The West Virginia Mine Wars

This day will slip by quietly in the little town of Honea Path.

The protest was part of a general strike called by the National Textile Workers Union at mills throughout the East Coast to call attention to low pay and poor working conditions. Some 300 people gathered outside Chiquola Mill as just-deputized townspeople and mill workers held shotguns, rifles and pistols.

Dan Beacham, the mill superintendent, also had a World War I machine gun mounted to the roof of the four-story mill. Picker sticks were passed by anti-union workers to like-minded workers outside, according to a history of the uprising written by Beacham’s grandson, Frank Beacham.

A fight broke out. Then the shooting started.

From inside the mill, from those on the ground. The machine gun jammed. Three minutes later, seven men were dead, all shot in the back while they were trying to run away, and 30 wounded. The day became known as Bloody Thursday.

Meyers said he had asked his mother, Mary Lollis Meyers, about the strike dozens and dozens of times during his lifetime, and each time she would turn him away. She refused to talk about it. She was a young girl then, and her father was the overseer in the cloth room.

It wasn’t until she was on her deathbed about a decade ago that she recounted the details of that day, Meyers said. When the shooting started, she was in the backyard garden. Her father gathered the family inside the house, then sent them on the P&L Railroad to Greenville to wait out the turmoil.

“He went up there (to the mill) and turned over the ones who were shot with his cane so their noses wouldn’t be flat,” Meyers said.

His grandfather joined his family in Greenville, but as a lay preacher was called back to Honea Path to help with the funerals.

“That’s the only time she opened up to me about it,” Meyers said. And that’s all she would say.

Those who were involved in the union were either fired and kicked out of their mill housing or required to promise they would never become involved in union organizing again and that they would never talk about it.

Meyers, who was for a time a plant manager in Calhoun Falls, remembers bringing up the subject of unions at Sunday dinner one day. His mother said, “You shut your mouth. We don’t talk about that around this table.”

Frank Beacham said he has been working since the 1990s to get townspeople to remember and to talk about it. He had known his grandfather was involved in a union protest, but it wasn’t until then that he learned his grandfather had lied about not being at the mill that day and that his grandfather had, in fact, given the order to shoot.

Beacham, a journalist, filmmaker and producer who grew up in Honea Path but lives in New York City, wrote about the protest, his discovery and its aftermath in “Mill Town Murder,” an e-book.

Beacham learned the truth after seeing a documentary by a New York University professor and a student about the strikes of 1934. Beacham contacted one of the women interviewed, Sue Cannon Hill, whose father, Claude Cannon, was one of the seven shot to death.

In a letter, Beacham apologized for what his grandfather had done. Beacham met Hill several weeks later. She told him about the hardships her family endured. That her mother went back to work in the mill, but avoided walking on the sidewalk where her husband had been gunned down.

Beacham’s mother was a history teacher, his father had been in the textile business. Beacham could not understand why no one had told him what his grandfather had done. He needed to made amends in some way. He took part in the installation and dedication of a granite monument in Dogwood Park to honor the slain textile workers on Memorial Day 1995.

That was the last public ceremony to commemorate the history that took place on this day.

“It upsets me that they are still trying to ignore this,” Beacham said Friday. “It’s an interesting thing to me that they still don’t want this story told.”

He’s doing what he can to change that. He made an audio tape about the events, and included some of his original interviews he conducted for his book. He also will appear in a panel discussion about the uprising at 11 a.m. Nov. 22 at the Hughes Main Library.

In addition, SC ETV is airing the original documentary made by George Stoney and Judith Helfand, “The Uprising of ’34.” Several showings are planned. The next is at 3 a.m. Sunday.

The mill, which opened in 1903, has been closed since 2003. For a time, the building was considered for a textile museum, not just to tell the story of the strike but also to celebrate the state’s textile history. The idea was not embraced by townspeople.

Instead, the property was bought by a North Carolina company. Demolition has been under way since 2008. Still, bricks and rubbish remain on the site. A recent temblor brought down one of the remaining walls.

Meyers said the property owner is still pursuing the construction of a nursing home. He was told last week the certificate of need had been issued and the site cleanup would be under way soon.

Meyers said the town museum doesn’t have much about the strike, a couple of issues of newspapers is about it. He heard from a woman in her 90s who was given a bullet by one of the militia members.

“She says she’ll give it to me,” he said.

He’d like to have more artifacts.

Perhaps one day, Meyers said, there will be a room to show others what happened on that Thursday in September.