8. A Centennial Note

Elderly miners and their families interviewed in the 1980s for The Miners of Windber uniformly named the strikes of 1906 and 1922 as the two most significant events in the town's near 100 years of history. Yet these were only two of the most dramatic collective and individual struggles in which working people in Windber engaged over the years, as they sought to unionize, gain greater control over their lives, and secure American constitutional rights and civil liberties in a company town where these elementary features of a democratic society did not exist. Moreover, ongoing struggles for social justice did not end with successful unionization in the 1930s, or with the subsequent closing of the mines and deindustrialization in the 1950s and 1960s, but continue today under new conditions.

What heritage exhibits, and what newspaper articles, accurately remember the aspirations and longterm struggles of Windber-area miners and their families for union? Who has remembered--or commemorated--the victims of the massacre of 1906? On the 75th anniversary of the landmark strike of 1922-23, who today remembers the participants, or the conditions which led thousands of Windber-area immigrant and American miners and their families to take part in this particular historic mass struggle? Or the experiences of the area's thousands of working people who encountered the harsh problems of coal-related diseases, poverty, unemployment, mine closings, outmigration, over the years since then?

Windber Miners at Mine 35, 1905.
Courtesy, Windber Area Museum