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Hellraisers Journal – Monday June 20, 1921
Lick Creek Tent Colony, Mingo County – Attorney West Describes Raid
From The Wheeling Intelligencer of June 18, 1921:
MINE WORKERS’ LAWYER MAKES
ALLEGATIONS OF RUTHLESS ACTS
AT THE MINERS’ TENT COLONY
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Declares State Police and Volunteers
Were Disorderly and Destructive
When They Raided the Homes
of Union Miners
———-Special to The Intelligencer.
Charleston, Va., June 17-Secretary-treasurer Fred Mooney, of District Seventeen, United Mine Workers of America, tonight made public the following report just received from the union’s lawyer, Thomas West, who was detailed to make an investigation of the activities of the state police in raiding tent colonies of union coal miners in Mingo county:
Williamson, W. Va., June 16.
H. W. Houston, Charleston, W. Va.
Dear Sir-On yesterday morning I visited the Lick Creek tent colony for the purpose of taking some statements regarding the outrage perpetrated there on the day before [June 14]. I found that the state police and their volunteer confederates [company gunthugs] had ripped up twenty or more tents. Some of them had probably a hundred slits up them, averaging about six feet each, and had knocked the legs out from under their cooking stoves and the stove pipes down, and where they found anything cooking on the stove they swiped it off into the coal box, as a rule found just back of the stove. They found some tables set for dinner and they turned these with the legs up and the dishes and food left on the under side.
They broke open every trunk and rifled every drawer. They dumped all the clothes they found out into the middle of the floor and kicked them all over the place. They dumped an organ out of one man’s tent over the hill and hit a phonograph with an axe or some other heavy tool.
They poured kerosene oil into a churn of milk found in one of the tents and in others they found such oil and poured it into the meal and flour. In one tent they found a considerable quantity of canned fruit and they put this on the bed clothes after turning them upside down on the bed and broke it up. They put the mattresses on the floor and ripped them open and put the springs on top of them.