U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia.

By Ronald Garay

University of Tennessee Press, 2011, 265 pages.  Hardcover, $48.

One of the most striking coal towns I ever visited was Gary, just south of Welch in McDowell County. The complex of coal towns U.S. Steel built around Gary had some of the most attractive company buildings, stores and miners' homes I ever saw.

Steel companies in general, I thought, built some of the nicest towns in the coalfields. And they were open to hiring more black miners than most other coal companies.

Having returned to the Welch area many times over the past 42 years, it has been depressing to watch a downtown bustling with stores, restaurants, clothing shops and movie theaters evolve into somewhat of a ghost town.

Many wonderful people still live there. But most storefronts and buildings along the once-vibrant McDowell and Mercer Streets, just above the banks of the Tug River, are now vacant and abandoned.

In his engaging book, "U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia," Ronald Garay tells a powerful story.

Beginning in 1902, the country's biggest steel company began building what became a vibrant complex of towns around Gary, housing people working in 14 different mines producing high-quality metallurgical coal.

But U.S. Steel, exercising nearly total control over what happened in its coal towns, changed Gary from a vibrant place through the 1960s into increasingly abandoned neighborhoods, beginning in the 1980s. 

"During the 20th Century, Gary assumed the mantle of industrial powerhouse in the hollows of southern West Virginia. Gary mines were crucial to steelmaking in World War II," Garay writes.

Between 1942 and 1945, Gary's mines produced one quarter of all coal mined in McDowell County and one quarter of all coal used by U.S. Steel during the war.

Gary employed a significant number of black miners. Its school system began to integrate during the late 1950s, but was not fully integrated until 1964.

But "the relative ease with which Gary Hollow schools were integrated reflected a racial harmony unique about Gary and its satellite towns," Garay wrote.

African-American miners throughout Southern West Virginia were often assigned more difficult jobs inside the mines and poorer living conditions with their families.

But "for years, Gary coal miners, regardless of race or ethnicity, had worked alongside one another, performing equal tasks for equal pay (the UMWA had seen to that)."

The United Mine Workers always represented workers at the company's mines.

U.S. Steel also maintained racial equality in its neighborhoods. "Everyone lived both figuratively and literally on the same side" of the tracks, Garay pointed out.

In November 1973, Francis Martin, a black miner from Gary, was elected to the International Executive Board from District 29 of the UMW -- the first black miner elected to the board in the 20th century.

When the local coal industry was booming, McDowell County also had the highest percentage of black residents of any West Virginia county.

Beginning in the 1970s, jobs and living conditions in Gary dropped.  By 1980, the best metallurgical coal in the Gary area had already been mined. During those same years, the national production of steam coal, to generate electric power, rose from 320 million tons to 530 million tons. 

Mining jobs in McDowell County fell from 5,814 in 1980 to 3,755 in 1982.

For Gary's miners and families, 1982 was particularly bleak.

In March, 550 miners were laid off. By late April, nearly 3,000 of U.S. Steel's 7,000 coal miners across the country had lost their jobs.

Longtime miners who lost their jobs collected $194 a week in unemployment benefits. Young miners who had not worked for very long received only $15 a week.

"Welch, where so many Gary Hollow dollars were spent, was pounded by the closures," Garay wrote. "In mid-April, Welch restaurants closed early because of the dwindling number of customers, clothing stores laid off their own workers ... and car dealers were hitting new lows in sales."

By the end of the year, U.S. Steel had closed all of its mines in McDowell County. Gary Mayor Charles Hodge said the company made no effort to help the town.

"Gary Hollow once had a congregational tradition. It was a place of gatherings, a place of small neighborhoods set within the bigger neighborhood of Gary. But no more," Garay wrote.

"The coal miners of Gary Hollow were for the first time ever totally at the mercy of a complicated set of circumstances over which they had no control."

Gary's unemployment rate nearly hit 90 percent in March 1983 -- higher than any other town in the nation.

In September 1987, the Gary No. 2 Mine reopened, but only after U.S. Steel sold it to a new company called Gary Enterprise. A number of other companies arranged sub-leases to mine what coal remained accessible.

Nationwide, U.S. Steel's employment fell dramatically -- from 171,654 in 1979 to just 53,000 in 1989.

"The abundant, good-paying jobs that had persuaded so many young people to enter the mines in times past simply no longer existed," Garay wrote.

By 1990, just 180 mining jobs remained in Gary Hollow and only 1,250 throughout McDowell County. In July 2003, U.S. Steel announced a deal that sold all of its remaining coal assets to PinnOak Resources.

Gary was founded in 1902. But during the historic town's centennial year, a century later, "there would be no parades, no speeches, no pageants, no celebrations of any sort to mark the occasion of Gary's birth," Garay noted.

"Most Gary Hollow residents probably had no idea that Gary had been around so long."

Reach Paul J. Nyden at pjny...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5164.