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March 1937. "Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove No. 2 coal mine. Scene taken from main highway shows company store and typical hillside camp." Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, three years before his death. View full size.
Twenty men were killed in an explosion at this mine on July 9, 1942. Dust and poor ventilation the culprit. Read about it here.
Scott's Run was infamous in the 1930s. An article in The Atlantic in 1935 called it ""the damnedest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America." Eleanor Roosevelt's secretary Lenora Hickok visited Scott's Run and described "ramshackle cabins that most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs." More history of the awful place here.
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