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…at work there, I heard of a vacant position in the household of General Lewis Ruffner, the owner of the *salt-furnace and coal-mine. — Booker T. Washington 

Booker, as a dependent child, was not in debt to the company.  His mother’s frugality in insisting that she make clothing and goods from materials at hand rather than go into debt buying items from the store likely allowed him the freedom to leave the mines–poor, but free. 

*After moving to the Kanawha Valley, Booker first worked in the salt furnace for a time before going to work in the mines.  The salt furnaces in Malden used slave labor until the emancipation proclamation and paid labor with long arduous hours afterward. Salt furnaces boiled salt well water into usable salt using coal from the surrounding mines.  Even mining was considered a step up from working the furnaces. Booker started working in the furnaces before switching to the mines.  He found both occupations required long hours and onerous work–overbearing heat in the furnaces and dark danger in the mines.

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Every now and then a little detail comes up in the sketching phase that is historically inaccurate. Usually we catch those in time. When we don’t, it’s either Photoshop time or I’ll point out the problem in a note below the comic. Sometimes catching these details results in an “Aha! We should explain this to the reader.” realization.  That happened with Better than Heaven #5G.

Becky initially drew the second panel with Jane kneading bread in front of a brick fireplace.  She asked me a question about a design for a later panel and I noticed the fireplace.  “Uh, we can’t have a fireplace in that panel.  Company cabins from this time period usually didn’t have fireplaces.”

Becky: “They’re right for the period.  They had to cook somewhere.”

John: “Yeah, but no fireplaces in most company houses at the time. That cost money–bricks and labor for building it and the house would have to have a foundation to support the brick.”

Becky a little sarcastically: “They had doors right?  I have him coming in a door.”

Rather than continue to recount the whole conversation, I’ll just summarize the housing situation in early coal camps.  They were called camps for a reason.  If you are really interested in digging into this I suggest Civil War in West Virginia by Winthrop Lane as a good starting place.

In the early days–through the nineteen twenties when Lane wrote–most company houses were pole construction which meant no actual foundation.  They were set up with a few rooms and no indoor baking options.  Heat was provided by a coal burning stove.  Stovepipes either went out of the house directly or connected to a brick chimney that stood on the ground and was attached to the outside of the house.  Water was available at a hand pump generally shared by a few houses.  The standard bathroom was a surface privy which was an outhouse with opening at the rear bottom rather than a hole dug underneath it.  Indoor frying was for winter months only, and indoor baking wasn’t possible at all. Housing in the areas where CC and Booker lived was of this type.

Becky’s response was: “I just can’t imagine living this way.”

Yeah, but I had neighbors with fairly similar housing situations in the early nineteen eighties.  Some things haven’t changed as much as most of us would believe.  (The link above goes to patreon where we have additional story about this.)

At any rate, that leaves us with the question–how did they bake?  Winthrop Lane explains that miners built brick ovens behind their shacks.  Bread and other baked goods were made in these ovens.  My great grandmother learned to bake in these kinds of ovens as a young wife.  She credits her Italian neighbors with teaching her to bake–and I’ll tell you–no one makes an apple pie like Mama Roxie did.

Yes, some miners did have brick indoor fireplaces, but these were the fortunate or more prosperous miners.  When Mama Roxie’s parents bought land and built their own home at Bullpush, it did have a fireplace and the foundation supporting it wasn’t an issue–because the floor was dirt*.
* A good dirt floor isn’t what most people now might think they are. Roxie described the floor to us in an interview. “And the floor was just a ground floor.  Just as hard and slick as it could be. I don’t know how they ever got that like that, but it was just slick as glass.”  It was years before I understood how this worked either but we have Youtube now to show us how these floors are built.

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