Frans H. Doppen - Richard L. Davis and the Color Line in Ohio Coal: A Hocking Valley Mine Labor Organizer, 1862-1900

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN STUDIES

1Memoirs of Grassy Creek: Growing Up in the Mountains on the VirginiaNorth Carolina Line. Zetta Barker Hamby. 1998

2The Pond Mountain Chronicle: Self-Portrait of a Southern Appalachian Community. Edited by Leland R. Cooper and Mary Lee Cooper. 1998

3Traditional Musicians of the Central Blue Ridge: Old Time, Early Country, Folk and Bluegrass Label Recording Artists, with Discographies. Marty McGee. 2000

4W.R. Trivett, Appalachian Pictureman: Photographs of a Bygone Time. Ralph E. Lentz II. 2001

5The People of the New River: Oral Histories from the Ashe, Alleghany and Watauga Counties of North Carolina. Edited by Leland R. Cooper and Mary Lee Cooper. 2001

6John Fox, Jr., Appalachian Author. Bill York. 2003

7The Thistle and the Brier: Historical Links and Cultural Parallels Between Scotland and Appalachia. Richard Blaustein. 2003

8Tales from Sacred Wind: Coming of Age in Appalachia. The Cratis Williams Chronicles. Cratis D. Williams. Edited by David Cratis Williams and Patricia D. Beaver. 2003

9Willard Gayheart, Appalachian Artist. Willard Gayheart and Donia S. Eley. 2003

10The Forest City Lynching of 1900: Populism, Racism, and White Supremacy in Rutherford County, North Carolina. J. Timothy Cole. 2003

11The Brevard Rosenwald School: Black Education and Community Building in a Southern Appalachian Town, 19201966. Betty J. Reed. 2004

12The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music. Edited by Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson. 2005

13Community and Change in the North Carolina Mountains: Oral Histories and Profiles of People from Western Watauga County. Compiled by Nannie Greene and Catherine Stokes Sheppard. 2006

14Ashe County: A History; A New Edition. Arthur Lloyd Fletcher. 2009 [2006]

15The New River Controversy; A New Edition. Thomas J. Schoenbaum. Epilogue by R. Seth Woodard. 2007

16The Blue Ridge Parkway by Foot: A Park Rangers Memoir. Tim Pegram. 2007

17James Still: Critical Essays on the Dean of Appalachian Literature. Edited by Ted Olson and Kathy H. Olson. 2008

18Owsley County, Kentucky, and the Perpetuation of Poverty. John R. Burch, Jr. 2008

19Asheville: A History. Nan K. Chase. 2007

20Southern Appalachian Poetry: An Anthology of Works by 37 Poets. Edited by Marita Garin. 2008

21Ball, Bat and Bitumen: A History of Coalfield Baseball in the Appalachian South. L.M. Sutter. 2009

22The Frontier Nursing Service: Americas First Rural Nurse-Midwife Service and School. Marie Bartlett. 2009

23James Still in Interviews, Oral Histories and Memoirs. Edited by Ted Olson. 2009

24The Millstone Quarries of Powell County, Kentucky. Charles D. Hockensmith. 2009

25The Bibliography of Appalachia: More Than 4,700 Books, Articles, Monographs and Dissertations, Topically Arranged and Indexed. Compiled by John R. Burch, Jr. 2009

26Appalachian Childrens Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. Compiled by Roberta Teague Herrin and Sheila Quinn Oliver. 2010

27Southern Appalachian Storytellers: Interviews with Sixteen Keepersof the Oral Tradition. Edited by Saundra Gerrell Kelley. 2010

28Southern West Virginia and the Struggle for Modernity. Christopher Dorsey. 2011

29George Scarbrough, Appalachian Poet: A Biographical and Literary Study with Unpublished Writings. Randy Mackin. 2011

30The Water-Powered Mills of Floyd County, Virginia: Illustrated Histories, 17702010. Franklin F. Webb and Ricky L. Cox. 2012

31School Segregation in Western North Carolina: A History, 1860s1970s. Betty Jamerson Reed. 2011

32The Ravenscroft School in Asheville: A History of the Institution and Its People and Buildings. Dale Wayne Slusser. 2014

33The Ore Knob Mine Murders: The Crimes, the Investigation and the Trials. Rose M. Haynes. 2013

34New Art of Willard Gayheart. Willard Gayheart and Donia S. Eley. 2014

35Public Health in Appalachia: Essays from the Clinic and the Field. Edited by Wendy Welch. 2014

36The Rhetoric of Appalachian Identity. Todd Snyder. 2014

37African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia: A History, 19001965. Phoebe Ann Pollitt. 2015

38A Hospital for Ashe County: Four Generations of Appalachian Community Health Care. Janet C. Pittard. 2015

39Dwight Diller: West Virginia Mountain Musician. Lewis M. Stern. 2016

40The Brown Mountain Lights: History, Science and Human Nature Explain an Appalachian Mystery. Wade Edward Speer. 2016

41Richard L. Davis and the Color Line in Ohio Coal: A Hocking Valley Mine Labor Organizer, 18621900. Frans H. Doppen. 2016

42The Silent Appalachian: Wordless Mountaineers in Fiction, Film and Television. Vicki Collins. 2017

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN STUDIES,

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2667-3

2016 Frans H. Doppen. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: top pickaxes 2016 iStock; inset Richard L. Davis, National Executive Board, United Mine Workers of America, 1897 (courtesy Ronald L. Lewis); background photograph of Mine #268 tipple in Rendville, Ohio (courtesy Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archives)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

This book is about the remarkable life of Richard L. Davis. Born in Virginia, he spent most of his adult life in Rendville, a community located on Sunday Creek in the Hocking Valley of southeast Ohio. Here, in a microregion known as the Little Cities of Black Diamonds, which encompasses Athens, Hocking, Perry and Morgan counties, Davis became an ardent mine labor organizer, most notably among his colored brothers. Soon active in the nascent mine labor movement, he rose to prominence by being twice elected to serve on the National Executive Board of the United Mine Workers of America. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, his was a regular voice in letters to the editor. In this book I briefly review prior research that has been conducted on Richard L. Davis after which I proceed to chronicle his life as much as possible in his own voice and those of his contemporaries. There are many lessons to be learned from Davis life that hold meaning for us today. I leave it up to you, the reader, until the final chapter to draw your own conclusions and analogies from his letters and experiences. It is my sincere hope his letters will inspire you as much as they have inspired me and those I have met along the way while conducting the research for and writing this book.

The following is the outcome of a serendipitous encounter I had when exploring southeast Ohio shortly after accepting a faculty position in what is now the Patton College of Education at Ohio University in Athens. During my 19 years as a middle and high school social studies teacher in north central Florida, I came to appreciate the importance of knowing the history of ones local school community. I organized field trips for my students to nearby small towns and engaged local historians to conduct walking tours to share their towns history. I quickly learned that my students loved the experience. Rather than learning history out of one of the many generic textbooks, they loved being able to make connections that had personal meaning to them. I took them to obscure and often largely forgotten cemeteries to visit not only, for example, the grave marker in Rochelle of Madison Starke Perry, Floridas fourth governor who led the state into the Confederacy, but also unknown markers of individuals who had lived in the area, including soldiers from various wars referenced in their history textbooks and early immigrants to northern Florida from the Carolinas. Ill never forget when one of my students discovered a stone marker overgrown with grass only to find out that a young woman had been buried there in the late eighteenth century. As a result, as a social studies teacher, I have made it my business to emphasize to student teachers the importance of getting to know the local school community in which their students live.