STANAFORD, W.Va. — A quiet residential community outside the city of Beckley, perhaps best known for its scenic views of the Piney Creek Gorge, Stanaford today gives little hint of the violence that once stained its soil.
More than a century ago, on February 25, 1903, this village was the site of one of the earliest armed clashes in the West Virginia Mine Wars. The Battle of Stanaford—sometimes remembered as the Stanaford City Massacre—was the violent conclusion of the 1902 New River coal strike.
Yet despite its role in labor history, the event has faded into obscurity. No roadside marker commemorates the dead. No exhibit tells visitors about the miners who fell there or about the extraordinary tensions between coal companies, courts, and working families.
Even among local history groups, the massacre remains strangely overlooked. The silence surrounding Stanaford contrasts sharply with the attention given to later, more famous confrontations in the Coal Wars, such as the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike in 1912 or the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921
To understand why Stanaford matters, one must return to the winter of 1903, when labor unrest, corporate power, and armed violence converged in a small Appalachian town.
The Strike and the Prelude to Violence
The conflict at Stanaford originated from the New River coal strike of 1902, which was part of a broader wave of unrest among Appalachian miners. In Fayette County, a group of thirty-three miners marched from Quinnimont to Atkinsville, now part of East Beckley, determined to press their demands for union recognition and improved working conditions.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Daniel Webster Cunningham had been tasked with enforcing federal injunctions obtained by coal operators. These court orders sought to curtail union activity and bar strikers from interfering with mine operations. When Cunningham attempted to serve the injunctions, he encountered resistance. The miners reportedly threatened him with armed force.
Cunningham retreated to Beckley and appealed to Raleigh County Sheriff Harvey Cook for assistance. Cook, unsure of the scale of the unrest, telegraphed Governor Albert B. White for troops. The governor declined to send the militia, instead instructing Cook to summon a posse of armed citizens. Within hours, some 500 men assembled at the county courthouse in Beckley.
But tensions appeared to ease. With Sam Burdette, the attorney for the United Mine Workers of America, acting as mediator, Cunningham and his deputies arranged arraignments and secured bonds for the accused miners. Sheriff Cook dismissed his massive citizen posse, announcing the “trouble had died out.”
In reality, the strikers had only shifted locations. They withdrew to their encampments near Quinnimont and to homes of sympathizers in nearby communities, including the village of Stanaford.
On February 25, Cunningham regrouped, assembling a new posse of 50 special marshals at Lanark. Sheriff Cook joined him, as did Howard Smith, a Baldwin–Felts detective attached to the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. It was this armed group that marched on Stanaford at dawn.
Conflicting Accounts of the Battle
What happened next has been disputed ever since and may never be resolved. In fact, no one has documented with assurance where the Battle of Stanaford took place.
The Fayette Journal, then owned by coal baron Sam Dixon, carried an account of the Battle of Stanaford sympathetic to the posse. According to the paper, the miners had fortified a schoolhouse and brazenly challenged officers to approach “at the peril of getting filled up with lead.”
Detective Smith and others reportedly called upon the miners to surrender, but were met with gunfire. The paper claimed Smith’s coat was pierced by four bullets, one striking his finger. The posse returned fire, and for five minutes “every gun” was engaged, with “over a thousand shots” exchanged. In this telling, some miners fled, others surrendered, and more than fifty were arrested.
But the Charleston Daily Gazette, citing an eyewitness, described a very different scene. Its informant watched as Cunningham’s men crept into Stanaford in the gray half-light, dividing into five groups to encircle the village. Shots erupted after deputies entered certain houses, and soon “from doors and windows guns were stuck out and fired as soon as stuck.”
The fighting spread, according to the gazette, with volleys flashing from ridges above the town. Ultimately, three men were killed in a single house, six others were wounded, and the miners retreated into the woods under fire.
The union’s own investigation, led by Chris Evans, painted the darkest picture of the Battle of Stanaford. Evans alleged that Cunningham and his deputies violated their agreement with the union, ignored messages urging the miners to submit peacefully, and instead staged a nighttime raid. He charged that telegraph lines, controlled by coal operators, had been used to suppress communications that might have prevented bloodshed.
Evans visited the scene himself. In the home of Stonewall Jackson, a Black miner, he found three bodies—William Dotson, William Clark, and Richard Clayton. According to Evans, the men were shot in their beds without warning. Two were still in their nightclothes.
Evans recorded testimony from Jackson’s wife, who said her pleas for mercy were dismissed by Cunningham himself with the chilling words: “Women and children must take care of themselves.”
Elsewhere, Evans found Joe Hiser, mortally wounded while dressing. At the home of Lucien Lawson, he discovered another miner gravely injured after returning fire. Only in Lawson’s case, Evans said, had any resistance been offered.
Mother Jones and the Aftermath
Perhaps the most searing account of the Battle of Stanaford came from Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, the fiery labor organizer who arrived in Stanaford soon after the shooting. In her autobiography, she recalled climbing the hillside trail to find shacks riddled with bullets, floors soaked with blood, and children weeping over their fathers’ corpses.
“I pushed open the door. On a mattress, wet with blood, lay a miner. His brains had been blown out while he slept,” she wrote. In another shack, a small boy clung to his mother, begging Jones to “bring back my papa to me.”
The coroner’s jury identified some of the dead and questioned the necessity of the posse’s actions. The victims included Richard Clayton, William Dotson, and William Clark—killed outright—while others lingered in agony for days before dying—Lawson, Hiser, Bert Irvin, and John Winchester.
In a striking verdict, the jury found that William Clark had been “feloniously shot by a body of armed men under the direction of Dan W. Cunningham.” Yet despite this, Federal Judge B. F. Keller later exonerated the posse, ruling they were acting within their authority to arrest men indicted by a federal grand jury.
Between five and eleven miners lost their lives at Stanaford, depending on the source. Many more were arrested. For the coal companies, the strike was broken. For the miners, the episode was another bloody chapter in a long struggle for dignity.
A Turning Point in the Coal Wars
The Battle of Stanaford was not the largest or most famous clash in West Virginia’s labor history, but it was among the first. It exposed patterns that would repeat throughout the coming decades—the use of federal injunctions against union activity, the deployment of Baldwin–Felts detectives alongside law enforcement, the suppression of communication by coal operators, and the starkly different portrayals of events in company-owned versus independent newspapers.
It also revealed the racial dimension of the conflict. The three men killed in Jackson’s home were African American. Their deaths underscored the multiracial composition of the mining workforce and the shared dangers faced by Black and White miners alike when they stood against the coal companies.
Most importantly, the Battle of Stanaford foreshadowed the escalating violence that would culminate in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912–13, the Matewan Massacre of 1920, and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921—the largest armed uprising in U.S. labor history.
The Silence That Followed
Given this significance, the absence of public memory at Stanaford is striking. While Blair Mountain is today protected as a historic site, and Matewan commemorated with museums and markers, Stanaford remains unmarked.
Visitors to the area will find no plaque to honor the dead miners. Local history groups, which are otherwise proud of their West Virginia heritage, never include the massacre in their tours or exhibits. Even many residents are unaware that a bloody clash once unfolded on their doorsteps.
In fact, no one has determined with certainty where the battle took place. The location of Stanaford has been mapped at two locales over time. Additionally, the location of "Stanaford City" is not known to appear on any map. This is not atypical, as mines and the communities associated with them often relocated as coal seams were depleted.
This silence may be partly explained by the event’s ambiguity. With conflicting reports and a federal court’s exoneration of the posse, Stanaford has often been portrayed as murky, its victims less easily celebrated than the more clear-cut martyrs of later labor struggles. Company influence over local institutions also helped bury uncomfortable memories.
But for labor historians, the absence of commemoration is itself telling. It reveals how power, memory, and silence intersect in the history of West Virginia. The miners who died in the Battle of Stanaford were among the first casualties in a war that would shape the very fabric of West Virginia. Their story deserves to be remembered.
Remembering the Battle of Stanaford
Scholars like the late Lois C. McLean, who had written about the episode, stressed its importance as a prelude to the Mine Wars. "The events of February 1903 highlight both the brutality of the coalfields and the resilience of miners who continued to organize despite fear of violent reprisal," she wrote in a discussion of the event.
For descendants of the miners, the massacre is a reminder that their ancestors fought—and sometimes died—for the rights workers later came to take for granted: the eight-hour day, safety standards, collective bargaining.
The absence of markers at Stanaford is, in many ways, a measure of how contested the past remains in West Virginia. To commemorate the dead miners would be to acknowledge the violence of coal company rule, the complicity of law enforcement, and the sacrifices of union men. For some, that history still cuts too close.
Yet as Mother Jones observed, the grief of the families was undeniable. The blood on the floorboards, the bullet holes in the shacks, the child’s plea to “bring back my papa”—these are the traces of history that cannot be erased, even if they are ignored.
Conclusion
The Battle of Stanaford was smaller in scale compared to Blair Mountain, but it was no less significant. It was an early clash that revealed the combustible mix of labor activism, corporate power, and armed repression in the coalfields. It was a massacre in which both Black and White miners lost their lives. And it was an episode that, shamefully, remains largely unrecognized.
As the 21st century unfolds, historians and local communities alike face a choice: to continue overlooking the Battle of Stanaford, or to finally confront its place in America’s labor history. To do the latter would be to honor not only the dead of 1903, but all those who struggled in the long and bloody road toward workers’ rights.
Until then, the hills above Stanaford remain silent, their secret guarded by the trees. But beneath the quiet lies the memory of gunfire, of shattered homes, and of miners who paid the ultimate price for daring to strike.
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