The Marion Manufacturing Plant, original site of the Marion Massacre, which has been in the process of being demolished for several years now.
In 1929, national guardsmen, local sheriffs, and state-backed union busters opened fire on striking workers in the small Appalachian town of Marion, NC, massacring six strikers and injuring many more. No one was held legally accountable. They were killed for demanding the shortening of their work week from 60 to 55 hours. They were paid less than $700 dollars a year; less than $10,000 today, adjusting for inflation.
As the sun rose on the morning of Oct. 2, 1929, hundreds of picketing mill workers in Marion, N.C., found themselves in a deadly standoff with law enforcement. And when the tear gas and fog at the gates of Marion Manufacturing had cleared, three workers were dead, three more were fatally injured and dozens of others were seriously wounded.
Sheriff Oscar Adkins later testified that the strikers had opened fire first, although no guns were found on any of them. Adkins and his 11 deputies — seven of whom were actually anti-union employees who’d been sworn in only moments before the shootings — were all acquitted. Meanwhile, the leaders of the protest and many of their fellow workers were fired, evicted from their company-owned homes and, in some cases, ostracized to the point that they were forced to leave town.
The bloody morning capped a tumultuous year of protests by newly unionized employees pushing for better working conditions. A dramatic climax to a drawn-out conflict that pitted neighbor against neighbor, it marked the beginning of the end for the area’s nascent labor movement. That same year, a massive textile strike in Gastonia, N.C., was also violently put down.
The clashes in Marion attracted considerable regional and national media attention at the time, including a pamphlet by acclaimed author Sinclair Lewis titled Cheap and Contented Labor. But “His perspective was very jaded — very much from the outside,” says Western North Carolina native Kim Clark, whose grandfather, Roy Price, was an early organizer at the plant and first president of its United Textile Workers chapter.
Soon, however, the complex circumstances surrounding the protests at Marion Manufacturing and the neighboring Clinchfield Manufacturing Co. retreated into mystery, as participants on all sides refused to talk about what had happened.
“I think, almost in mountain shame, they just shut the door on it,” says Clark, a former WNCW radio host who produced an audio documentary on the strikes for the station in 2005. It was later incorporated into a broader oral-history series funded by a grant from the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area.
After the union’s defeat, Price was blackballed by the community, forcing him to flee to Detroit, an area friendlier toward organized labor. Eventually, he found his way back to Asheville, but like many others involved, Price never spoke of his role in the conflict, even to his own children, Clark reports. It was only after her grandfather died that family members discovered a trunk filled with old union documents, membership pins and books.
The violence, she speculates, created a kind of mass post-traumatic stress disorder that rippled through the community’s collective unconscious.
“The day after the shootings took place, all the people that were out there in front of the mill striking — they saw it happen — they didn’t know what else to do, and they just filed back into the mill and went back to work, all but 100 of them,” Clark explains. “The people in McDowell County, once this tragedy happened, it’s like they shut the lid on a box, and they locked it, and that’s it. … It’s like this whole thing has been frozen in time. … I think one of the big reasons is the community has been in some kind of silent solidarity.”…
Throughout the 1990s, amateur author and historian Mike Lawing — a descendant of several strikers as well as one of the accused deputies — went door to door in Marion trying to unearth residents’ stories.
Despite encountering “people who would not talk to me unless I absolutely promised not to use their name, who would tell me, ‘I don’t want my wife to know I had anything to do with this; I don’t want my children to know anything about it,’” Lawing labored on, self-publishing The Marion Massacre in 2004. Until now, the 98-page book was considered the most authoritative history of these painful events.
But just a few weeks ago, Asheville resident Mike Blankenship unveiled a new piece of the puzzle: a comprehensive scrapbook of contemporary news articles and photos, which longtime McDowell historian Anne Swann calls “a treasure trove of information that we have not seen before.”
Blankenship says it was the recent pro-labor rallies in Wisconsin that inspired him to bring the scrapbook out of storage.
“I turn on the radio and hear this report about the governor of Wisconsin wanting to call out the National Guard, and I’m thinking, ‘Holy sh*t — I didn’t think they did that anymore. I thought that was 1920s stuff,’” he explains. “We have to look at history, or else we’re in trouble. Especially right now.”…
Meanwhile, just down the road from the McDowell County Library, the massive old Marion Manufacturing building is being taken down, brick by brick.
After numerous private and public attempts to preserve the sprawling historic structure failed, a painstaking demolition began last September and is expected to continue through this summer. Working from the inside out, the current owner is salvaging as much of the old factory’s materials as possible: bricks, stained-glass windows, piping and more.
Clark believes the protracted dismantling is proving cathartic for residents of this small mountain town. “That tragedy and that trauma — it’s kind of haunted Marion, in a way,” she says. “I think it’s not an accident that this history is coming to the fore at the very time that building is being torn down.
Even so many years later, the old mill still holds secrets, notes Holda. When she found out it was going to be demolished, she donned a headlamp and scoured the dark depths, uncovering assorted artifacts that she was able to secure for the library. Moldy ledgers seem to indicate that as early as 1921, the business had a budget of more than $1.3 million per year.
“That’s unreal to think about that kind of money being brought in back then,” she observes.
Workers weren’t sharing the benefits, however. In 1929, they made about $13 a week — minus the cost of company-provided housing and whatever they were charged at the company store. Yet the strikers’ main demand that year wasn’t money but whittling down their work week from 60 hours to 55. Long days and low pay were standard practice at Southern mills, but even so, the Marion plant was said to have some of the worst working conditions in the region, says Blankenship.
Partridge berry (Mitchella repens) is a creeping, evergreen vine whose delicate, trailing stems repeatedly branch and take root in the rich humus to form a beautiful, deep-green carpet of leaves between fallen logs and snaking tree roots and along sandy stream banks. A lover of full to part shade and dry to moist, acidic soil, this earth-hugging perennial produces opposing pairs of small, rounded leaves along the lengths of its slender, somewhat woody stems; the foliage retains a rich, deep green appearance through the worst of the winter season, making it a go-to ground cover for native plant gardeners. In late spring to early summer, the vines erupt in pairs of radiant white, trumpet-shaped flowers, which despite their tiny sizes collectively form one of the loveliest wildflower shows of the Appalachian forest. Bright red berries follow the flowers in the fall and provide a valuable food source for birds throughout the winter. The berries, which persist through the following spring, are edible but with no distinctive flavor. Native American women ate the berries and made an extract from the leaves to prevent miscarriage and premature birth, which resulted in the plant’s other common – and nowadays derogatory – name, squaw vine.
Autumn Berries, Volume 9: Northern Spicebush. Of all the berry-producing shrubs of Appalachia, few are as beautiful and desirable as northern spicebush (Lindera benzoin). A member of the laurel (Lauraceae) family, this gracefully-mounded, perennial shrub grows in the shady understory of rich, damp woods, where it reaches a height of up to twelve feet. In the spring, northern spicebush produces dense clusters of yellow flowers on its rangy stems, giving it the appearance of forsythia. The flowers are replaced by green berries in the summer, which turn a deep, rich red
in the fall. They remind me a bit of coffee beans. The berries form a striking contrast to the plant’s alternate, ovate leaves, which turn a lovely yellow-gold from September through October. Northern spicebush is so named because of the aromatic scent of of the plant’s leaves, bark, and berries. Native Americans and wild plant gatherers have long dried and boiled the leaves to make an herbal tea to cure fevers, although its flavor is powerful and warm enough to be enjoyed as a culinary tea. In addition, the berries can be crushed and used as a spice for baked goods – the flavor is similar to allspice. The plant is sometimes referred to as wild allspice for this reason. The berries linger into winter but rarely last long due to their popularity with song and game birds.
I used to think my daddy was a black man With script enough to buy the company store But now he goes to town with empty pockets And his face is white as a February snow
I was born and raised at the mouth of hazard holler The coal cars rolled and rumbled past my door But now they stand in a rusty row all empty Because the L&N don’t stop here anymore
The line here where Jean says she “used to think my daddy was a black man” because he was covered in coal dust might sound like some sort of racist blackface-type reference today, but the implications to the line in the context in which she originally sang it make it really incredibly progressive. Jean Ritchie is a white woman in Eastern Kentucky comparing her father to a black man- comparing the plight of exploited Appalachians with the even greater plight of Black Americans- in the year 1965. This line would have been extremely controversial at the time and place, not as a racist line, but as an explicitly anti-racist line signaling solidarity between poor whites and black people.
Many younger Appalachians in the 1960′s were swept up in the rising left-wing protests and student movements of the time (it still shows today, with a significant number of retired hippies residing in various pockets around Appalachia today). There was a rekindled spark of class consciousness among young Appalachians at the time that led many towards explicitly anti-racist progressive politics. Some most notably founded the Young Patriots Organization that allied with the Black Panthers and joined Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition; around the same time, other young Appalachians played a significant role in MLK’s Poor People’s Movement. Jean Ritchie, in her 40′s at the time, was one of these Appalachians: she wrote songs about poverty and environmentalism while performing alongside leftist folk icons like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Ritchie had to release this and other political songs under a pseudonym (Than Hall, after her maternal grandfather, Johnathan Hall) to avoid upsetting her apolitical mother, and because she “felt that they would be better received in those days if they came from a man.”
Looking at Appalachia is a cool, collaborative photo project. And they’re expanding to include regional literature as well! i’m excited to be the first poem featured in their Call and Response section.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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