Collections

One digital copy of a map of Mine No. 21 of the Preston Division of the Industrial Collieries Corporation, a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel. The mine was located in the Upper Freeport coal seam within Monongalia County, West Virginia. This mine supplied coal to the Baltimore shipyards during World War II. The railroad leading out from this mine has been converted into the Deckers Creek Rail-Trail.

Correspondence, legal papers, photographs, and printed materials of John W. Mason (1842-1917). Mason was a circuit court and state Supreme Court judge, member of the Virginia State Debt Commission, and commissioner of Internal Revenue. The general correspondence contains personal and business letters, as well as manuscript speeches, notebooks, and reports. The period while Mason was circuit judge is particularly sparse. Also includes Internal Revenue correspondence consisting of about 8,500 pages in letter press copy books. Roughly half of the collection is devoted to his legal papers and printed materials concerning law in general. Subjects include early development of the Republican Party in West Virginia; political campaigns in West Virginia from 1870-1916; Monongalia Academy; industrial development; Internal Revenue Service (1889-1893); the Virginia Debt question; early banking development in Grafton; and the development of coal companies, particularly around Fairmont. Correspondents include Arthur I. Boreman, A.W. Campbell, Stephen B. Elkins, Benjamin Harrison, Francis H. Pierpont, and others.

Typescript drafts and research materials--including photocopies of interview transcripts, court documents, and printed materials--for Lon Savage's book, Thunder in the Mountains: the West Virginia Mine War, 1920-21.

Map shows Pocahontas Coal Field, with index of mines and their owners. Map is bordered by images of the mines listed on the map.

Map shows land owned by the Guyandot Coal Land Association in the Guyandot basin, in West Virginia. It displays some railroads and openings in coal beds.

Much of this collection documents the efforts of Marian McQuade as the founder of Grandparents Day including information she collected on centenarians of West Virginia. There are also miscellaneous publications and artifacts belonging to her husband, Joseph McQuade, that pertain to coal mining.

This collection contains three envelopes that included several different mining companies stock certificates from 1896 to 1904. These stock certificates were owned by different people with the amounts ranging from $1,000 to $2,000.

Typescript memoir of the life of Mother Jones, entitled "Mother Jones: the Life Story of the Irish Immigrant Girl Who Became the Most Unique Character in the American Labor Movement, Living Past 100 Years," written by Lillie May Burgess of Hyattsville, Maryland, and copyrighted 8 February 1938. The manuscript is in two parts, several pages of which are missing. The first part (241pp.) is entitled "The Life Story of Mother Jones: American Labor's Joan of Arc," and is a narration of events in Mother Jones' life. It includes a description of her early years, before she became a labor activist, and some of the highlights of her labor career. Her activities in organizing miners in West Virginia and Colorado receive most emphasis, but also included are her activities among women brewery workers, her participation in the 1919 steel strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania, her interest in the Mexican Revolution of 1911, her views on woman suffrage and prohibition, her meetings with various presidents and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and her friendship with Terence V. Powderly, fellow labor activist. The narration follows closely that of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES, published in 1925 by Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, Ill., with the addition of some chapters on her life after 1925. The second part (106pp.) is entitled "The Last Years of Mother Jones (Personal Reminiscences)." It is a narration of the later years of Mother Jones' life, ca.1927-1930, most of which she spent under the care of the author, Lillie May Burgess, at the Burgess home in Hyattsville, Maryland. Mrs. Burgess relates the circumstances under which Mother Jones and she became friends, how Mother Jones came to live with the Burgess family in 1927, and what these years of her life were like.