[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 148 (Wednesday, September 13, 2017)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1212-E1214]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CELEBRATING THE CITY OF LYNCH'S 100TH BIRTHDAY
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HON. HAROLD ROGERS
of kentucky
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of the
centennial birthday celebration of the City of Lynch on September 16,
2017, a remarkable milestone for a historic coal mining camp in Harlan
County, Kentucky. Iinclude in the Record, an article published in the
Lexington Herald Leader on February 24, 2017, which provides a detailed
overview of our historic coal town in a story written by reporter Bill
Estep entitled, It was the world's largest company coal town. As it
turns 100, it fights to stay alive.
In 1917, U.S. Steel purchased 19,000 acres of land in Harlan County
at the base of Black Mountain, Kentucky's highest peak, to produce the
coal needed to make steel during World War I. By the 1940s, Lynch,
Kentucky was the ``largest company-owned coal town in the world,''
boasting unmatched water and sewer infrastructure in the area, a local
hospital, schools, retail stores, recreational activities and a diverse
workforce.
While our storied coal town has suffered tremendous losses over the
last century with the coal industry's decline, it hasn't terminated
their pride for the City of Lynch. The citizens have honorably
preserved the historic efforts of local workers and immigrants from
more than 30 foreign countries who tirelessly worked miles underground,
producing enough coal to power our nation for generations.
Today, the City of Lynch is embracing its heritage and working to
boost tourism to capture the historic treasures of this community that
served as the epicenter of coal production 100 years ago. I applaud the
local leaders and entrepreneurs who are reimagining the future of coal
country and working to integrate this small, rural town into the
digital economy.
Mr. Speaker, our Appalachian heritage is uniquely defined by the
sheer grit of the mountain people who are determined to not only
survive, but thrive, in our small, rural American towns. I am proud to
join the City of Lynch in celebrating its 100th birthday.
[From Lexington Herald Leader, Feb. 24, 2017]
It Was the World's Largest Company Coal Town. As It Turns 100, It
Fights To Stay Alive
(By Bill Estep)
Lynch.--The valley along Looney Creek in Harlan County was
a wooded wilderness in 1917 when U.S. Steel, hungry for coal
to make steel during World War I, bought 19,000 acres and set
about creating the largest company-owned coal town in the
world.
The company built an entire town from scratch--hundreds of
houses, stores, schools, a hotel, a hospital, a baseball
field, a fire station, water and power plants and industrial
buildings, including a machine shop and the highest-capacity
coal tipple anywhere.
Despite the buzz of work and grand intentions, some thought
the town would be a flash in the pan.
The L&N Railroad refused to extend tracks to Lynch from
Benham, a coal town about a mile away, because officials felt
the town would die after the war when demand for steel went
down, according to one history by a U.S. Steel official.
The company built its own tracks, and Lynch survived. The
town at the foot of Kentucky's highest peak, Black Mountain,
turns 100 this year.
In that century, Lynch has mirrored the history of Eastern
Kentucky as coal jobs swung up and down and families moved
out to find work during hard times.
More than half the coal jobs in Eastern Kentucky have
disappeared since a precipitous slide started in 2012. At the
end of 2016, there were fewer miners on the job in all of
Eastern Kentucky than there were at the U.S. Steel mines at
Lynch at their peak.
The town's population has declined to less than 800 from a
peak of 10,000, and a third of the houses are vacant,
according to U.S. Census figures.
Now, like the rest of the region, Lynch is looking for a
new way forward. Residents are trying to promote tourism and
small businesses to create jobs, and a study about the
possibility of merging with two nearby towns is underway.
The challenges from an anemic economy and a declining tax
base are steep, but many in Lynch have a fierce pride in the
historic town and are determined to breathe new life into it.
A committee of volunteers is working to schedule events
each month to mark the anniversary. On Jan. 1, local churches
rang their bells for 100 seconds, and in February, residents
put up red ribbons around town. The big event will be in
September, with plans for a car show, vendors, family games
and performances by several bands.
[[Page E1213]]
Residents also have set up a Facebook page where they are
posting historic photos and trivia about the town's past.
The hope is that the centennial will be a springboard for
efforts to keep Lynch from withering away.
``The city was built by coal but it can be maintained by
something else,'' said Rev. Ronnie Hampton, a retired mine
inspector who was the town's first black mayor. ``As long as
we've got breath, we won't give up.''
Coal companies built hundreds of towns in Southern
Appalachia in the early 1900s. Many were thrown together with
cookie-cutter houses, poor sanitation and few amenities.
Lynch, however, was considered a model town, with better-
built houses of varying styles; health care better than that
available to most people in the region; recreation
opportunities that included lighted tennis courts, the
baseball field, a bowling alley and dances at the hotel
ballroom; paved streets; a sewage system; and a company
commissary that was reputed to be the best department store
in Eastern Kentucky, according to historians.
Italian immigrants used sandstone quarried from the nearby
hills to build impressive public buildings.
``None of them rivaled Lynch,'' James B. Goode, a retired
community college professor who grew up in the neighboring
coal town of Benham and has studied the history of Lynch,
said of other coal towns.
The thought was that keeping miners content would enhance
production and keep down problems.
'A lot of fun here'
Lynch resident Irene Florek, who is 100, arrived in town
with her family when she was a few months old. Her father had
moved from a U.S. Steel coal town in West Virginia to work at
the new Lynch mines.
Florek lived near the baseball field and remembers frequent
activities including games and parades. One local history
recounts that the company would close off the street to the
hotel when it snowed so kids could go sledding.
``It was a lot of fun here at that time,'' Florek said.
The company history recounts milestones from Lynch's first
40 years, including a meningitis epidemic that hit the area
in early 1936. U.S. Steel banned church services and public
gatherings to try to limit the spread, and set up a temporary
hospital.
Six of the 100 Lynch residents who got sick died, but the
death rate was 80 percent or more in nearby communities,
according to the company history, which attributed the
relatively few deaths in town to the good medical care from
company doctors.
In the Depression, people relied on gardens to help get by
and the Red Cross gave out flour and other commodities, the
history said.
Lynch was a classic melting pot of white people from the
region, black people from the South and immigrants of more
than 30 nationalities. In 1921, nearly 60 percent of the
outgoing mail was to Europe, according to one history.
U.S. Steel recruited black workers from Alabama and other
Southern states who were looking for better work than
sharecropping, including some recruited from older mines in
the Birmingham area.
The company also had recruiters at Ellis Island who used
ship manifests to identify European immigrants with mining
experience that they could hire, Goode said.
The first load of coal left Lynch in November 1917. By June
of 1920, the Lynch mines employed 2,300 men and the
population of the town had already reached 5,350, according
to a company history.
``It was hustle and bustle here,'' said Mike O'Bradovich, a
first generation American whose father came to Lynch from
what became Yugoslavia and whose mother was from Germany.
O'Bradovich followed his father into the mines, working
from 1974 to 2002.
The sense of pride many in Lynch felt was rooted in
immigrants making their way in a new country, O'Bradovich
said.
``The pride started when these people were coming over,
becoming Americans,'' he said.
Generations of black residents have maintained ties to
Lynch through the Eastern Kentucky Social Club, which has
chapters around the country and sponsors a Labor Day reunion
each year, and through a homecoming to Lynch each Memorial
Day.
When a former city clerk was charged in 2009 with stealing
$137,000 from the city, leaving it strapped, the city council
appointed Hampton to steer the city through the crisis.
Hampton sent letters to Eastern Kentucky Social Club
members and former residents seeking help, which brought in
thousands in donations.
Lynch was segregated until the 1960s. Black and white
employees worked together in the mines, but black miners
could not move up to supervisory positions until winning a
lawsuit in the 1970s, and schools and entertainment were
segregated.
There was racial violence directed at black residents in
the Appalachian coalfields, especially in the early days, but
there was a relatively high degree of harmony between the
races at a personal level, historian Ron Eller wrote in his
1982 book ``Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers:
Industrialization of the American South 1880-1930.''
Whites and blacks in the mines had to rely on each other
for their safety, and there were not major differences in pay
or living conditions for miners of different races, Eller
said.
When the schools integrated in the mid-1960s, U.S. Steel
``made it seamless,'' said Dwain Morrow, whose father,
William Morrow, retired after working 40 years for the
company.
`Virtual reign of terror'
Labor relations were another matter.
Harlan County had some of the most widely reported labor
clashes in the country between the world wars. Coal operators
used control over the county's economy and politicians to
beat back organizing efforts, evicting union members from
company houses, blacklisting them from getting jobs and
paying the salaries of sheriff's deputies who intimidated
miners.
Lynch was not immune from the violence associated with
those struggles that cemented the nickname ``Bloody Harlan.''
There were shootings in Lynch, including one fight at the
bathhouse in which two men died, Goode said.
``They didn't hesitate to resort to violence,'' he said of
the union organizers and the coal companies.
U.S. Steel and other coal companies exerted authoritarian
control over employees and the economic, political and social
life in the county, John W. Hevener said in his 1978 account
of the labor battles of the 1930s, ``Which Side Are You On?''
When the United Mine Workers of America tried in 1935 to
sign up members at U.S. Coal and Coke, the U.S. Steel
division that operated Lynch, the company laid in a supply of
tear gas and extra ammunition, barred organizers and followed
union members and destroyed their literature, Hevener wrote.
A state commission later said that a ``virtual reign of
terror'' existed in the county, financed by coal operators in
collusion with public officials, and that miners had been
evicted, beaten and mistreated.
Goode said U.S. Steel eventually accepted the UMW at Lynch
in the late 1930s, deciding that the cost wouldn't be
onerous.
Pay and benefits for miners improved under the union, said
William Morrow, 94, who lied about his age to go to work for
U.S. Steel at 16.
``It made it better,'' Morrow said.
By the late 1950s, mechanization had eliminated many
miners' jobs and railroads and factories switched to other
fuel sources, reducing demand for coal.
Coal production hit a 50-year-low in Harlan County in 1960,
and the county's population dropped by nearly half between
1950 and 1970 as people left to find work, according to
Census figures.
U.S. Steel and other companies, including International
Harvester at neighboring Benham, decided it was too costly to
maintain company-owned towns. They tore down many houses,
sold others to residents, turned over schools to county
districts and gave offices and other buildings to the towns,
keeping only their mining operations.
U.S. Steel eventually ended its involvement in Lynch after
more than six decades, selling its mines to Arch Coal in
1984.
These days, the city is living month to month financially
and operates in the red at times, said Mayor John Adams.
``Getting by--that would be optimistic,'' Adams said.
Arch stopped mining around town in the late 1980s, cutting
a key source of revenue for the city from selling water to
the mines.
Adams said the city needs more employees but can't afford
to hire. When both of its water-plant operators quit in
January, the mayor pressed his sons into service to keep the
plant going.
Untapped potential
But residents say Lynch also has assets to develop its
tourism economy, including the beauty of the mountains, a
fascinating history and its coal-camp houses and buildings.
Some of the original buildings in town are still in use,
such as the hospital and a building that was a bank and post
office, which now holds City Hall.
Kitty Dougoud, administrator of the Kentucky Main Street
Program at the Kentucky Heritage Council, said she was not
aware of a more intact coal town.
``The potential is there,'' Dougoud said.
Neighboring Benham is home to the Kentucky Coal Museum in
the renovated coal-company commissary and other historic
buildings, including the School House Inn, which was a high
school for decades beginning in the 1920s but was converted
to a hotel.
Cumberland, Benham and Lynch have been designated as trail
towns. They are working to develop hiking and horse trails,
and Lynch has started work on a campground.
The city received a grant to renovate the old coal-camp
fire station, which now houses Fire House Gifts and Crafts,
and a Christian service organization called Meridzo Center
Ministries financed the renovation of a building that housed
a popular restaurant in the 1920s across from the portal of a
mine in the center of town. The Lamp House Coffee shop is in
the building now.
There has been interest for years in restoring more of the
town's old stone buildings, but not enough money to match the
interest.
[[Page E1214]]
The town did receive financing to create a unique
attraction at the Portal 31 exhibition mine. Visitors tour a
restored section of an underground mine where workers
produced more than 100 million tons of coal from 1917 to the
early 1960s.
Recordings and animatronic displays tell the story of
mining and the town over decades, covering technology, safety
concerns, union organizing, and the rise and fall of Lynch.
`Here to help people'
Residents say Meridzo also is a key resource for the town.
In addition to renovating the building for the coffee shop,
the ministry operates a convenience store, a gym, a
veterinary clinic, retreat centers and a stable in Harlan and
Letcher counties.
Meridzo sees its mission as helping people with practical
needs, including jobs, and in the process share the Gospel of
Christ, said Lonnie Riley, who founded the ministry with his
wife, Belinda, in 1999.
``We're here to help people,'' Riley said.
Meridzo is working to recruit a chiropractor, and has
started a facility to grow shiitake mushrooms in sections of
hardwood logs in the old bathhouse where miners cleaned up
before going home.
There also is an effort underway to develop a customer-
service center to provide jobs locally.
Betsy Shirey, who is developing the project, said her idea
is a center where employees would field telephone calls and
emails for other companies, and could provide other services,
such as bookkeeping and marketing.
Shirey works for Humana, but after visiting Lynch on
mission trips coordinated by Meridzo, she felt a spiritual
calling to try to bring jobs to the area.
She can do her job from home, so she bought a house in
Lynch and moved from Louisville.
Shirey said the lack of jobs in the area has helped create
an attitude of entrenched hopelessness for many people.
``We've got to build up some infrastructure of meaningful
work for people,'' Shirey said.
Merger ahead?
Some think merging services for Lynch, Benham and
Cumberland--or even merging local governments--would put all
three on better footing.
The three lie end to end over a space of a few miles and
have been known as the Tri-Cities for decades, but grew up as
distinct places, with their own schools and competing sports
teams, and have always maintained separate city services.
With all three stretched thin, however, their councils
agreed to a merger study proposed by the Tri-City Chamber of
Commerce, which said in its application for a grant that with
declining populations and tax bases, the three towns ``have
struggled mightily in their efforts to maintain basic
services to their citizens.''
The study will focus on how the towns could form one
government, how services could be combined, potential savings
and how layoffs would be handled if needed.
W. Bruce Ayers, former president of Southeast Community and
Technical College in Cumberland and head of the chamber, said
many members believe merger is needed.
A merger would reduce costs, increase efficiency and give
the unified city a better shot at government grants, Ayers
said.
``I really fear for their existence unless they are willing
to come together and work as one,'' Ayers said.
It will probably be next year before the study is done and
the towns have to decide on merging.
Even if they do, Lynch won't lose its identity in its
second century, said Mary Jo O'Bradovich, who with her
husband Mike is involved in the centennial committee.
``After 100 years, I don't think anyone is going to say, `I
am from the Tri-Cities,' '' she said. ``Lynch will be
Lynch.''
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