Harlan Co-Operative Coal Co. 1921-1925, 60 Employees
Evarts, Kentucky, 1946. Photo by Russell Lee
This is Evarts, the town where I grew up. The photo was taken in 1946, the year after I was born. What you see is almost the entire downtown.
Look at the diner in the center of the photo under the Royal Crown Cola sign. It has glass brick on two sides, the short one you can see and a much longer one on the left side. They cooked with coal in that restaurant and you can see the smoke coming out.
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If you look above the large brick building in
the center, there is a slate dump to the left. It’s across the river and about a third of the way up the hill. I played on that dump sometimes. Sometimes my brother and I would find coal which we took home with us.
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When we had coal delivered it would sometimes have dynamite wire in it, lengths of blue or red or green coated copper wire. We used it as a binding material. It was our version of duct tape. We used it to hold our toys and contraptions together.
"The appellant Black Mountain Corporation owns extensive coal lands in Harlan county, and in 1918 it constructed a mining camp on Yocum Creek. This mining camp is now known as Kenvir and has a population of approximately 2,500. It is unincorporated, and the Black Mountain Corporation owns substantially all the real property
in and around the town. When the camp was established, streets and roads were laid out; but these are the private property of the Black Mountain Corporation and are used by the public only with its permission."
Black Mountain Corp. v. Appleman, 33 S.W.2d 327 (Ky. Ct. App. 1930)
Scatter tags are small pieces of aluminum foil or paper that are mixed in with coal to brand it. Black Mountain used red heart-shaped foil and the scatter tags and the heart-shaped cut-out on its scrip refer to the name of its mine, the Great Heart mine.
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Coal from the Great Heart mine was used by Adm. Byrd in Antartica for his 1917 exploration. He's expedition was cut short by the outbreak of the war and he left a large amount behind
The Battle of Evarts was a shoot-out between striking miners and Black Mountain guards and sheriff's deputies.
Kenvir is about three miles from Virginia and is named for the initial letters of Kentucky and Virginia.