Coal Camp Revolutionaries

 The Town Least Likely

Born a rough, no-hope company, town Rendville became not only respectable, but self-respecting

Story by Charles H. Nelson 

At the start, Rendville was a prime candidate for the town least likely to succeed as a town. Indeed, Rendville had all the makings of a backwoods sweatshop, a private industrial fiefdom. It was a quasi-company town plunked down in a remote corner of south-central Ohio to garb cal out of the ground at the lowest possible cost, using the cheapest, most malleable work force the absentee owners could recruit—immigrants fresh off the decks from Europe and blacks fleeing the post-Reconstruction South.

Somehow Rendville became a real town, especially for its black citizens. Though it was never especially pretty nor prosperous. Rendville was a genuine interracial community in an era when the very notion was anathema and the reality supposedly impossible. In the last two decades of the last century, blacks in Rendville were regularly elected to political office, served as policemen, practiced medicine, organized labor unions, owned businesses, resisted the segregation of the public schools, lobbied the legislature against the punitive "Black Laws," founded churches with mixed congregations and saved a black Rendvillian from a lynch mob in a neighboring town by threatening municipal war—all of this at a time when the economic and political position of American blacks, indeed the very physical safety of their race, was perilous.

In the twentieth century, there has been little use and less luck for Rendville. The center of town burned to the ground in 1901, although most of it was rebuilt. Coal mining has always been a grinding business of sharp peaks and deep valleys, and even in Rendville's early heyday, there were more downs than ups. After a last peak during the First World War, coal production and Rendville steadily declined together. In 1970, the state tore down much of the south end of Main Street to widen Highway 13. Today Rendville is a dying town that never quite gets around to being dead. The First Baptist is the last active church left in town. There are perhaps one hundred citizens. Yet Rendvillians and former Rendvillians have a curious stubborn pride in their declining town. For the last thirty years, there has been a formal Rendville Club in Columbus to keep alive the connection, meeting once a month to socialize and plan events to benefit its humble hometown.

Rendville was a creature of two-fisted, bare-knuckles capitalism. It began in 1879 with a railroad into the Sunday Creek Valley under the grand name of the Atlantic and Lake Erie , which almost immediately became the Ohio Central Railroad, which in turn spun off the Ohio Central Coal Company to work the rich local coal deposits. The Ohio Central sank shafts and threw up the town of Coming to house the miners. To get in on the bonanza, William P. Rend arrived from Chicago and leased coal lands to the north. There he built the No. 3 and No. 9 Sunday Creek mines. The No. 3 was to become the largest "black" mine in the state.

Rend was a miner coal baron in an era of ruthless coal kings. He was born in Ireland in 1840 but migrated to Lowell , Massachusetts , as a young boy. He rest to the rank of colonel in the Union Amy during the Civil War. After the stillness at Appomattox , Colonel Rend went to Chicago to build his empire on freight-hauling and coal mining. At his peak, he controlled 1,800 freight cars, 10 cool mines and 2,000 worker, And he named his newest Ohio enterprise after himself.

Rendville was built partially on contract by the Ohio Central--company houses, a company store, a school, a row of rooming houses and even churches, which the company put up at half-cost. Colonel Rend was something of a "progressive" by the brutal standards of the contemporary coal industry; he favored arbitration over gunfire in labor disputes. This blatant liberalism made him enemies. Once the Hocking Valley Railroad "locked" Rend's shipments off the line until he got a federal court injunction, forcing them to provide cars at the going rate.

Through the cracks of Rend's progressivism, the new town of Rendville managed to put down a few real roots. He allowed private houses to be built, churches and fraternal lodges to flourish; and when the miners organized their own cooperative store, he did not interfere.

His basic labor policy was more traditional. His first miners were recruited on the Eastern seaboard by shipside agents who offered Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English immigrants, on credit, one-way tickets to the glorious boomtown of Rendville. Many of the Swedes and Germans thus recruited arrived in Rendville with no mining experience, took one look at the situation and quickly skedaddled, without paying their fares or board bills.

To provide himself with a counter work force, Rend hired in 1880 over 100 black miners from the New River region of West Virginia and shipped them North. The blacks were not brought in as strikebreakers, but they came on "sliding scale" contracts with their wages tied to the price of coal, which shot up and down in value because of strikes, depressions and outright manipulation of the market.

The neighboring white miners of Corning and other towns saw the Rendville blacks as a threat and in the fall of 1880 marched into town several hundred strong behind a wagon carrying rifles under the hay. The black miners stayed home. 'The Corning War" ended only when Governor Foster sent in the state militia armed with a Galling gun. Newspapers reported that two or three men were wounded in the resulting skirmish; but eventually the invading miners withdrew, and the blacks went back to work in No. 3.

Against this tense background, Rendville boomed. The area's population rose within three years of its founding to 2,500 (although the population of the town itself never exceeded 900). This was by no means small for the day; only one American in four lived in a town that large.

Early Rendville was a rough, wide-open man's town. The population was 66 percent male, and Rendville had nineteen saloons to keep them watered, or one for every twenty-five men. There were six murders and one lynching between 1880 and 18%. The law was also rough. Marshal Joseph Inman took on the Murray brothers outside a wedding reception in November 1882, beating one up with a "mace" and shooting another. The next year, Marshal Inman was himself arrested for picking a pocket in a saloon owned by a Mrs. Hickey. In 1886, Inman shot and killed Moses Hatchet, a black man, during a barroom argument. He was "conveyed to the New Lexington jail for fear he would be lynched by enraged citizens, both white and colored," reported the Cleveland Gazette. In February 1884, Richard Hickey, a white man, was hanged from a sycamore tree in the center of Rendville by an angry mob for having shot a young miner named Peter Clifford.

Life in and around the mines was brutal. Not a month went by without reports of serious accidents: falling slate breaks the leg of a ten-year-old boy; a man loses a hand when he slips under a railroad car; a man is killed while crawling under a train to cross the tracks when the locomotive bumps the cars; a five year-old is kicked to death by a horse.

The town made some progress, although sometimes the impetus came from outside. In 1882, the legislature passed a Sunday Closing law to curb liquor sales by requiring saloons to post a heavy liability bond. Fifteen of Rendville's nineteen bars were wiped out overnight because they could not raise the money. The townspeople themselves were organizing for their betterment. With the arrival of the Presbyterian Church in 1884, Rendville had five active Protestant churches. Fraternal lodges multiplied: The Odd Fellows, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of the Free and Accepted Masons, the Knights Templar's, Knights of Pythias, Knights of the Wisemen and the Sons of St. George. In the days before workmen's compensation and union benefits, the lodges were often the miners' only hope for a decent burial and relief for their widows and orphans. The lodges also provided the constantly changing work force a chance for fellowship.

In spite of the continuing racial tensions, the casual violence and the general indifference of distant absentee owners, Rendville surprised itself. 

The town got religion in a major way in the spring of 1885. Without advertisement or evident planning, a religious revival swept into town from nowhere. The town had certainly been tense that spring. Colonel Rend himself had arrived to tell a mass meeting of miners that their wages would be cut sharply to match the sharp drop in the price of coal. Some turned for relief to the local "colored" chapter of the Knights of Labor Assembly, but the masses applied to a Higher Authority. The fervor built, day after day, week after week, until the churches were open around the clock, the mines shut down and most businesses closed.

Caught up in the ecstasy was Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., who, after he went on to the pulpit of New York City 's largest black church, the Harlem Abyssinian Baptist, became Rendville's most famous former citizen. He was also the father of the controversial black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. The senior Powell was first called to religion in the muddy waters of Sunday Creek

"Rendville was the most lawless and ungodly place I have ever seen," the senior Powell wrote in his autobiography. "Every house on Main Street except the mayor's office and the post office was used as a gambling place." With hellfire dancing before their eyes, the saloonkeepers and the gamblers repented, rolling whiskey barrels into Main Street and stoving in the tops. A great bonfire of gambling equipment was ignited. In April, Powell was one of fifty converts baptized by Reverend Hammond in Sunday Creek as a crowd of a thousand stood by reverently.

Sin and hard times were not banished from Rendville forever, but the town had undergone a permanent change. The flaming whiskey and faro tables on Main Street burned away part of the town's founding wildness. Henceforth, Rendville would be a more serious place.

In these years a remarkable group of black leaders emerged in Rendville. By modern standards their accomplishments seem modest, but at a time when blacks were being systematically disenfranchised and terrorized, they were extraordinary men. 

John L. Jones was a prime example. Born in Pomeroy in 1857, he came to Rendville in 1881, hoping to get a job as a teacher. The position was already taken by Sarah D. Broadis, the daughter of a local pastor. Jones married her in 1887, and they had four children. He worked for a time as a "trimmer" in the mines but quit to become a grocery store clerk. In 1884, a number of leading black citizens organized the Sunday Creek Cooperative and hired "Sandy" Jones as manager. The coop prospered for a time, but in 1887 when the opal market slumped again, they invited Jones to buy it out. He did and ran it successfully for years. An active Republican, he was appointed postmaster in 1897 by President McKinley. He also served on the school board and the town council. "Mr. Jones has made a careful official," a turn-of-the-century chronicle reported, "and has the confidence of all who know him."

The old dispute with Coming flared again in November 1888, when a black Rendvillian was arrested there on charges of killing a white man. A mob formed. The mayor of Rendville, Dr. Isiah S. Tuppins, a mine physician and community doctor, rode over to

Corning and confronted the town marshal. Dr. Tuppins was blunt. "If the law will not protect us," Dr. Tuppins warned, "we will protect ourselves." The prisoner was hustled off to safety in New Lexington.

Dr. Tuppins was another of Rendville's extraordinary "ordinary" black citizens. Born of free parents in Nashville , Tennessee , in 1859, Tuppins grew up in Xenia . He taught school for a few years in Tennessee before moving to Columbus , where he saved enough money working as a barber to put himself through the Ohio Medical College , becoming its first black graduate. He came to Rendville in 1884. He represented Perry County at the state Republican convention and became the first elected black mayor in the north-central United States . He also served as the coroner of Perry County before his death in 1889, aged thirty.

Perhaps the most daring of Rendvillians was Richard Davis, a union organizer. He came from Roanoke , Virginia , where he was born a slave in the closing years of the Civil War. Put to work in a tobacco factory when he was eight, Davis lit out for the coal fields of West Virginia in his teens. He reached Rendville in 1882 and immediately became active in the Knights of Labor. When the Knights collapsed in 1890, Davis was a founding delegate of the new United Mine Workers Union. Davis worked as a "check weighman" in Rendville but also volunteered for special undercover organizing missions to black miners in West Virginia and even as far south as Birmingham , Alabama . To be a union organizer in that era was dangerous enough; to be a black union organizer in the Deep South was nothing short of terrifying.

In 1896, Davis was the only black elected to the UMW National Executive Board. The year before, when the national board sent a delegation to Corning , it was Davis who organized their reception. The union men checked into the Mercer Hotel, but when they went downstairs for dinner, Davis was refused service. His presence would give offense to guests from West Virginia , he was told. The delegation promptly rose as one and walked out.

Davis later sued the innkeeper, George Mercer, for damages in Perry County Court, with the UMW officers returning to testify. The suit and subsequent appeal to the circuit court lost, and Davis was ordered to pay all court costs.

In 1894, the national economy sank into a depression. The people of the Sunday Creek Valley , who had already suffered through their own local depression for two years, were now driven toward utter destitution. Rendville miner William E. Clark wondered in a letter to the UMW Journal," . . . if other worlds were inhabited? Did they have the same kind of law and government that we have? And my next wonder was, was this world of ours the hell we read about in the good book? If it is not, how can a man stand the punishment twice, and then live through eternity?"

Mayor David Wells and John L. Jones of the Rendville Relief Committee appealed to Governor McKinley to save 225 families who were "without work or any means of support." Relief trains carrying donated food and clothing were rushed to the region.

Mining picked up briefly in 1899, but organizer Davis was by then well known to the bosses. He was blacklisted at the No. 3 mine. He appealed to his fellow unionists in their Journal. "I have as yet never boasted of what I have done in the interest of organized labor, but will venture to say that I have done all I could and am proud that I am alive today, for I think I have had the unpleasant privilege of going into the most dangerous places in this country to organize, in other words, to do the almost impossible. I have been threatened; I have been stoned, and last of all, deprived of the right to earn a livelihood for myself and my family.

"I do not care so much for myself, but it is my innocent children that I care for most," Davis wrote, "and heaven know that it makes me almost crazy to think of it." Thirteen months later, Richard Davis, age thirty-five, was dead of pneumonia.

Through all these great tragedies and small triumphs, Rendville cultivated a normal side. The town had an orchestra called the Orpheus Society, the Allen Comet Band, the 16-piece Dodson Brass Band and a traveling baseball team, the "Colored Giants."

The big holiday of the year in Rendville was Emancipation Day, September 22. Newspapers make mention of it as early as 1883, and each year thereafter it became a grander occasion—flags, bunting, Chinese lanterns, a parade, an ox roast, fireworks, various athletic contests and a "wheel of fortune." Farmers came in from the country as white and black Rendvillians celebrated together. The surest sign that the citizens of this unlikely town mattered was the strong contingent of visiting politicians who, as one newspaper duly noted, "were on hand to make friends."    

Charles H. Nelson is professor of sociology at Muskingum College , New Concord, Ohio, where he has taught for the past seventeen years. His teaching and research interests include community, and racial and cultural minorities. His book John Elof Boodin: Philosopher-Poet will be published later this year by Philosophical Library.