AFTER THE BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN, THE LEADERS OF U.M.A. District 17 were arrested and tried for treason. Their trials were held at Charles Town, in the same courthouse that saw the conviction of John Brown. Popular sentiment was on their side and they were eventually acquitted, but the union was broken throughout West Virginia, even at mines that had once been organized. Justice County’s miners endured another winter in the tents before drifting away, defeated. Not until the administration of Franklin Roosevelt twelve years later was the union given the freedom to organize and the mine guard system abolished.

Dr. Toussaint Booker died at Institute, West Virginia, in 1931. Gladys Marcum Justice bore a daughter after Isom’s death. She continued to live at the farm. My Uncle Talcott and Aunt Pricie lived on Campbells Creek until 1934, when the Justice County mines were organized. They moved back to Blackberry Creek that very year and settled at Winco.

Rachel Honaker, Ben and Flora’s daughter, my first cousin who was more like a sister to me, married a grandson of Rosa Angelelli and set up housekeeping in the coal camp house at Winco where the Lloyd family once lived. By that time the mines had been mechanized and Winco had been reduced to ten families. Rosa was ignored by her own family, and only Rachel, who was a nurse, went to see her. Once I went along to visit Rosa in the state hospital where she was kept for so many years. I wrote down her story as I remember she told it, her mottled brown fingers gripping my arm, her long fingernails digging into my flesh as she called me by the name of a long-dead son.

In 1929, my uncle Ben opened a general store at the mouth of Scary Creek near the Aunt Jane Place. The store failed in the early years of the Great Depression. Not long after, Imperial Collieries claimed to have purchased all mineral rights to the land the year that Orlando Bishop was killed, and laid claim to the Homeplace. Uncle Miles, who had gone to work at his father-in-law’s bank, could do nothing. My mother, Uncle Ben and Aunt Flora were forced to move, and lived at five different places in Paine and Justice Counties until their deaths. Aunt Flora suffered a stroke after the third move in the early 1940’s, and died in 1957 at the age of 71. Uncle Ben passed away in 1962.

Although the timber was clear-cut, coal was never mined at the Homeplace. The land was purchased by the federal government to build a dam, which was constructed in 1969. But the floodwaters never reached the Homeplace and it stands empty to this day, held for some unknown reason in the control of a distant power beyond our ken. The houses are gone and I can only find the site by searching out a row of willow trees.