Coal, Power, and the Hidden Machinery of Black Wheeling: The Elm Grove Mining Case of 1918

A Court Case With a Bigger Story Beneath It

At first glance, West Virginia Traction & Electric Co. v. Elm Grove Mining Co. looks like a business dispute.

A street railway company needed coal. A mining company wanted more money. A federal judge had to decide whether the mine could stop supplying fuel in the middle of wartime.

But for the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, records like this are rarely just records. They are doorways.

This 1918 federal court opinion does not announce itself as African American history. It does not list Black miners by name. It does not describe segregated neighborhoods, Black churches, Lincoln School, the Blue Triangle, the Pythian Building, or the everyday architecture of Jim Crow Wheeling.

And yet, it helps explain the machinery of the city those communities lived inside.

The Elm Grove Mining Company would later become one of the most important employers of Black men in Wheeling. By the early 1930s, city survey records showed the company employing 700 men, 300 of whom were African American. That meant nearly 43 percent of Elm Grove Mining’s workforce was Black at a time when African Americans made up only a small fraction of Wheeling’s overall population.

So when we find Elm Grove Mining in a major federal case in 1918, we are not merely reading about coal prices. We are seeing one of the industrial engines of Wheeling before it fully enters the Foundation’s African American story.

The City Ran on Coal

The case began with the West Virginia Traction & Electric Company, a public utility and transportation company operating in and around Wheeling. According to the court, the company ran roughly 16 miles of street railway in Wheeling and out toward the Pennsylvania line at West Alexander. It also operated an electric power plant at Elm Grove and waterworks outside the city.

That meant coal was not just coal.

Coal moved streetcars. Coal powered lights. Coal helped pump water. Coal carried workers to factories. Coal helped keep wartime production alive.

The court noted that the traction company transported “several hundred workmen” to plants outside Wheeling where they were engaged in manufacturing munitions for the government. It also supplied electricity to about 12,000 families and water to about 1,500.

Pause on that for a moment.

In 1918, a dispute between one utility company and one coal company could ripple through homes, factories, transportation lines, and the war effort itself. This was not a private quarrel tucked away in a ledger. It was a fight over the fuel that kept Wheeling moving.

A Contract From 1910 Meets a World at War

The original coal contract dated back to May 4, 1910. Under that agreement, Elm Grove Coal Company, predecessor to Elm Grove Mining Company, agreed to supply the traction company with run-of-mine bituminous coal. The contract called for 40 tons per day, with adjustments depending on the traction company’s needs.

The price was set at $1 per ton, with changes allowed when “mining rates” changed.

That phrase became the heart of the case.

The traction company argued that “mining rates” meant the cost of cutting and loading coal into mine cars at the miner’s place of work. Elm Grove Mining argued that the phrase should mean the broader cost of production, including overhead, outside work, fixed charges, interest, insurance, taxes, and office expenses.

In ordinary times, this might have been a technical contract dispute. But these were not ordinary times.

By 1917 and 1918, the United States was in World War I. Coal was strategic. Fuel shortages mattered. Transportation mattered. Wartime production mattered. The federal government had created a national fuel administration under the Lever Act to regulate and conserve food and fuel during the war.

In that atmosphere, Elm Grove Mining’s demand for a higher price became more than a local disagreement.

The Price of Power

The court described the price dispute in detail.

For years, the coal had been supplied at $1.11 per ton. After Elm Grove Mining assumed the contract, the company began demanding increases: $1.30, then $1.44, then $1.58, and finally $1.90 per ton. When the traction company refused, Elm Grove Mining threatened to stop supplying coal altogether.

The matter went to state and local fuel administrators. A compromise price of $1.70 was recommended, but the dispute continued. The federal maximum coal price for the district had been set at $2.45 per ton, and Elm Grove Mining pushed toward that figure.

The traction company argued that if the coal stopped, Wheeling’s streetcar and lighting services could grind to a halt.

The judge agreed that the public interest was at stake.

Judge Dayton did not attempt to settle every accounting issue between the companies. Instead, he focused on whether the fuel administrator’s order requiring Elm Grove Mining to keep supplying coal could be enforced. His answer was yes.

The court granted a temporary injunction requiring Elm Grove Mining to continue supplying coal under the contract, while reserving the parties’ rights to fight over the proper price in another court.

When the Court Spoke Like a Moral Witness

One of the striking things about this opinion is its tone.

Judge Dayton was not simply balancing contract language. He was writing during wartime, and he treated the threatened shutdown as a matter of public duty. He criticized the idea that a company could place its own interpretation on a contract, refuse arbitration or suit, demand sharply increased sums, and threaten to cut off coal within 24 hours.

In one of the strongest passages, the judge wrote that such conduct was not in accord with “equity and good conscience.” During war, he said, when the life and welfare of the country demanded sacrifice for the common good, such conduct became even more troubling.

He then described the purpose of wartime fuel regulation in words that still ring across the page: to keep “greed and extortion” from running loose and to prevent the work of men, women, partnerships, and corporations from being crippled during the national conflict.

It is rare to find a coal contract case that sounds almost like a sermon. But Wheeling’s industrial life was never just machinery and money. It was power. It was labor. It was class. It was public responsibility. And eventually, for the Foundation’s purposes, it was race.

Why This Matters to African American Wheeling

The 1918 case itself does not tell us who was working in the Elm Grove mines.

That comes later.

But later records make the connection impossible to ignore. In 1931, the City of Wheeling’s survey of employers found that Elm Grove Mining Company employed 700 men, 300 of them African American. The Ohio County Public Library Archives notes that this represented nearly 43 percent of the company’s workforce at a time when Wheeling’s African American population was roughly 4 percent.

That is extraordinary.

In a Jim Crow city where many employers reported few or no Black employees, Elm Grove Mining stood out as a major source of work for Black men. Coal mining was dangerous, difficult, and often brutally demanding. But it was also one of the industries where African American workers could find wages and employment at a scale unavailable in many other sectors of Wheeling’s economy.

So this 1918 case becomes part of the prehistory of a larger story.

Before we see Elm Grove Mining as a major Black employer, we see it as a company powerful enough to affect streetcars, electric service, water service, war production, and federal court. That matters. It tells us that when African American men later labored in those mines, they were not working on the margins of Wheeling’s economy. They were helping power one of its central systems.

The Invisible Workers Behind the Visible City

This is one of the recurring themes in the Foundation’s work.

African American history in Wheeling is often hidden in records that were not written to preserve it.

A Board of Education report becomes a window into the Colored School. A club photograph becomes evidence of civic power. A newspaper notice becomes a map of Black recreation.

A court case about coal becomes a clue to labor, transportation, and public infrastructure.

The city that appears in the 1918 opinion is a city of streetcars, power plants, waterworks, munitions workers, coal contracts, wartime regulations, and federal authority.

But behind that visible city was another one: the city of workers whose names were not always preserved, whose labor kept systems alive, and whose communities built schools, churches, clubs, lodges, homes, and futures within the boundaries Jim Crow tried to impose.

Elm Grove Mining belongs in that story.

Not because this case alone tells the whole tale, but because it shows us how large the company’s shadow already was.

From Industrial Power to Community History

By the time we reach the 1920s and 1930s, Wheeling’s African American community was living through the contradictions of industrial opportunity and racial exclusion.

Black workers could be essential to the mines and mills while still excluded from many public accommodations, civic institutions, and social spaces. They could help fuel the city while their children attended segregated schools. They could labor in dangerous industries while being denied equal access to housing, recreation, and advancement.

That is why records like this matter.

The Foundation’s work is not only to celebrate heroic individuals, though we proudly do that. It is also to reconstruct the systems around them: the schools, workplaces, churches, clubs, courts, factories, streets, and neighborhoods that shaped their lives.

The 1918 Elm Grove Mining case gives us one of those systems in motion.

Coal came out of the ground. Streetcars ran. Lights came on. Water moved. Workers reached the plants. The court intervened because the city could not simply stop.

And later, hundreds of Black men would be documented as part of that same industrial world.

A Case Worth Holding Onto

This opinion is not the final word on Elm Grove Mining and African American Wheeling. It is a beginning.

It invites more questions:

Who were the Black miners working for Elm Grove Mining in the 1920s and 1930s?

Where did they live?

Were they connected to East Wheeling, Lincoln School, the Black churches, the Pythian Building, the Blue Triangle, or Wheeling’s fraternal and civic organizations?

Did their wages help buy homes, educate children, fund churches, and support the institutions we now study?

What did it mean, in a segregated city, for one of the largest Black employers to be tied so directly to the energy system that powered Wheeling?

Those are the questions that turn a federal coal case into a Foundation story.

Because sometimes history does not announce itself with a headline. Sometimes it sits inside a lawsuit about “mining rates,” waiting for someone to notice that the coal contract, the streetcar line, the power plant, and the Black workforce were all part of the same city.

And that city is the one we are still learning how to see.

-T

Sources and Notes

• 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. The opinion describes the traction company’s street railway, power plant, waterworks, coal contract, wartime fuel dispute, and the injunction requiring Elm Grove Mining Company to continue supplying coal.

• Ohio County Public Library Archives, “Valley Camp Coal Co., Night Shift Workers, 1939,” Flickr. The archive note states that by December 29, 1931, Elm Grove Mining Company was a wholly owned subsidiary of Valley Camp Coal Company, and that a 1931 City of Wheeling survey recorded Elm Grove Mining as employing 700 men, 300 of whom were African American.

• Seán Duffy, “No Colored Employees…” Surveys of Jim Crow Wheeling, Archiving Wheeling, February 17, 2020. This article discusses the Blue Triangle/YWCA collection, 1928 and 1931 survey records, African American employment patterns in Wheeling, and Elm Grove Mining Company’s unusually large number of African American male employees.

• Foundation note: This post treats the 1918 case as part of the industrial backdrop to later African American labor history in Wheeling. The case itself does not identify Black miners by name. Its importance lies in documenting Elm Grove Mining’s central role in Wheeling’s fuel, transit, and public utility infrastructure before later records show the company as one of the city’s major employers of African American men.