STANAFORD, W.Va. — No marker commemorates the tragedy, few locals know of the matter, and historians are not fully in agreement about what transpired. Yet, as many as 11 people lost their lives that frigid morning in 1903 in what’s now called the "Stanaford Massacre" or the "Battle of Stanaford."
“No one even bothered to put up a marker,” says Pauline Haga, a historian renowned for her work in the region of the New River Gorge where the massacre took place.
Haga says she thinks she knows where some of the bodies of victims were interred near Stanaford, where the battle erupted, but only a handful of historians have worked to chronicle or explain the event.
Labor leader Mother Jones even turned up to visit the collection of bullet-strewn miner’s shanties where this, the final episode of the 1902 New River Coal Strike, erupted into bloodshed.
According to most sources, the battle, perhaps more accurately termed an armed raid, was engaged just before dawn when a posse operating on behalf of local coal companies attacked a miner’s camp in which a group of union organizers were sleeping.
The U.S. was rocked violently by union organizing during the rise of industry as workers fought for increased wages and safety. Similar mass killings occured in the coal industry elsewhere. Perhaps the most infamous were at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914, and at Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920.
Historian Jim Wood in his “History of Raleigh County” provides the most extensive overview of the event, which in the end involved 33 miners, 50 U.S. marshals, 125 alleged outlaws, and some 500 armed citizens.
According to Wood, Deputy Marshall Daniel Webster Cunningham had been tasked with serving injunctions on behalf of coal operators to a group of 33 miners who had marched from Quinnimont, on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, to the town of Atkinsville, which is now a section of Beckley known as East Beckley. The miners reportedly threatened him with armed resistance.
Cunningham then withdrew to Beckley, the seat of Raleigh County, and asked Sheriff Harvey Cook for a posse. He then traveled to the state capital at Charleston to assemble a group of detectives, while Cook telegraphed the governor for troops.
The governor instructed Cook to gather a posse. He summoned about 500 men to appear at the courthouse with their firearms, where they were later instructed to hold themselves ready until the afternoon or until the sheriff could come to a peaceful agreement with the miners.
Sam Burdette, an attorney with the United Mine Workers, accompanied the marshall and his officers back to Atkinsville and made arrangement to pay the bonds for the striking miners. Cook then returned to Beckley and told the members of the posse that the trouble had died out, and they were discharged.
However, the strikers had merely withdrawn from Atkinsville and returned to their encampments at Quinnimont or lingered at Stanaford, where they lodged in the homes of friends and acquaintances.
Despite the appearances of a peaceful outcome, Cunningham assembled a smaller posse of 50 special marshals on the morning of February 25, 1903, at Lanark, adjoining Stanaford, or “Stanaford City,” as the place was often known. He was accompanied by Sheriff Cook and Howard Smith, a Baldwin–Felts detective assigned to the C&O Railway.
What happened next has been reported by two sources in different ways. One is provided by a regional coal operator through a local newspaper. The other comes from a report by the United Mine Workers of America.
The article from The Fayette Journal, owned by coal operator Samuel L. Dixon, reported that 125 "outlaws" had headquartered in a schoolhouse at Stanaford City and began shooting at the approaching posse.
"[The posse] left Lanark about 6 o'clock in the morning for the strikers' camp. The mob had taken up headquarters in a school house and had sent a challenge to the officers daring them to come near to serve any papers on the peril of getting filled up with lead."
"The officers had stationed guards around the school house in the night and were aware of the mob's intentions. It is estimated there were about 125 of the outlaws in the house and they all had guns and plenty of ammunition. The officers halted a short distance from the school house, and detective Smith and two others went up to the house and called upon the party to surrender."
"For answer, the outlaws began shooting at Smith, and four bullets were put through his overcoat. One shot struck him on the finger. When the shooting started from the building the officers opened fire and for about five minutes both sides were working every gun and over a thousand shots were fired."
"The fire was too hot for the outlaw gang and about half of them rushed out of the building and surrendered. The others took to the woods where they were pursued by officers, and many of them arrested. Over 50 were arrested."
Chris Evans, a UMW official, had been dispatched by the organization to investigate the alleged killing of the three black men who had died, and was present on the day of the battle.
Evans said a coal company attorney named W. J. St. Clair had agitated to have the strikers arrested, which led Cunningham to break the agreement with the union to bond the arrested men and instead opted to proceed to Atkinsville to arrest them.
The miners at Atkinsville drove Cunningham off. Evans said he sent a report to the men to submit quietly, but that the operators who owned the telegraph and telephone lines refused to deliver it and charged that Cunningham and his deputies proceeded to Stanaford and killed the miners in their beds at night, before Evans could get the message out.
In his report, Evans said that after visiting the battlefield he found in a house occupied by a Black man named Stonewall Jackson, in which lay the dead bodies of William Dotson, William Clark, and Richard Clayton.
"We found the wife of Jackson and her four children, with eight Negroes, were in the house and that about daybreak all were awakened by shots fired into the house from the outside. This shooting took place without warning and the three colored men were found dead on the floor. Two were in their night clothes and the other one was partly dressed.
"We visited another house where Joe Hiser lay in bed mortally wounded, he being shot as he was dressing. Hiser lived with his sister and she made the statement at the inquest that she pleaded with those shooting not to kill her children, and in reply Cunningham said, 'Women and children must take care of themselves'."
Evans attested that at no point were the miners ordered to surrender until after the deputies began shooting at the occupants in the houses.
He went on to say that, "We next went to the house of Lucien Lausen [Lawson], who was considered mortally wounded[...] this man, with others, returned the fire of the posse and this is the only instance where an attempt of resistance was made by the miners..."
The Charleston Daily Gazette at Charleston provided a differing description of the raid in which the posse peformed a sneak attack in the darkness.
"It was a dramatic as well as a tragic scene, according to the story of an eye-witness who took no part in the fight but stood not far away and watched the progress and who related it to a Gazette reporter yesterday:
"'The parties wanted had been located in certain houses in the village, said he, 'and the deputy and his posse went into the camp within a few hundred yards so as to be ready to make an early morning charge before those wanted could get away. The posse was divided into five parties which marched to different sides of the town and then all closed in at the same time. It was not yet light enough to distinguish anything more that the shadowy outlines of the men when they had gotten a few yards into the town to where I was standing, go to a house, stop a moment then go in.'
"Soon afterwards, I could see other forms emerge from other houses and run toward the one into which the officers had gone. A moment after, I could see the men come from the house, then I saw the flash of fire and heard the boom of a gun, then came its answering boom, and the fight was on.'
"'From doors and windows guns were stuck out and fired as soon as stuck. Pretty soon the other four parties joined in the firing and from every side of the town came the flash of fire, the ringing of rifles and the booming of shotguns as the fight became general. Soon I could see figures of men retreating to the woods and firing as they went.
"A line formed upon a low ridge slightly above the town and began firing on a party of officers on lower ground. They were answered by a line from another ridge beyond the party in the low ground, but the range was too great, and no damage was done that could be seen. The three men killed were all in one house, and in the house six others were wounded...' "
Labor leader Mary Harris Jones, better known as "Mother Jones," visited the site the following day, and described a poigniant scene with clarity.
"I took the short trail up the hillside to Stanaford Mountain. It seemed to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror. Everything was deathly still. As I came nearer the miners’ homes, I could hear sobbing. Then I saw between the stilts that propped up a miner's shack the clay red with blood. I pushed open the door. On a mattress, wet with blood, lay a miner. His brains had been blown out while he slept. His shack was riddled with bullets.
"In five other shacks men lay dead. In one of them a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father's corpse. When the little fellow saw me, he said, 'Mother Jones, bring back my papa to me. I want to kiss him.'
"The coroner came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept; shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company."
In the end, it appears that between five and eleven men were killed in the battle. Three were killed outright, and the rest dying later. Wood cited the following deaths—
- Richard Clayton, shot in the chest
- William Dotson.
- William Clark, shot in the heart.
- L(ucien) Lawson, died 28 February of infection as a result of his wound.
- Joe Hiser, died 6 March of his wound, nine days after the battle.
- Bert Irvin, dying later in the Mckendree Hospital.
- John Winchester, dying as well in Mckendree Hospital.
A Raleigh County coroner's jury questioned the necessity of the attack, Wood wrote.
"We, the jury, find the within Dick Clayton and W. Dotson each came to his death by gunshot wounds, and cannot tell whether lawfully or unlawfully, and we further find that the within named William Clark came to his death by being feloniously shot by a body of armed men under the direction of Dan W. Cunningham, United States marshal, W. C. Thurman, W. D. George, W. M. Johnson, J. F. Burgess, C. C. Snuffer, W. T. Shumate.
"The finding of this verdict has created a grave doubt in the minds of many good citizens as to whether or not the actions of those charged with executing the process of the law acted within reasonable limits when the lives of these men above named, were taken, were justified."
Sign up for a FREE copy of West Virginia Explorer Magazine in your weekly email. Sign me up!
