Book on Wise Mining

Book details history of mining in America, Wise County
By JEFF LESTER, Senior Writer November 16, 2004

This is how Westmoreland's Big Stone Gap office complex looked in August 1995. (Sonny Young photo)

The Minor Building, the Luke Building and the Trail Building still dominate the skyscape of downtown Big Stone Gap, forming a massive white brick compound rivaled in size and gravity only by the federal courthouse catty-cornered across the street along Wood Avenue. But the buildings have grown dingy, their coat of white paint fading and peeling. The dozens of Westmoreland Coal Co. executives, secretaries, engineers and bookkeepers who once roamed their halls and offices have died, retired or moved on to other opportunities. Now, the buildings' sole occupants are a lawyer's office, an insurance agency, a home furnishings rental store and warehouse space for a retail electronics store. Nine years ago, under the protection of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization plan, Westmoreland Coal made the decision that its nearly 650 remaining regional employees, thousands of retirees, and local business and government leaders dreaded, but knew was coming.

The company shut down its Virginia division, laid off the workers, moved its headquarters from Philadelphia to Colorado and began to concentrate on its western strip mines. An estimated $25 million annual payroll was lost, and as many as 400 spinoff jobs at other businesses and elsewhere were threatened. The downtown office complex, long the symbol of Westmoreland's power in Big Stone Gap, was emptied.

Many former Westmoreland miners quit the industry altogether, retiring or seeking new careers. Some left for mines in Alabama, while others found work at smaller lean-and-mean local coal companies.

The end of Westmoreland in the eastern United States arguably had been inevitable since the end of the 1989-90 United Mine Workers strike against rival Pittston Coal, and the resulting congressional debate that imposed new burdens on all coal companies to provide permanent health care for retired miners.

Mercifully, the severe economic downturn caused by the loss of Westmoreland's last local jobs was brief, although the company was embroiled for years in a legal dispute over payment of retiree and "orphaned" miners' health benefits.

But the legacy of Westmoreland and its longtime corporate cousin, Stonega Coke & Coal, continues to influence Big Stone Gap, Appalachia and the nearby coal camps.

Vestiges of the companies' contributions remain visible in facilities, programs and institutions they helped create: Penn Virginia Corp., the spinoff company that still controls thousands of acres of local coal-bearing land; the company towns that once housed Stonega miners and today provide pleasant bedroom communities for their descendants; the massive, idle transloader facility outside Appalachia that is being eyed for industrial development; the Harry Meador Jr. Coal Museum in downtown Big Stone Gap.

The legacy also lives in the former Westmoreland and Stonega mine sites themselves, many of which have been carved up for remining and new mining by a collection of small local companies.

Time after time, the death of coal mining here has been predicted, but the sway of coal on the economy continues today.

Roughly five years ago, Philadelphia-based author and journalist Dan Rottenberg decided to tell the story of Stonega and Westmoreland largely from the perspective of the Leisenrings, the family of Pennsylvania investors who captained Stonega since 1902 and Westmoreland since 1929.

In the process, Rottenberg chronicled the history of American coal mining and its critical role in building the nation's industrial might.

The result was "In the Kingdom of Coal: An American Family and the Rock that Changed the World," published in 2003 by Routledge, a division of Taylor & Francis Books Inc. (www.routledge-ny.com).

THE LURE OF COAL

Most people don't think about coal at all, or they think it is a fuel of the past, Rottenberg noted in a recent interview.

The average American with some knowledge of the coal industry might be familiar with stories about mine disasters, legendary United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis or movies about life in company-built coal towns, he said.

But without coal, America would not have had a steel industry and an extensive railroad network, Rottenberg argues. Even today, he noted, coal fuels more than half of the nation's electricity production, as more and more people demand power for computers.

"Everybody needs coal, but nobody wants to think about it."

When asked to think about the business world, most people who don't live it each day tend to think of "guys in suits, sitting at big desks, raking in lots of money," Rottenberg said. It's not necessarily true, and certainly not true of coal, he explained.

Those who have given their lives to coal mining are seduced by a fickle mistress, according to Rottenberg.

The allure of the business is its nearly unique nature, he said. You're not making a product that can be standardized. You must go to where it is, find it, extract it and ship it to the customer as cleanly and cheaply as possible, all the while buffeted by the shifting winds of global trade and volatile energy trends. For hundreds of years and even today, many have ventured beneath the surface of the earth into dangerous dark places to cut it from the ground.

At various times, oil companies have bought coal companies, thinking they would make a nice fit in the energy management picture, Rottenberg said. But it's never quite worked because the principles of oil exploration and production don't apply to coal. "They didn't know what they were doing."

Coal mining is more resistant to big corporate consolidations than most other industries, Rottenberg said. Over more than a century, thousands of big and small companies have competed for coal markets. Many investors have thrown in for a fast profit, then gotten out with the cash, he said.

The exceptions to that rule may be best exemplified by the Leisenrings, Rottenberg believes. The family first got involved with eastern Pennsylvania anthracite mining in the 1830s. The legacy continued through Edward B. "Ted" Leisenring Jr., who started his career as a mine engineer in Big Stone Gap in 1949 and retired as head of Westmoreland Coal in 1988.

In the course of nearly two centuries, the family tangled with and outlasted legendary industrialists such as Henry Clay Frick and steel baron Andrew Carnegie, along with labor icon John L. Lewis and his successor, UMWA president Tony Boyle, who became notorious for allegedly ordering the murder of his chief rival.

THE BOOK

In 1997, Ted Leisenring encouraged Rottenberg to turn the story of the family business into a book.

Rottenberg relied heavily on an extensive collection of family and company papers at the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Del., fleshed out through many interviews with Leisenring and others involved with Stonega and Westmoreland. To balance the story of the company's executives, Rottenberg also chronicles the fortunes of the Givens family, locals who mined for the Leisenrings across four generations.

The story begins with entrepreneur Josiah White, who opened a Philadelphia iron works briefly fueled by soft bituminous coal mined near Richmond, Va. - until, thanks to the War of 1812, the British navy blockaded ports and cut off coal shipments to the north.

In 1813, White's company discovered a method for using slow-burning hard anthracite, mined only 100 miles north, to fuel his blast furnace. He realized anthracite's potential to fuel steam engines and liberate industries from water-based power sources.

Soon, White took over a struggling coal company and started building his power base in the company-owned town of Mauch Chunk (now known as Jim Thorpe), Pa. By 1820 he had constructed a canal to float coal barges to Philadelphia, and by 1827 he had begun building one of America's first railroads to haul coal from his mines to the barge loading point.

Around the same time, John Leisenring became proprietor of Mauch Chunk's luxurious Mansion House hotel. Later, he became a merchant in town. His son, also named John, soon began working for White's firm. The family's association with mining had begun, and eventually would stretch across five generations.

Rottenberg chronicles the Leisenrings' ups and downs as the family companies expand from the eastern Pennsylvania anthracite to western Pennsylvania bituminous coking coal, to mines in Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia, and finally, in the early 1970s, to the lignite fields of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, Montana, Utah and Colorado.

In between, the Leisenrings and others contend with the rise and fall of the American steel industry and the ascent of its competitors in Japan and elsewhere overseas. They cope by taking advantage of long-term sales contracts, new technology and the pure dumb luck of events such as the early 1970s oil crisis.

The family rises to leadership of a national coal trade association and a crucial labor bargaining arm amid the rapid growth of the UMW under Lewis, its turmoil under the leadership of Boyle and Arnold Miller and its dramatic shrinking in the last two decades as industry changes, environmental regulations and crushing employee benefit obligations drive operators toward non-union mines.

Rottenberg describes how the Leisenrings and their competitors steered their companies through the Great Depression and the resulting growth of the union, two world wars and labor strikes in which two presidents, Truman and Carter, eventually intervened.

Finally, the Leisenring family's romance with coal mining ended in 1988 with Ted Leisenring's retirement. He watched from a distance seven years later as Westmoreland's current chief executive, Chris Seglem, shut down its eastern operations and moved the corporate headquarters to Colorado, then steered the company through bankruptcy and returned it to profitability.

"It's a big story," Rottenberg said, "close to 200 years of boom, bust, success and failure."