AMERICA'S DEADLIEST INDUSTRIAL DISASTER WAS ERASED FROM HISTORY

THE MEN CAME TO WEST VIRGINIA WANTING NOTHING MORE THAN HONEST WORK. INSTEAD, THEY FACED A SILENT KILLER-AND A MASSIVE COVER-UP.

- BY RYAN D'AGOSTINO

THEY ARRIVED IN GAULEY BRIDGE BY THE DOZENS, AND THEN BY THE HUNDREDS, UNTIL THEIR NUMBERS REACHED INTO THE LOW THOUSANDS, SWARMING THE TINY WEST VIRGINIA TOWN WITH THE KIND OF HOPE THAT'S HARD TO TELL FROM DESPERATION.

Some of the men were as young as 18, many were in their 20s and 30s, and some were much older than that, decades of labor recorded in their sun-cracked skin and hard hands. They came from Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina, from Ohio and Kentucky, from Florida and Tennessee and the reaches of West Virginia itself, leaving behind fallow fields where the yields on cotton and tobacco could no longer feed a family, where jobs in steel mills and coal mines, if you could get one, now paid almost nothing. They left their home-towns by train, by bus, sometimes even on foot, looking for something, anything.

They wanted to work.

It was 1930, less than a year into the Great Depression and several years before Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal created jobs for millions through federal work programs. Even the whisper of an opportunity to earn a decent wage could spread to dusty sharecropper towns three states away. After the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation—an industrial firm formed in 1917 by a merger of four smaller companies, which would grow to be the corporate giant it remains today—announced its intention to create a hydroelectric-power operation near Gauley Bridge, the company printed handbills soliciting workers and passed them out all over the region. The men who showed up to work would total more than 2,000. A handful of them were white locals, but most were Black migrants who flocked to Fayette County from elsewhere in the South.