Jon Chase
July 10 – August 29, 2021
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- Coal miners on graveyard shift, Twilight, W.VA. © Jon Chase photo
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- This marquee for a drive-in movie with a parked coal train on the right marks a desolate landscape after the theater closed and was demolished. Harlan has come to symbolize the hard-scrabble history of coal mining in Appalachia. Mining was dangerous work, with men occasionally trapped in collapsed mines resulting in multiple deaths. The Harlan Coal Wars lasted from 1931 to 1939, with numerous miners, deputies, and bosses killed. Strikes marked by violence continued for decades afterward. Underground mines began closing in the late 1970’s, replaced by mountain-top removal and large-scale surface strip mining that scarred the landscape and polluted water sources. © Jon Chase photo.
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- Coal miner at Elkin Mine #6, Norton, VA, 1979. © Jon Chase photo
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- A farther comforts his young daughter on his front porch, somewhere in Coal Country, Kentucky. © Jon Chase photo
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- Coal country woman barkeeper thinking of other places, West Virginia, 1978. At one point, more than 100,000 West Virginians worked in the mines that produced well-paying jobs. Now there are fewer than 20,000, and the jobs that do exist pay far less than they used to, thanks to successful anti-union actions by coal companies. Coal counties in Appalachia suffer high rates of heart disease, obesity, smoking, diabetes, and opioid abuse, leading them to have some of the lowest life expectancies in the country. © Jon Chase photo
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- Doug Shelton, a non-union supervisor drives to check on the condition of a mine during the national bituminous coal strike of 1978 near Norton, VA. He has a pistol on the seat and a rifle below it, while he keeps a close watch on the surrounding steep hillsides for anyone who might shoot at his truck thinking he is intending to work during the strike. He also explained that long-standing personal feuds are often played out and settled under the guise of union-coal company violence. © Jon Chase photo
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- Don and Doug Shelton, two brothers, two sides: one union, the other, non-union, standing but not working during a lengthy coal strike in Norton, Virginia, 1978. © Jon Chase photo
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- Faith healing at a church service in Micco, West Virginia in 1979. The young boy appears to have a drooped arm. Faith healing is the practice of prayer and gestures (such as laying on of hands) that are believed to elicit divine intervention in spiritual and physical healing, Micco is named for the Main Island Creek Coal Company. © Jon Chase photo.
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- Riverboat pilot in a bar at ten in the morning, Charleston, W.Va. He made very good money on a river run, but then would have several days off before working again, which he would spend in bars like the one I found him in. ©Jon Chase photo
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- State police patrol the Osborne Coal Yard near Pennington Gap, VA during the 1978 national bituminous coal strike led by the United Mine Workers of America. The strike lasted 110 days. When it was settled, coal miners were forced to pay for part of their health care for the first time in 30 years, they lost their pension benefits, and they lost the right to strike over local issues. By 2014, coal mining had largely shifted to open pit mines in Wyoming. The once 200,000-strong UMW was reduced to just 20,000 miners, mostly in underground mines in Kentucky and West Virginia. Jon Chase photo
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- Striking coal miner passing time at the public square in Harlan, Kentucky, on the hundredth day of a coal strike, 1978. Harlan has a long and storied history of coal strikes and violence dating back to the 1930’s, when the song “Which Side Are You On?” became the anthem of a reborn United Mine Workers (UMWA) union. As recently as 2019 miners in Harlan County occupied a railroad track to halt a coal train until they got paid the back wages they were owed for loading that same train. There is no longer a miner’s union in Kentucky. © Jon Chase photo
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- Railroad worker, WV. When West Virginia became a state in 1863, 90 percent of its population lived on farms. In 1873, the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) railroad finally connected southern West Virginia with the East Coast. By the early 20th century, branches of the C&O, Norfolk & Western, and the Virginian railroads extended into every coal-producing hollow in southern West Virginia. They served two main purposes: importing miners, and exporting coal. Between 1880 and 1920, southern West VirginiaÕs population grew from 93,000 to 446,000, due almost entirely to the coal industry. © Jon Chase photo
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- Woman with a Cadillac hat stands in her backyard, with a freight train parked on tracks behind. She lived in an all-Black hollow in the back hills of West Virginia. she posed willingly for me, but after few minutes her husband called her back into the house. She quickly told me, “You’d better get moving. My husband says he’s getting his gun right now.” People don’t are kindly to strangers, and no stranger had any reason to visit this small, isolated settlement. © Jon Chase photo
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- Tent revival, Briarbranch, Kentucky. © Jon Chase photo
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- Mother and daughter, Rowe Restaurant, Algoma, West Virginia, 1978. This combination restaurant/bar was like many in coal country, open early and late to serve miners working around-the-clock shifts. Men came in for beers after the graveyard shift ended, while others ate breakfast before starting work. The day I came by a fist fight broke out between two burly brothers in their late teens. A few punches were thrown, but it was quickly broken up. I was sitting with the woman pictured, whose husband was the owner. She got very teary and upset, despite no one getting hurt. When I asked why, she explained she hated to see brothers fight. She went on to relate how years earlier two brothers began fighting, and the place was getting torn up. Her husband told them to stop, to no avail. He raised his shotgun from behind the bar and repeated his demand. The two charged him, and he fired his gun. Seconds later, two brothers lay dead on the barroom floor. No charges were ever brought. That was justice in the back hills of West Virginia. © Jon Chase photo
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- Hired hand in a tobacco field, Jackson, KY, 1978. Jackson is nestled in the heart of the Cumberland Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains. Kentucky produces more tobacco than any other state except North Carolina. For centuries, tobacco barns dotted the central Kentucky landscape, but as health risks from smoking became clear, sales of the state’s longtime top crop plummeted. Now farmers are turning to hemp as a less labor-intensive, more profitable alternative with a growing market for the extracted CBD oil. © Jon Chase photo
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- A woman handles a rattlesnake at a church service in Micco, West Virginia in 1979. The minister standing behind her with arms outstretched lost his 15-year-old son to a rattlesnake bite a month earlier. Snake handling is based on a line from the Bible urging people to pick up serpents as a symbol of their faith in God. If a person gets bitten, it is said to happen either because their faith was not strong, or they picked up the snake without being instructed to do so by the Lord. Micco is named for the Main Island Creek Coal Company. © Jon Chase photo
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- Willy Turner with banjo, Briarbranch, KY, 1978. I picked him up hitchhiking on a back country road, and was a bit surprised to see a man his age asking for a ride. In the course of our conversation I asked if he lived alone. He responded, “No, I don’t live alone. I live with Jesus.” © Jon Chase photo
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- Disabled coal miner Phelan Napier and his wife, Kitts, Kentucky. Kitts is on the outskirts of Harlan, a hard-core coal town in Kentucky. It has been the scene of well-documented, violence and even a pitched battle between federal agents and striking coal miners where many on both sides were shot and killed. Phelan invited my friend and myself into his 6’x6′ cabin, which had no running water or plumbing. He was welcoming at first, but then started drinking, and thought my Irish friend was possibly his long-lost son, whom he hadn’t seen in over 20 years. He then became violent, and pulled a rifle off the wall. He threatened to kill his wife, and held us all at bay for two hours. At one point he fired a couple of shots into the wall. Eventually my friend and I were able to leave with our bodies intact. © Jon Chase photo
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- Tarncy Mullins stands by his truck deep in the heart of coal country near the WV and KY borders in Wise County, VA, 1979. I recently was able to track Tarncy down through a funeral notice for his older brother, who died Jan. 6, the same day rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. I spoke with him on the phone; he is now 76 and lives with his wife of 55 years in nearby Clintwood, VA. He actually remembered our short roadside meeting some 42 years ago, and still has the photo I sent him way back then. Tarncy worked at Elkin #6 mine in Norton with two brothers whose photo I also took, Don and Doug Shelton. He gave up mining for the ministry, and officiated at the recent service for his brother. He lost another brother in a fatal mine accident decades ago. Mine accidents and black lung disease are both occupational hazards for coal miners. The disability rate in Wise County for the working population aged 15-64 is over 20%, meaning 1 in 5 workers have some sort of permanent disability. © Jon Chase
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- A coal miner takes a short break on the graveyard shift in an underground mine in Twilight, W. VA. Twilight is in Boone County, West Virginia, with a 2010 population of 90. The Twilight surface mine, which flattened and stripped an expanse of heavily-forested mountains covering more than 3.5 square miles, has met most of its official clean-up requirements. But Dustin White, whose father was a miner with West Virginia roots going back 11 generations, says: “It’s all to give the illusion that they’ve reclaimed these sites, when basically it’s dead land. Any novice gardener can tell you that you can’t grow much in what is essentially clay mud and shell rock, and that’s all that’s left over when mining is done. All the topsoil has been dumped into the valleys, and it’s just this barren landscape. © Jon Chase photo
About Jon Chase –
I have been a staff photographer at Harvard University for the past 27 years. I got my start in photography by taking a six-week introductory course at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1973. Following that, I came to the Boston area and moved to Newton Corner, where I
began to photograph my neighbors in an old apartment building. This led to my obtaining a grant from the Mass. Foundation for the Humanities to produce a book of photos and interviews with people on all sides of what became a city-wide controversy when a developer bought the property. In 1987, The Fight for Newton Corner was published and distributed free of charge to every town and city planner in Massachusetts.
I subsequently moved to Cambridge and worked for several newspapers as well as Associated Press in Boston. In Cambridge I again photographed my neighbors, this time in a residential hospice on my block over a period of two years. Other projects include prison inmates at the Billerica House of Correction, coal miners and local people in Appalachia, and orphanages and flood victims in China. I have always felt an affinity for people living outside the mainstream, and that has been the focus of almost all my personal work.
I am a strong believer in combining words with photos, both to provide historical context and to add anecdotal information that personalizes the images. I have done that with my photographs of coal miners, which are mostly portraits, but which also document a specific time in the history, often violent, of coal mining in those areas of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia known as Coal Country.
I live in Acton with my wife Louisa, with my adult daughter Maya living nearby. – JC
Statement
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