solidarities.

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, this is where the story becomes especially important.

Elm Grove Mining was not just an industrial company. It became one of the major workplaces where African American men labored in Wheeling’s wider economy, alongside immigrant workers who were themselves struggling for dignity, wages, safety, and belonging.

The mine was a workplace. It was a battlefield. It was a migration story. It was a class story. And it was absolutely a Black Wheeling story.

From National Road to Industrial Power

According to historian William Hal Gorby, Elm Grove Mining’s origins reached back to land near the Chambers family farm along National Road, east of Wheeling. J.B. Chambers founded the company, but its transformation came in 1915, when J.A. Paisley of Cleveland purchased the low-producing mines.

Paisley was not simply dabbling in coal. He wanted fuel reserves for his steamship interests and Great Lakes traffic. His purchase came at exactly the moment when coal production in the Northern Panhandle was rising sharply.

The growth was stunning.

In 1918, Elm Grove Mining produced 185,184 tons of coal, making it West Virginia’s 98th largest coal company. By 1920, production had climbed to more than 501,000 tons, making it the 22nd largest. In 1921, the company mined more than 853,000 tons and jumped to 7th largest in the state.

That kind of growth required bodies.

It required men to cut coal, load coal, haul coal, timber rooms, set track, face danger, and live close enough to be called back to the mine when the company needed them. Elm Grove Mining’s expansion brought hundreds of immigrant workers and Southern Black workers into company housing and into the industrial orbit of Wheeling.

The phrase “suburbs of Wheeling” appears in recruiting language for miners. That may sound almost pleasant from a distance. But for the men who entered those mines, the reality was hard, dark, and dangerous.

The New Wheeling Workforce

After World War I, Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley entered a period of economic restructuring. The older diversified manufacturing base remained important, but steel and coal became even more central. Glass houses and breweries declined. Metal shops, tobacco, tile, textiles, steel, and coal expanded or reorganized.

The mines on Wheeling’s edges grew with them.

Gorby notes that by 1930, Ohio County had the highest number of immigrants and second-generation ethnic residents of any county in West Virginia. That matters. It means Wheeling’s industrial history was never only a story of native-born workers or old-stock families. It was a story of movement: people arriving, clustering, learning English, building churches, finding work, joining unions, crossing picket lines, raising children, sending money home, and trying to survive America’s industrial order.

In the mines, the workforce became increasingly diverse.

Polish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, Slovak, Croatian, and African American miners all appear in the record. These were not decorative minorities on the edge of the story. They were the labor force.

And among them, African American miners became increasingly significant.

The Numbers Tell a Story

One of the most powerful pieces of evidence in Gorby’s work is a table drawn from West Virginia Department of Mines annual reports showing the ethnic and racial background of Ohio County coal miners from 1918 to 1930.

The numbers are striking.

In 1918, Ohio County mines counted 83 African American miners. By 1922, that number had grown to 184. By 1924, it was 221. In 1926, it leapt to 422. In 1928, it reached 519. By 1930, the figure remained high at 439.

That was not a footnote.

That was an industrial reality.

The Black mining workforce in Ohio County grew from a small but visible presence into one of the largest groups in the county’s coal labor force. By the late 1920s, African American miners were not merely present. They were central.

This helps explain later survey records showing Elm Grove Mining as one of the major employers of Black men in Wheeling. The Foundation has already encountered those numbers: a later city survey recorded Elm Grove Mining employing 700 men, 300 of whom were African American. That was nearly 43 percent of the company workforce in a city where African Americans were only a small percentage of the population.

The mines did not treat Black workers equally in a moral sense. Jim Crow still shaped housing, recreation, education, and public life. But the numbers force us to confront something important: Black labor helped power Wheeling’s coal economy.

A “Judicious Mixture”

Gorby uses a chillingly revealing phrase from historian Kenneth Bailey: mine managers sought a “judicious mixture” of workers.

That phrase deserves to sit with us.

It sounds orderly, almost managerial. But underneath it was a strategy of control. Employers in West Virginia mines often balanced racial and ethnic groups against one another: Black workers, immigrants, native-born whites, union men, non-union men, recent arrivals, and experienced miners.

This was not accidental diversity. It was labor policy.

Operators understood that a workforce divided by language, race, nationality, religion, and legal status could be harder to organize. At different moments, they hired Poles, Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and African Americans in shifting proportions. Gorby notes that after 1925, Ohio County mine operators preferred, in order, Black, Italian, and Polish workers.

That ordering tells us a great deal about power.

Black workers were often recruited into the hardest and most contested labor spaces.

Sometimes they were brought in during strikes. Sometimes they were used by employers to weaken unions. Sometimes they were simply workers looking for wages in a brutal economy that gave them few good choices.

That is the part we have to handle carefully.

African American miners were not pawns without agency. They were men making decisions under pressure, seeking income, housing, mobility, and survival. But they were also entering a workplace where employers could exploit racial tension as a weapon.

Danger Below Ground

The mines were dangerous for everyone who entered them.

Gorby notes that the newer mines relied heavily on coal-cutting machinery and unskilled coal loaders. As early as 1910, more than 86 percent of Panhandle mines were machine cut. Mechanization increased production, but it did not remove danger. Men could be run over by motors, electrocuted, crushed by falls of stone, or caught in explosions.

Elm Grove Mining itself was deadly. In 1921 alone, nine miners died at the company as it expanded its workforce.

That number should not pass by quietly.

Nine men in one year.

Nine families interrupted. Nine kitchen tables changed. Nine sets of wages gone. Nine reminders that coal did not simply come from the earth; it was paid for in bodies.

This is where industrial history must become human history.

Coal kept Wheeling’s industries alive, but miners carried the risk. The city above ground enjoyed the power; the men below ground absorbed the danger.

Union Dreams and Mine Reality

Elm Grove’s miners were not silent.

The United Mine Workers of America had a strong presence among Ohio County’s immigrant miners. Locals at Elm Grove and Triadelphia pushed demands that tell us what everyday miners were fighting for: a six-hour day without a reduction in pay, compensation for “deadwork,” removal of fines imposed on coal loaders, and “man trips” to transport workers more safely.

These demands were not abstract political theory. They came from the daily grind of the mine.

Miners wanted to be paid for labor the company did not always count. They wanted to stop being fined for conditions partly outside their control. They wanted safer ways to move through the mines. They wanted time, dignity, and less bodily punishment.

The union world was multiethnic. Slovak, Polish, Italian, Croatian, Lithuanian, and other immigrant miners worked together in some places and clashed in others. Men like Jacob Zednick, a Slovak miner living in Triadelphia, became intermediaries because they had worked in multiple mining communities, understood the dangers, and could speak across ethnic lines.

But solidarity was fragile.

Employers used court injunctions, evictions, state police, company housing, wage cuts, and strikebreakers. Workers were divided by nationality, race, desperation, and fear. The same labor movement that sometimes called for unity across “Colored men” and immigrant workers could also fall into ugly racial resentment when Black workers were recruited into mills and mines during labor conflicts.

That contradiction is part of the truth.

The Strike That Tested Everything

In 1926, Elm Grove Mining broke with the Jacksonville Agreement, a national wage agreement meant to stabilize the coal industry. The company announced reductions that would take miners back toward older wage scales. John Cinque of the UMWA ordered 1,700 miners at Elm Grove out on strike.

The stakes were enormous. A Wheeling newspaper summarized the moment plainly: the future of union coal fields hung in the balance.

The company pressed hard.

Miners faced eviction from company housing. At Mine No. 3, eviction notices went out to dozens of union miners, affecting hundreds of people when families are counted. Some left. Others stayed and fought in court.

The legal record from those evictions gives us glimpses of actual miners’ lives. Joe Hanas, born in Austrian Poland, had moved with his family through coal camps in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio before returning to the Elm Grove mines. His rent was deducted directly from his wages. That arrangement gave the company power over both work and home.

Other miners raised safety concerns. They worried about motors, ventilation, gas, open lights, black powder, and the deadly combination of mechanized mining and combustible conditions. These were not small complaints. In mining country, safety disputes could be the difference between walking home and being carried out.

In the end, the court upheld Paisley’s actions, and the union was removed from the Elm Grove mines.

That outcome changed lives.

Some miners scattered to other jobs and other coal towns. Some returned later. Some moved across the river. Families adapted as best they could. Sons went into mines. Daughters worked in nearby factories. Workers who had hoped for industrial democracy found themselves back inside a system where the company held the stronger hand.

Black Workers in a Complicated Labor World

For EBSHF, one of the most important lessons from this source is that African American labor history cannot be separated from the broader labor world of Wheeling.

Black workers were part of the same industrial transformation that brought Polish, Italian, Greek, Slovak, Croatian, Hungarian, Russian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Mexican workers into the Upper Ohio Valley. They shared dangerous workplaces, crowded neighborhoods, economic insecurity, and the search for better wages.

But they did not share equal status.

European immigrants, however despised or mocked by native-born elites, could often move gradually toward acceptance as “white.” African American workers remained trapped inside a harder racial boundary. They could be necessary to the mine and mill, yet still excluded from full civic equality. They could help fuel the region, yet remain segregated in schools, housing, recreation, and public life.

This is why the Elm Grove story is so important.

It shows us a Wheeling where Black workers were not incidental. They were part of the city’s industrial muscle. But they were also navigating a world where employers, unions, newspapers, and white workers often viewed them through the lens of racial competition.

The mine was a place of possible solidarity and real division.

Both things were true.

The Upper Ohio Valley as a Shared Working-Class Landscape

The Foundation’s work often begins with Wheeling’s African American institutions: Lincoln School, the Pythian Building, the Blue Triangle, churches, fraternal lodges, sports teams, civic clubs, and families.

But this source reminds us that Black Wheeling also has to be understood through the wider Upper Ohio Valley.

Workers crossed rivers and county lines. A man might live in Wheeling and work in Benwood, Triadelphia, Warwood, Martins Ferry, Yorkville, Lansing, or Beech Bottom. Streetcars, bridges, rail lines, mines, mills, and company towns tied the region together.

The industrial map did not stop at the city line.

Neither should our history.

Elm Grove Mining sat within this larger landscape of movement. The company drew men from the South, from Eastern Europe, from nearby coal camps, and from Wheeling’s own neighborhoods. Its growth helped shape where people lived, how families survived, how unions organized, and how racial and ethnic communities encountered one another.

For Black workers, this was both opportunity and burden. Mining could offer wages unavailable elsewhere, but at enormous risk and within a segregated social order. It could connect Black men to one of the city’s most important industries while still leaving their families to fight for dignity in schools, housing, recreation, and public recognition.

The Numbers Beneath the Story

The 1919 West Virginia Department of Mines report gives us a sharper snapshot of Elm Grove Mining before its explosive growth of the early 1920s. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1919, the company’s Skillcorn mine produced 209,671 tons of coal. Every ton was listed as shipped from the mine, a reminder that Elm Grove was not a sleepy local pit. It was already part of a wider industrial supply chain.

Just as striking is how mechanized the mine already was. The same state report lists Elm Grove with 14 mining machines, producing all 209,671 tons by machine mining rather than pick mining. In other words, this was not only a labor story. It was a machine-age labor story. Black workers, immigrant workers, and native-born miners were working inside a modernizing industrial system where productivity was rising, but the human danger remained painfully high.

By another table in the same report, Elm Grove employed 323 men at the Skillcorn operation: 295 working inside the mine and 28 outside. That made Elm Grove one of the major mining employers in Ohio County. When we later see the 1931 survey identifying Elm Grove Coal Mine as employing 300 African American men, this earlier 1919 data helps us understand the scale of the workplace those men were entering. This was not a marginal employer. It was one of the engines of Wheeling’s industrial world.

A Mine Powered by Machines

The report also recorded six electric locomotives in use at Elm Grove. That detail may sound technical, but it matters. It tells us that Elm Grove was not just expanding by hiring more men. It was building a mechanized underground system of cutting machines, haulage, cars, motors, tracks, and power. The men who worked there were not only digging coal.

They were navigating an industrial environment where machinery, electricity, dust, gas, and human labor met underground.

That helps explain why safety became such a powerful issue in the labor conflicts that followed. When miners later complained about motors, lamps, dust, gas, and dangerous working conditions, they were not imagining abstract risks. They were speaking from inside a highly mechanized mine where the margin between production and disaster could be terrifyingly thin.

The Cost Paid Underground

The same 1919 report records three fatal accidents at Elm Grove No. 2 during that fiscal year. Of Ohio County’s five recorded mining deaths that year, three were at Elm Grove. The report appears to list the men killed as Albert Keighley, Jack De Negi, and Edward J. Bath. Their names deserve to be read slowly. They remind us that every tonnage figure, every production table, and every legal dispute sat on top of human bodies and family grief.

The state calculated Elm Grove’s coal production at 69,890 tons per fatal accident that year. That is the kind of statistic that stops the room. It was meant as an industrial measurement. For us, it reads differently. It tells us that the coal fueling Wheeling’s modern life came with a human cost, and that the men who bore that cost were often the very people least centered in the public memory of the city.

Only two years later, the dissertation notes that nine miners died at Elm Grove Mining Company in 1921. Seen together, the 1919 state report and the later scholarship show a mine growing fast, mechanizing fast, and becoming increasingly central to the lives of Black and immigrant working families in and around Wheeling.

A Better Data Paragraph for the Existing “By the Numbers” Section

The numbers are worth pausing over. In 1919, Elm Grove’s Skillcorn mine produced 209,671 tons of coal, used 14 mining machines, employed 323 men, operated six electric locomotives, and recorded three fatal accidents. By 1920, production had jumped to 501,555 tons. By 1921, it reached 853,724 tons, making Elm Grove one of the largest coal operations in the state. The story, then, is not simply that Black men later found work at Elm Grove. It is that Black labor became tied to one of the fastest-growing, most mechanized, and most dangerous industrial workplaces in the Ohio Valley.

Elm Grove Mining, Skillcorn Mine	1919 State Mine Report
Coal produced	209,671 tons
Mining machines	14
Coal produced by machine mining	209,671 tons
Men employed	323
Inside workers	295
Outside workers	28
Electric locomotives	6
Fatal accidents	3

The new data gives the Foundation a research map: follow Elm Grove not only through court cases and labor disputes, but through mine reports, death records, census records, city directories, oral histories, and the families of the men who worked underground. Somewhere in those records are the names behind the numbers.

Why This Belongs in the Foundation’s Archive

This is the kind of history EBSHF was built to preserve.

Not because it is simple. Because it is not.

The Elm Grove Mining story forces us to hold several truths at once:

Black workers were central to Wheeling’s industrial economy.

Immigrant workers also faced exploitation, danger, and exclusion.

Employers often used race and ethnicity to divide labor.

Unions sometimes reached toward interracial solidarity and sometimes failed badly.

Coal jobs could offer wages and community stability while also threatening life, health, and home.

The same city that depended on Black labor could still deny Black families equal access to public life.

That complexity is not a weakness in the story. It is the story.

The Foundation’s mission is not to flatten the past into easy heroes and villains. It is to recover the real terrain: the institutions, the families, the workers, the contradictions, the courage, the harm, the strategy, the survival.

Elm Grove Mining belongs in that terrain.

A Mine Is Never Just a Mine

A mine is geology. It is capital. It is danger. It is machinery. It is law. It is labor.

But it is also memory.

Elm Grove Mining helps us see a Wheeling that was far more diverse, tense, ambitious, and interconnected than the simplified versions of local history often allow. It was a city where a Polish parish, a Black school, an Italian miner, a Slovak union man, a Southern Black laborer, a company town, a court injunction, a streetcar line, and a coal seam could all belong to the same story.

That story is not only industrial history.

It is African American history.

It is immigrant history.

It is labor history.

It is Wheeling history.

And for the Foundation, it is another reminder that the history we seek is often not hidden because it was small. It is hidden because it was everywhere.

-T

Sources and Notes

• William Hal Gorby, Saints, Sinners, and Socialists on the Southside: Polish Catholic Immigrant Workers, Politics, and Culture in Wheeling, West Virginia, 1890-1930, Ph.D. dissertation, West Virginia University, 2014. Especially Chapter 8, “Immigrant Coal Miners’ Struggles in Ohio County,” including Gorby’s discussion of Elm Grove Mining Company’s origins, J.A. Paisley’s 1915 purchase, production growth, Ohio County mine workforce demographics, the “judicious mixture” of Black and immigrant labor, UMWA organizing, the 1926 Elm Grove strike, company housing, and mine safety disputes.

• West Virginia Department of Mines annual reports, 1918-1930, as summarized in Gorby’s Table 8.1, “Ethnic and Racial Background of Ohio County Coal Miners, 1918-1930.”

• West Virginia Traction & Electric Co. v. Elm Grove Mining Co., 253 F. 772; 1918 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 887; No. 46, District Court, Northern District of West Virginia, decided December 9, 1918. Used as context for the previous installment and for understanding Elm Grove Mining’s relationship to Wheeling’s coal, transportation, and public utility infrastructure.

• Foundation note: This post is part of an ongoing EBSHF series on Elm Grove Mining, coal labor, and African American workers in Wheeling. The current evidence establishes the importance of African American miners in Ohio County and the later significance of Elm Grove Mining as a major Black employer. Additional research is needed to identify individual Black miners, their families, neighborhoods, churches, school connections, and civic roles.