How many black coal miners came to Lucas County?

The first of 11 Whitebreast Township census pages on which the black population of East Cleveland was enumerated during 1885.

Everyone knows about Buxton, population about 5,000 at its peak in 1914, the integrated coal mining camp that flourished in far northern Monroe County around Consolidation Coal Co. mines from 1895 until shortly before World War I. Well, maybe not "everybody," but most Iowans interested in our state's history do.

Less is known commonly about that coal company's earlier settlement called Muchakinock, five miles south of Oskaloosa in Mahaska County, simply because it was smaller and Buxton has gotten all the glory. Muchakinock flourished from the time the mines opened there in 1873 until roughly 1900, when the coal supply was exhausted and full attention turned to the Buxton mines. It, too, was a fully integrated community with a peak population estimated at 2,500. Consolidation began its practice of recruiting black coal miners, most from Virginia, here during the spring of 1880.

But when it comes to Lucas County's Cleveland mines --- Whitebreast Nos. 1-4 --- very little is known about the size of the black miner population in East Cleveland, Cleveland and Lucas during the decade, 1880-1890, when mining here was at its peak. As you might expect, this is something I want to know --- and keep fussing about.

So the other day, with the 1885 Iowa state census available online, I decided to sit down and count. The total black population in those three adjoining communities --- Lucas and Cleveland incorporated and East Cleveland not --- was 414 when the census was taken. This number includes all family members. I'm guessing the number of actual miners was about 200, since many of those enumerated were single men. And, yes, I'm going to go back one of these days and head-count miners specifically.

Of the total, 364 were residents of East Cleveland, six of Cleveland, 16 of Lucas and 28 of unincorporated areas in Jackson Township just outside Cleveland/East Cleveland.

So at its peak somewhere between 1880 and 1890, I'm speculating, the black population in this small area of western Lucas County was in the neighborhood of 500, give or take.

+++

The first black miners recruited into south central Iowa were strike-breakers --- although they were not aware of that fact when they boarded Iowa-bound trains in Virginia. These former slaves (for the most part) and their families were leaving a region where they had no economic opportunity and the increasingly hostile "Jim Crow" era was commencing, headed for a land of promise in the west.

And that gamble paid off. The mining companies proved to be for the most part color-blind --- Consolidation, for example, did not tolerate segregation in its mines and mining camps and treated black miners exactly as it did white miners. The black miners proved to be good workers, easily trained (and unlikely to strike), and so the mining companies continued to recruit in the old South.

There's no indication that the Whitebreast company tolerated segregation either even though the housing it built for is black employees and their families was adjacent to the company town of Cleveland --- already filled for the most part with the homes of white miners --- rather than actually being inside its corporate limits.

+++

The principal recruiter for Consolidation --- and for Whitebreast, too --- was a gentleman named Thomas Shumate (1841-1893), who had risen to the rank of major during the Civil War in the Confederate 18th Virginia Cavalry. It was his practice to return to his native Staunton, where he had been a building contractor after the war, assemble parties of workers and their families recruited in that region, then accompany them west by rail, ironing out travel details for his charges en route.

He arrived at Muchakinock with his first recruits during April of 1880. The first black miners arrived in Lucas County during the autumn of 1881 --- probably late September or early October.

There's every indication that Maj. Shumate was one of the good guys, genuinely concerned about the welfare of his recruits.

+++

To learn a little more about how the black miners were received in Lucas County it's necessary to rely on the two Chariton newspapers being published at the time --- The Patriot, published by the Quaker Lewis family, who reported respectfully on their new black neighbors; and The Democrat, inclined to racism and all that entailed.

Even though there was discontent among the white miners employed by Whitebreast when black miners began to arrive --- apparently to take their jobs should they not settle labor disputes in the mine owners' favor --- there was never violence other than that expected when men overdose on whisky and experience overdoses of testosterone, too.

The Democrat fantasized quite a lot about the potential for racial violence at Lucas/Cleveland, violence that never occurred.

Ron Roberts, in "Everyday Ghosts and Ordinarily People," a book dedicated to historical notes about and personal memories of Lucas, offers the most likely explanation of why miners white and black were able to get along peaceably in western Lucas County late in the 19th century.

Nearly all of the white Whitebreast miners were immigrants --- from Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland and Sweden --- not previously exposed to the poisonous racial tension stitched into the American fabric. Overt racism was foreign to them and they simply didn't buy into it, even when new arrivals threatened to take their jobs, Roberts suggests.