Oral History Interview with Mr. Higgins

[Begin Interview]

Higgins: Well, it just, working in the store, I’d work on Saturdays and hol-, holidays when I wasn’t going to school. And I guess I worked about couple of years then. Then I entered the engineering department under Frank D. King. He was a chief engineer at that time. And it seems, although at, when I went in, they just more or less turned engineering over to me. Because I think one of the fellows, or two or three of the fellows, that went out of the department somewhere. And so, we established an engineering department.

Interviewer: When, what were, what was, what did the store sell? Tell us something about the company stores and what they sold and all that. What did you have that you were selling?

Higgins: Oh, this store, right over here, right over here on the corner, you sire. We had just groceries and dry goods in this store here. And I guess this was the largest store, I guess, this part of the state at that end. Now that West Kentucky–

Female: Did you have furniture? Did you have furniture and everything [ ]

Higgins: Did it have what?

Female: Didn’t you have furniture over there then?

Higgins: Oh, yes, they had furniture.

Female: I thought you did.

Higgins: This store, it was divided kind of like it is now, in the furniture department and, and they had the grocery department and the dry goods department. And [mumbles] I started in clerking on the grocery side. Then of course if I wanted to, I could work in any section there. But I, I sold, most of mine, sold groceries.

Interviewer: What, grocery stores then aren’t like the supermarkets today with all the frozen foods, were they?

Higgins: Well, the, the difference there, they’d have what they call--.

[ pause in recording]

Higgins: five or forty dollars back there then. Forty, not very many of them. They’d, they’d, they’d buy up, I guess, from wheat. And another thing is then, where we worked on a unit inside the mines, we had maybe four or five units in there that [ ]– we don’t have, I guess we have about, not even a third of the men that worked inside the mines now that would worked [work] then. One mine would have maybe a couple of hundred mine-, men working for the mine, working in the mine.

Interviewer: About how large was Burlington, the company town here? This town?

Higgins: Well, it was, when I started to work over there, it, it settled out pretty good. Well, I guess you had two thousand [ ]. We’ve always had pretty good–

Interviewer: It was, almost everyone that was here was living at that time in company housing.

Higgins: They had, they had a lot of them, company houses. Down like here we call them different sections. And, and just like Morton Gap. They had, they owned, I guess, two or three hundred houses up there. And later on, when they consolidated things down, they, they brought them, and brought them, and moved them up here at what we call Arnold Division. That’s where they owned a mine later on, when they started dwindling down different.

Interviewer: Why did the company have company houses?

Higgins: Well, when they wan-, when they bring somebody in to work, they might go out and get a group. They might go, I know, I, I don’t recall, it, it, it’s back before my time then. But they tell me that they’d go down South or someplace and, and, and get a group of men and bring in. And then they’d bring whole families, just move into the houses there. And then we’d have what we call one section over here, Johnson Hill and another place over there. And they’s [they are]...

Interviewer: What were the houses like?

Higgins: Well, some of them out in the mining camps, call, were shotgun houses, they called them. Kind of like these you see up here as you go around up there. But they were well built houses. Because they, had, they had, had the carpenters that kept the houses up all the time, in, in good shape and all that. And another thing is, I guess you think I had a lot to do, but I didn’t think much about it. On one section later on I recall in the spring of the year they’d want to paper the houses somewhere, and they’d come and get the paper themselves. And I know they’d come in and--and meet the office there and I’d issue them out paper. Then they’d go down to the supply house and get how much paper. They wanted to paper certain rooms. Tell them how many rolls of paper and so forth. They had, they had one of the largest supply houses down here in Earlington any part of the country, I guess it was called.

Interviewer: What kind of paper were they using? What patterns were popular?

Higgins: Well, I don’t, I guess, they, they used to had [have] a, the company, they wanted to men, they had the best of everything that they had. So, they had nice, good paper. They’d come in, we’d have a big, you know just like you want to select paper for your house or something like that, they’d have a catalog, and they’d select the paper they wanted from there. Then they had it down there with a number. They’d give them the number, and, and the numbered roll. And had a, I had a book, I have it now somewhere around here. That every house, I knew how many rolls of paper it would take for each room. How many rooms and how many rolls of paper. And I’d give them, I know we had to kindly check them up. I was, I was talking with a fellow not long ago, and he said he liked, he liked, colored fellow, and he said he liked to take you little drinks now and then. So, he’d swapped some of his paper for some liquor. You don’t have to be taping this. But, and he. I’d have it so close that I’d check him up and find, find [ ]. Maybe his wife would say he, he hasn’t got his paper on. And we’d inspect houses, or have someone inspect them, see. And, so she said, well, she didn’t get it. Well, I checked around and found out. Enough to find him. And, of course, joking with him. Told him he’d have to do better next time, and we’d give him more paper that time. And that, we’ve always, good relationship with everybody in camp that counts.

Interviewer: Did the, did people have to pay, pay for their paper? For their paper for their houses? Or was that furnished by the company?

Higgins: That’s furnished by the company.

Interviewer: That, that was no, no charge.

Higgins: No charge at all. That’s the reason, yeah, I didn’t say that. There’s no charge. They’d just give it to them. They’d charge them so much rent, and that’s taken out on the payroll. It would come to the payroll office up there. And they had clerks up, I mean men for that job. See, they have a man for nearly every, in other words, even when they have a man for everything, when they’d pay off, they’d have the mine payroll. They’d go around to different places, Providence. And I, I know my brother, Clarence Higgins, he’d, he’d get in his car and drive to Providence and, and, and he’d carry the payroll. Now I, I wouldn’t rest very much now if I knew my brother was driving down to Providence with so much money. And it, it was a lot of money involved in that then. But he never did have any trouble. One car would follow behind him to see that he didn’t have much trouble anywhere, just follow him down. But no, they was occasion ever occurred that anyone was trying to rob him on the way down, or anything like that.

Interviewer: What, what type of, I probably didn’t make myself clear a moment ago. When I was asking about groceries, what would be the common staples that people would buy? They didn’t have frozen foods and all that like we do today. Did you sell those? Or what?

Higgins: No, we didn’t, didn’t have, yes, we’d--we’d have, of course, ice boxes to keep any-, anything, it would have to have frozen. But they had, just, just like your, beans, and, and, and anything. Corn, or whatever they. And then we had a lot of can, a lot of cans. Lot of canned goods.

Interviewer: What was the most popular order? What, what, what would the people generally order when they arrived?

Higgins: Well, they, they ordered, as I recall now, it, it would be a, of course bacon, you know, bacon, they liked bacon. And hams. And we had, down in the store we’d have, down in the basement down there we’d have hams hanging up and so much a pounds. And then we’d, we’d sell ham. We’d sell a whole ham at one time, at that time. And course we had eggs and, and just about what we have now. However, no frozen foods...

Interviewer: Did you have an ice factory around that made ice?

Higgins: Yes. Yes, we had, they had an ice plant in Earlington. Right down here. And they delivered ice around. Had, had ice. I remember that when I was really small. Now that might have been a little bit before I was working, when I think about much ice. But we always had a ice plant. Still, the building’s still there. We had an ice plant in Earlington.

Interviewer: Did the company provide the electricity for [ ] housing?

Higgins: Yes. The company owned, and they, and they even had the power plant. It’s sitting right out there, that power plant. And it supplied power for Providence, and they had a line built down to Providence. And, and had the power plant sitting right out there, where we have it. KU is hooked on now, and they had transformers out there going. But they don’t, don’t have, make any power out there.

Interviewer: The, what was the general pay that people made? The, the miners made.

Higgins: I don’t recall how much they, they made. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t remember.

Interviewer: Was the payroll always, that your brother, was it always cash? Or did they ever use scrip?

Higgins: Well, they might have used a little scrip. I didn’t know very. And they had the books, they had, what the scrip books. They’d have this little book. And they’d give them credit. He’d, he’d have a credit window. And he, and when they’d go up, he’d give them so much [many] credits on that book. And it’d come down to the store. And when we, wrote the order, would take it off that book. Happen to run out of credit or something like that, they’d go back upstairs and he’d, he’d, knew to cancel them [ ]. That was, that was my brother’s job for a long time. He and Mr. Brick Southford.

Interviewer: What was the, what was the, your entertainment when you were a young lad working in the store? What, what you, did you go fishing a lot, or what?

Higgins: Well, we had the, we had the shows to go to. We had, I think we had two, two shows, I recall in this town. Two, two or three. One on the street, and one over here. And you go to picture shows. And then they had, traveling shows. Had this, had an old opry house, we called it round, round here. And, and it used to have traveling shows would come in.

Interviewer: Ok stop, I’m running out of tape. Let me turn it over.

[End Side A. Begin Side B. End Interview]