[Begin Interview]
Interviewer: We’re in Mrs. Rife’s house in Weeksbury, Kentucky. Mrs. Rife, you
say that you were born and raised in a coal camp, were you?Rife: No, I wasn’t born in the coal camp. I was born on a farm. But was mostly
raised at Jenkins, Kentucky, in the mining camp.Interviewer: Was it right in where Jenkins, the town of Jenkins now? Or was that–
Rife: No, it’s Burdine.
Interviewer: Burdine.
Rife: Number one mine that the Jenkins Coal Company owned. It was Consolidated
Coal Company.Interviewer: Your husband mined for how long? He was a miner for how long?
Rife: I’d say thirty-five, forty years. He went to work in the mines when he was
about seventeen-year[s]-old.Interviewer: When did you marry?
Rife: We married in 1923.
Interviewer: Where did you all move first when you were married?
Rife: We moved up on Joe’s Branch, just a little hollow right out of number
three Jenkins.Interviewer: Was this your own home, or was this a company home?
Rife: No, it was a company home.
Interviewer: How far, was in Burdine, I guess they had a company store?
Rife: Had a commissary, company store, a theater, YMCA, and I guess that’s about
it with the school building or public buildings.Interviewer: Did you tell us, try to remember back, and try to construct a day.
What would you do? You’d get up and you’d get your husband ready to go off to work. And then what you did during the day, kind of an average day, and then on in when he came in at night. Could you kind of talk about that?Rife: Now my husband pumped water out of mines. He was called a pumper. And I
had to get up at 3:30 to get him off to work, cause he had to start them pumps at four o’clock. And where we lived, it didn’t take him but about thirty minutes to walk to the job. And he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. And he got a dollar and twenty cents a day to begin with.Interviewer: Now when after you got him up and everything, what would you
usually do then?Rife: Lord, I’d wash clothes, scrub the floors. We didn’t have rugs on the
floors. We just had plain floors. Cause there wasn’t no money to buy things like that. Make the beds. Cook and garden. I always had a garden. And if I had anything extra to can and put up, food for the winter.Interviewer: Did you have…
Rife: Carried water. We didn’t have no wells or no water in the house.
Interviewer: Did you have any trouble keeping the house clean with the coal
dust? Was there any problem with that much?Rife: Not really. No. Coal dust wasn’t too bad if you lived a little distance
from the tipple.Interviewer: How did you buy your groceries?
Rife: Scrip. The company allowed you a dollar a day scrip.
Interviewer: When did you do your shop, did you go in the store and shop like
you do now? Did you order it, how did you handle it?Rife: They had what they called a dray wagon, an order boy that come around and
get in orders. And you give your order to him one day, and the next day he deliver it and bring it back to you. That was in the beginning of coal mining.Interviewer: What kind of recreation did you and your husband do? Did you go to
the movies sometime?Rife: Once in a while we’d go to the movies. Not too often, he was always too
tired. And then children come along, we had children to take care of. And we’d go visit our parents and go visit the neighbors sometimes. And we’d have little candy parties of a night, you know, and pull candy.Interviewer: Was there much of that type of, in the coal camps, people having a
lot of social activity with each other? Quite a bit?Rife: Everybody was good to each other, yeah. They all visited together. And on
the Fourth of July they’d have big picnics. And gatherings, you know, and fireworks of a night.Interviewer: Were those theaters and YMCA owned by the company?
Rife: Everything was owned by the company.
Interviewer: Everything.
Rife: Yeah. They had, see, they had a number one mine, number two mines, number
three mines, and number four, five, six and seven. What they call coal mines. That’s in Jenkins you see. Number one, number two and number three was named Burdine. And the rest of it was named Jenkins. The other numbers. And yeah, they had a company store in each. At number three, they had a company store. And number four, they had a company store. And number one, they had a company store. They had three company stores. All in about five miles. It was easy shopping, because it wasn’t too far to the stores, you know.Interviewer: Could you tell us, from your point of view as a homemaker handling
some of the money, about scrip. Tell us a bit about that.Rife: Well scrip, at that time, was little metal pieces. You know, one penny,
five, ten, twenty. No, five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty cent pieces and dollars. It was metal then. And then later on, they changed that metal scrip to paper scrip. And it was numbered the same way. And you’d go to the store, and you’d go to the scrip office now. And you’d draw your allowance of scrip, what you was allowed. Of course, you were allowed as much as you had in there. But most people didn’t have it in there, you know. And they’d come strikes, and then you’d get a dollar a day while the strike was going on. But you was allowed as much as you had in there. Then they’d give raises along. I can remember my husband got up to four twenty a day there on that pumping, before he quit pumping. And that was pretty good, you know. You didn’t get no hourly wages. You were paid by the day, in them days.[pause]
Interviewer: How you’d go about preparing his lunch kit that he took down in the mines?
Rife: They had dinner pails. And the bottom of them held water. And the top of
them held food. And then there was a lid to go on them. And you’d put water in the bottom of the bucket. And then you didn’t have ice, because you didn’t have Frigidaire’s in them [those] days. And you’d put ice in the--or put water in the bottom of the bucket. And then you’d make bologna sandwiches, or a little can of, small can of peaches, or something like that. And they had light bread in the store. You’d put bread in there to make the sandwiches with, you know. And maybe he’d want a big onion head in his bucket. And I’d wrap that up in a piece of wax paper and put it in his bucket. And that would be what he’d have for lunch.[pause]
Rife: You didn’t have washing machines. You washed on the board by the tub. And
you didn’t have water in your house, and most people didn’t have wells. Now right in the camp, they had a pump at about every third house. Where’d they’d drilled wells and put a pump in them. Every third house had a pump. And you carried your water from the pumps. And you filled up your wash tubs the night before, and there’s always a red skim on them. You’d have to go out and skim that off of a morning, you know, so your clothes would come white. And then you’d wash on the board and hang your clothes on the line to dry. And I’d get up at three-thirty in the morning and get my husband out to work, and then start washing right then for my water’s up. Well by ten o’clock, I’d have that washing on the line and it’d dry, bring it in. While I cook supper, put the stove irons, you didn’t have electric irons. You didn’t even have electricity in your house. You had oil lamps. And then later on, they brought the electricity. But I’d put them stove irons on that stove and stand there while I was cooking supper and iron. And you had enough to eat. You’d fry chickens and bake biscuits and fix things good and cook beans, you know. And fry potatoes, and you’d have a good supper if you raised a garden, which we always did. You had extra things.Interviewer: That’s true…
[pause]
Rife: Well, children all get together out in the big road, you know. And they’d
run in the yard, they’d play hide and go seek. One would hide his eyes. And they’d hunt for, then they’d holler, “Ready? Ready or not!” And “Ready!” And then they’d all start running to hunt one another. And the last one in was the one that had to stand out there the next time. And just hunt and that’s what the children played of a night.Interviewer: Can you think of some other games?
Rife: Parents sit on the porch and watched them play; you know. People well
supervised their children in them days.Interviewer: What other games did they play?
Rife: Ring Around the Rosies, where they gather up in the rings, and jump the
ropes, and hopscotch, and things like that.Interviewer: Did they play marbles?
Rife: Yeah, they played marbles. Had to draw big rings and get down. The boys
mostly played the marbles. Girls didn’t play. Girls played hopscotch.Interviewer: Did they have anything like baseball?
Rife: Yeah, they played ball. Just played, had little games out there together
playing baseball. But they didn’t have leagues like they have today.Interviewer: Did any of the men in the community play baseball and stuff?
Rife: Well, they played with the children sometimes. Yeah, they had baseball
games, and had ball players that played on them. The company did. Had a big lot down there below Burdine that they had a baseball lot down there, and they’d all go down and play baseball on Saturday evenings and Sundays. Yeah, they played ball.Interviewer: Maybe one camp playing against another?
Rife: Uh, huh. One team playing against another, you know. See who’d win. It was
real[ly] nice. We’d go there and sit in the bleachers and watch them play ball on Sundays. I’d forgot about that. It just come back to my mind.[pause]
Rife: Now when they got the electricity in the houses, and the company had,
their houses, little four-room houses. And then each porch was a partition dividing the four rooms. There were two front doors to each house. And there’s two families lived in a house. They had two rooms each. The front room was for their bedroom, and the other room was for the kitchen. And they charged four dollars and sixty cents a month for rent. And the light bill went in with that. But they never did get water in the houses till about 1940. And then, of course, rent went up, and things kept raising, as it does today.Interviewer: About how much would you pay for some of the things you’d buy at
the store?Rife: Well, you could get white beans for a dollar and a half a hundred pound.
And you could get the pinto beans for three dollars, a hundred pound. And you could get lard three dollars for a fifty pound can. And bread was five cents a loaf. And them big buns they made was a penny apiece. And things was cheap as, in them days. Sugar was twenty-five cents for a five-pound bag, about five cents a pound. And coffee was cheap, about forty-nine cents a pound. And everything was reasonable enough.Interviewer: Did you ever buy anything from farmers around that might bring in
some stuff to the camp?Rife: Well, farmers had wagons. And they’d load these wagons full of stuff and
go through the camp, selling roasting ears and green beans, and fresh stuff, which the company didn’t get regular. And they got a pretty good price out of their stuff. I don’t know what sold it at because I didn’t buy it. We raised our own. We always raised a big garden.Interviewer: Did most of the people raise a garden?
Rife: A whole lot of them. I’d say half of the people raised gardens. Of course,
the young people that’s newly married, they didn’t raise gardens much. It was just the older like people that had families, that raised gardens. And you could buy cloth for ten cents a yard to make your children’s dresses out of, and shoes for a dollar, and a dollar and a half a pair. Things wasn’t too bad.Interviewer: You made most of your clothes and your children’s–
Rife: I done all my sewing.
Interviewer: That probably kept you fairly busy right there, didn’t it?
Rife: Yeah. When you can sew, you can save a lot of money. I still do my sewing.
Interviewer: My wife does, too. .. much time, she doesn’t have much time.
[pause] farms–Rife: They brought people in on transportation, which wasn’t Americans. Of
course, I guess they would have brought Americans, too. But they went to Pennsylvania and brought trainloads of people, men, and their wives. And sometimes maybe one child would come with them. And they brought them in on transportation. The company paid their way in here. Put them in them two rooms and furnished them a chest, and a bed, and a cook stove and a table and four chairs to each family. And then let them work and pay it back out of their wages when they worked. And paid their transportation out of their wages. And them people stayed and worked, some of them, and some of them didn’t like the deal they got and slipped off. Because the farmers that lived around in the country didn’t want nothing to do with the mining people. Because it was foreigners were coming into our community, and they wasn’t used to having foreigners. They was all, well, I guess you’d call them Anglo-Saxons, mostly, people that lived back in this country. And they had their set ways. And they didn’t want nothing to do with strangers. And the companies were bringing these foreigners in, what they call foreigners, which was the Italians and Yugoslavians, and people like that, you know. So, I guess that all in all, after a while, the farmers got used to the people and kind of liked them and got better to them and bring their stuff and sell it to them from the farms.[pause]
Rife: Well, the way the people lived, there wasn’t too many families settled in
this country. Now take like the Johnsons, they’d be maybe two or three families of Johnsons living here, one up in Skull. And then that was old Floyd Johnson’s family that up in Skull. And then there was another Johnson man lived up on the Caleb side. And they owned the whole hollow, maybe four or five hundred acres of land. And when they sold that, they sold the coal to the company. They didn’t sell the land. And they first sold the coal in about 1913, I think. And then later on, they give the company places to build houses and things like that, and their commissaries. And then later on, as time went on, they’d sell the company another little strip of land for houses till eventually the company had the whole thing bought out. And then they built houses all over, camp houses, all over. Some two-story houses had four rooms to each side, two down, and two up. And bigger families lived in them. And then cottage houses with four rooms, two rooms on each side that the smaller families lived in. And then they had a place called Silk Stocking Row, which was up on the Caleb side. And that’s where the bosses and the rich people lived here in Weeksbury. Well, I wouldn’t say they’s [they are] rich, they’s [they are] better to do, because they had better jobs. And they call it Silk Stocking Road. And the other sides lived, the poor people, or the newcomers, got in the other sides. And they had boardinghouses. And men that didn’t have no families could board in them boardinghouses and get room and board. For I’d guess that they maybe paid twenty dollars a month for room and board back in the 1920s.Interviewer: Did the people in Silk Stocking Row ever mingle with the rest of
the camp?Rife: No. The people in Silk Stocking Row, they was very friendly people, but
they had their parties of their own, you know. They had the 400 Club. And some people wasn’t invited. And people don’t usually go where they’re not invited.Interviewer: How about the churches? Do you remember the people?
Rife: Yeah. We always had the Old Regular Baptist Church. Been here since time
begin. And then they’ve got the Church of Christ, and the Holiness Church. There’s lots of churches. And most people’s churchgoers. Now I belong to Church of Christ. But now, the Old Regular Baptist has always been here.Interviewer: Did they, in the camp town, were the churches in the town? Or did
they tend to be outside?Rife: No. Churches. Each camp had a church. And I believe that the church that
they had in this camp was called, I don’t know what it’s called, but it wasn’t called nothing, Later Day Saints, or something. Couldn’t have been that. I was…I don’t know what it was called. But anyhow, it’s tore down and gone now. The people all that belonged to it moved away. Just a select group. The superintendents, and you know, people like that belonged to it.Interviewer: Did people sometimes meet in the homes? Churches meeting?
Rife: Oh, yeah, he used to have prayer meeting in the homes every night. They’d
gather up into one home, maybe twenty or twenty-five, and the preacher would come, and they’d have prayer meetings in the home. Then the next night they’d have it in somebody else’s home. They was great churchgoers. But you don’t see them in the homes much anymore.Interviewer: Going to church, then, in addition to worshipping, but it also
served a social function where the people could come together and they could talk, and they could, you know, have church suppers and that type of thing. You know, where it was a social thing as well as a religious?Rife: Well, something like social things, things the church was. They all
gathered together and talked and make plans, you know. Of course, there wasn’t much to make plans for because they had nothing to say in nothing except in their own home, where they rented. The companies took care of their old buildings. And the company took care of the doctor’s plan. We had a doctor’s office and a free doctor. You went to the doctor anytime you wanted to. And he’d give you your medicine, and there wasn’t no charges whatsoever. The company furnished the doctor, and sometimes two doctors, for every camp.Interviewer: Did they furnish a teacher for a school?
Rife: They furnished the teachers. The company or the county one now, I don’t
know what the county paid the teachers. But the company built the schoolhouses.Interviewer: How were the teachers that came in? Were they pretty effective, you think?
Rife: Good teachers. Had good teachers. Just friendly hometown girls, and then
teachers come from a way off. They was all good teachers.Interviewer: How many families would live in one of those communities like Burdine?
Rife: Well, as high as twenty-five hundred. From that on down, according to the
size of the community. Now I remember Jenkins had a population of twenty-five hundred. And this population here used to be pretty big. Maybe eight, nine hundred people. And Wheelwright had a population of maybe a thousand people, eighteen hundred.Interviewer: That could be a good number of students in the school. If there’s
twenty-five hundred people, there might be–Rife: Well now, they always had a schoolhouse at each camp, you know. So,
there’d be maybe three or four schools for that many people. And two and three teachers to a school.Interviewer: Did school go on year-round?
Rife: No. Nine months. Nine months. First it was seven-month schools, cause
that’s what the country was used to. Way back in the nineteens and teens you know, was a seven-month school. Because the fact was that the parent that wanted to garden and raise big crops needed their children home when crop time comes. And school went on when crop time wasn’t, and then turned out for crop time. If you know what I mean, crop time.Interviewer: Sure do. Sure do. When you gather the crops.
Rife: Yeah. When you’re putting it out, and then when you’re getting it in.
Interviewer: Did some of the miners also farm?
Rife: No. Miners, some of them would go up on the hillside and clean them up.
Because to all the valley part, you know, there’s not much level land in this country. Took all the valley part for the building of the houses and the yards. And the miners, men, would go up on the hillside and clean them off a little garden up there. And some of them would garden a little. Do it for just recreation, you know, and to help out with the table, too.Interviewer: When the miners were, I know there were some periods when they
didn’t have regular work. Maybe they just worked one, two, three days a week. What would they do then? It would be more work [with] in the gardening.Rife: Well, when they didn’t have regular work, the men would go hunting, go
fishing, and go to the barber shop and sit around and talk. And the women would gather in one another’s backyards. And sometimes they’d play a few cards or something, you know. Play, have a table set out there and they’d play rummy or play rook, or play something like that, you know. Then they’d maybe cook a big meal, or they had quilting bees, and they’d quilt. And gather round. The older women would make quilts. And then the next day, another would bring its quilt and they’d quilt out a quilt a day. Yeah.Interviewer: That’s interesting.
Rife: And then you’d cook a big meal and set it on the table, and all set down
and eat. And then the men all come in and eat whether they helped or not.Interviewer: Have you ever heard your parents talk about the bees and the
workings on the farms? When you were growing up?Rife: You mean the farms?
Interviewer: Mm hmm.
Rife: Yeah, child, I lived on a farm.
Interviewer: Could you tell us what is a working?
Rife: Well, you’d put out, if you wanted to build you a log cabin, or if you had
more of a corn than you could hoe out or before the rains come, you know, then you’d have a working. And all the men from miles around would come and bring their hoes. See when you farmed then, you didn’t have machinery. You used a mule and a goose-necked hoe if you know what I mean. And the men would come from miles around, and they’d hoe out that, they could hoe out maybe five or six acres in one day. They would be that many men. And they can get that man’s crop laid by. Then they’d go on the next day and hoe out another man’s crop. And see, with all of them together, and wherever place they worked, whosever farm it was, them women would gather in there and cook big suppers and have ready for them when they got through. And they’d all gather in, eat their suppers, and sit around. They’d pick a banjo, play guitar, or listen to a few songs some. Then they’d all go home and go to bed and get up the next morning and go back. Now if they had a log cabin that one of the daughters or sons is getting married and they want to throw up a log cabin right quick, they’d call a working. And the men would gather in and cut them logs and hew them down and notch them. And they’d put that cabin in. Be able to make a couple of days. And then they’d all have their big suppers where the women would gather in and cook. And each one would bring stuff to contribute to the cooking. And then they’d all go home. And everybody’s happy.[pause]
Rife: The doctors that the company brought in made–
[End Side A. Begin Side B.]
Rife: Now the doctors that the company brought in made house calls. And if your
child would get sick or something, you’d send for the doctor. You had no telephones. You couldn’t call them. You’d just send word by somebody passing by for the doctor to come, that your child was sick. And he would come and doctor your child free, no matter what time, what it was, nothing. And they just had one hospital there at Jenkins. If it was bad enough to go to the hospital, they’d put it in the hospital. And the hospital here was free, too. What you paid there; you paid about fifty cents on the half into the doctor’s office. But you paid nothing for hospitalization. When they went to the hospital, it was all free because the company took care of it. And but now, they didn’t deliver no babies free. Each baby that was delivered cost you twenty dollars. They’d come to your house and the babies were delivered right in your home. But now you had good doctors, and they took care of you. And never know them to losing a case. But they did charge you twenty dollars for–[pause]
Rife: I’d tell you what I’d do on the average day. Average day I’d get up and
get my husband off to work. And then I would get the children up and give them their breakfast. And then I would go carrying the water in to bathe them. And I’d bathe all five of my children. I’d have to empty the tub one time. I’d bathe two to the tub of water, because the water was hard to carry. And then I would start my washing, get my washing out. Send the children out to play. Get my washing on the line. Then come back in, make my beds, sweep my floors, and sometimes scrub the floors. And scrub and clean the front porch, have it cool. You didn’t have no screen doors, so I didn’t want the flies in. And then I would bring in my clothes and do my ironing while I cooked my husband’s supper. And then I would get the children in, wash them up and get them ready for supper. And then I’d get all the beds turned down. Then we’d go sit on the porch in the cool of the shade while we waited for bedtime to come.Interviewer: Excellent.
[End Interview.]
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