In the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more than a few American farmers
took up coal surface mining as a secondary occupation. During the winter
months, between the harvest and planting seasons, they worked local seams
to provide fuel for their families or to sell in area markets. This strip
mining, which was done on a small-scale with picks, shovels, and mule-drawn
scrapers, fit easily within the patterns of daily life and had only minimal
impact on the land. In the twentieth century, however, coal surface mining
mechanized and expanded. Profit-seeking operators introduced steam shovel
technology to improve mine efficiency, the number of mines grew, and stripping
increasingly came into conflict with agriculture as a competing land use.
This generated opposition within farming communities and led to some
of the first state regulatory legislation. In Boonville, Indiana, for example,
on the eve of World War I, farmers, coal miners, and local businessmen began
a campaign to stop strip mining by passage of a state law. They objected
to stripping because it made hundreds of acres of "fine farming land" unfit
for cultivation, undermined the tax base, and threw deep miners out of work.
In the decades that followed, opposition spread beyond Boonville and, in
1941, Indiana became the second state (after West Virginia) to enact a control
law. This legislation was meant to head off growing support for a ban by
requiring "the conservation and improvement" of lands that had been strip
mined, setting up permitting and bonding procedures, establishing penalties
for violations of the law, and prohibiting classification of stripped areas
as forest lands for taxation purposes.1
Chad Montrie teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.
This article is drawn from his book, To Save the Land and People: A
History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia
(University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).
1. Coal Age, 6 (December 1914), 965; Ind. Acts
1941, ch. 68, 172; Robert C. Meiners, "Strip Mining Legislation," Natural
Resources Journal, 3 (January, 1964), 442-69.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 45
Farmers also played an important role in the early opposition
to coal surface mining in Ohio. Between World War I and the end of World
War II, strip mining caused extensive social and environmental devastation
in the eastern part of the state, ranging from massive out-migration of
local populations to acid mine drainage and sheet and gully erosion. Responding
to these adverse effects, farmers and other rural people organized and
lobbied for passage of the first state controls on stripping in 1947.
Their argument for regulatory legislation was threefold. They claimed
that coal surface mining threatened agricultural productivity and the
communities that farming sustained, violated God's injunction to be stewards
of the land, and destroyed the aesthetic virtues of a pastoral scene.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when the first legislation proved to be inadequate,
strip-mining opponents used similar arguments to pass stricter control
bills and improve enforcement by the state regulatory agency. By the 1970s,
however, farmers and their concerns were no longer prevalent in the opposition,
and the focus of coal surface mining opponents shifted from state to federal
action.
Although Ohio farmers' interest in the issue eventually
diminished, reconstructing their early opposition to stripping contributes
to the sparse literature detailing farmers' involvement in conservation
and modern environmental movements in general. Most histories of U.S.
environmental policy neglect to mention farmers at all, or they lump them
together with timber and mining companies dedicated to largescale resource
extraction. Some standard environmental histories, such as Donald Worster's
study of the Dust Bowl and Ann Vileisis' history of American Wetlands,
portray those who labor on the land for a living as too blinded by a desire
for material gain to accept ecological limits. But as environmental historians
make a greater effort to bring questions about class and equity into their
work, a modified interpretation is beginning to emerge. In his examination
of the roots of conservation in northern New England, Richard Judd contends
that some of the earliest concern about the physical and organic environment
actually came from nineteenth-century farmers. Combining a belief in democratic
access to and common stewardship of the land, an aggressive approach to
reshaping nature to serve human needs, and a pietistic, perfectionist
vision of natural order, farmers took the first steps in redressing New
Englanders' relationship to nature. The nineteenth and twentieth century
conservation movement did not originate with a social elite alienated
from the natural world, Judd argues, but with rural common people who
had a complex relationship to the land that was their home and livelihood.
Similarly, the early opposition to coal surface mining in Ohio came from
farmers and other rural people who depended on the land and
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 46
its productivity to sustain viable communities, who believed
that its stewardship was mandated by God, and who appreciated its beauty.
They sought controls on stripping because the mining threatened these
aspects of their relationship to the land, and in pushing for regulatory
legislation they made a small but important contribution to modern environmental
policy.2
Early
Impact and Initial Responses
Strip mining for coal probably began in Ohio in the late
eighteenth century, just as Americans began to move westward from New
England and the mid-Atlantic states. An advertisement in the Pittsburgh
Gazette, 12 August 1797, mentioned coal as an inducement for settlement
near Steubenville. "Sale of Lots," it read, "In the new County Town of
Fort Steuben, in the new county called Jefferson, on the bank of the river
Ohio. There is a Sawmill close to the town-and the abundance of Pitt Coal,
will render fuel a very cheap article forever." Since many of the Ohio
coal beds were near the surface, including the ones around Steubenville,
they could be mined by simply stripping off the overlying soil and rock,
known as the "overburden." Throughout the nineteenth century, many Ohio
farmers mined coal this way from seams on their own land, or nearby. In
the early twentieth century, however, coal surface mining underwent important
changes. Operators started buying or leasing land for the express purpose
of stripping it, and they began using fixed-boom steam shovels and diesel
draglines, which maneuvered large buckets by steel cables. This technology,
as well as the extension of railroad tracks into pits and the use of large
trucks, allowed for a dramatic expansion of the industry. In the early
1930s, Ohio had eighteen strip mines, which produced 800,000 tons of coal.
By the end of the decade the number of surface operations increased fourfold
and production tripled, making Ohio the fourth leading coal surface mining
state in the country. Expanded production during World War II boosted
output even more dramatically, to twenty million tons, and strip mining
2. "To farmers, loggers, and miners, and to mining and
manufacturing businesses," explains Richard Andrews, "nature was at best
the ordinary raw material of economic commodities and livelihoods, and
at worst a resistant or even threatening adversary, though as individuals
they might also enjoy hunting and fishing." Richard N. L. Andrews, Managing
the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental
Policy (New Haven, 1999), 210; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern
Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1982 [1979]); Ann Vileisis, The
Unknown Landscape: A History of America's Wetlands (Washington, D.C.,
1997); Richard Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation
in New England (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997).
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 47
edged closer toward eclipsing less efficient deep mining.
Between 1926 and 1947 the percentage of coal mined by stripping in Ohio
increased from 9 percent to 46 percent.3
As coal surface mining spread in the eastern part of the
state, it had a significant impact on land, water, and human communities.
Between 1921 and 1945, coal stripping in twenty-two counties directly
affected at least 22,750 acres and indirectly impacted nearly 5,000 acres.
In southeastern Ohio, where the topography ranges from hilly to steep,
the surface-mined land had little agricultural value, selling for as low
as $4 to $8 an acre. But the land in eastern Ohio proper was highly developed
farm and dairy land, especially in the wide fertile valleys of the river
basins, with a value of $100 an acre. Much of the strip mining in the
state was in this area, particularly Harrison and Jefferson Counties,
the leaders in production, as well as Columbiana and Tuscarawas Counties.
In these counties especially, unregulated strip mining ruined land for
future crop production and grazing. Early on, some strippers admitted
as much. In 1916 an anonymous author for Coal Age explained: "[T]he
coal stripping absolutely destroys the land for farming purposes. The
overburden, which is made up of soil, hard shale, clays, and more or less
solid limestone, is stacked up on the mined area by the big shovel in
ridges higher than the level of the undisturbed formation. This ground
is left so rough that it is extremely difficult to walk over it. The material
in these stacks is bottom up, as far as the soil is concerned. It is hard
to imagine what further use could be made of such land."4
Early twentieth-century strip operations in Ohio created
a rippled
3. Howard Evanson, The First Century and a Quarter
of American Coal Industry (Pittsburgh, 1942), 265; Geologists J.A.
Bownocker and Ethel S. Dean make numerous references to farmers using
surface mining techniques to extract coal for personal consumption and
for local sale. J.A. Bownocker and Ethel S. Dean, Analyses of the Coals
of Ohio, Geological Survey of Ohio, 4th Series, Bulletin 34 (1929),
6, 14, 20, 22-23, 27, 36, 173, 176, 182, 247, 273-74, 276, 284; Coal
Age, 9 (January 22, 1916), 161-62; U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals
Yearbook: 1939 (Washington, D.C., 1939), 791-95; U.S. Bureau of Mines,
Minerals Yearbook, Volume II, Fuels: 1948 (Washington, D.C.,
1950), 64, 310-11; The strip-mining operations in Ohio, from the early
twentieth century to the 1970s, are more accurately referred to as "area
strip mining." In the more mountainous parts of Appalachia strippers extracted
coal largely by "contour mining," following a seam around the contours
of a mountain. Beginning in the late 1940s, contour mining operations
were performed along with "auger mining," using huge augers to bore further
into a coal seam on a mountainside. Since the 1970s, operators in mountainous
areas have relied increasingly on "mountaintop removal," taking the top
of a mountain to expose a coal seam. In the eastern, unglaciated half
of Ohio, however, the topography is generally one of rolling hills with
some steep ridges. This terrain was and still is mined by area stripping
methods, making alternate cuts in parallel strips, exposing a coal seam
and placing the overburden of soil and rock in the previous cut.
4. Report of the Strip Mining Study Commission to the
Governor and the 97th General Assembly of the State of Ohio (January
15, 1947), 10; Coal Age, 9 (January, 1916), 162.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 48
landscape and reshuffled the soil layers. They also exposed
acid silt shales and increased erosion. Consequently, nearby streams were
contaminated by acid mine drainage as well as silt, killing off aquatic
life. Acid contamination of ground water also threatened local water supplies.
Several small communities, including Cadiz, Wellsville, Sugar Creek, and
Smithfield, took their municipal water supply from wells close to stripping
operations, and some were forced to implement expensive filtration and
chemical treatment. Where acid drainage was acute there was fear that
communities would eventually be forced to import treated surface water,
which would have been a considerable expense. In a few southeastern counties
calcareous shales and limestone in the overburden neutralized the acid.
But these spoils often had their own unique problem, containing clay and
clay-forming shales that made for tight, impervious, poorly aerated soil
after disintegration and settling.5
Because it degraded farm and dairy land, strip mining
also affected the tax base of counties. Once mining was completed some
operators simply abandoned mine sites and defaulted on their taxes. In
other cases, depreciated property values reduced revenues. There were
large increases in valuation when strip mining began, with new valuations
ranging from $60 to $300 an acre. In tax dollars this could translate
into an increase of more than $2 per acre. But after a year or two, with
the mining finished, county auditors devalued the land to $5 and $15 an
acre, and tax revenues declined precipitously to as low as five cents
per acre. In the case of Tuscarawas County, none of the land which had
been stripped up to 1947 was in tax delinquency. But between 1915 and
1940,
5. Acid mine drainage varied depending on the spoil-bank
composition. There are three primary types of spoil banks in Ohio. Group
One spoil banks, the glacial till soils, are above the line of glaciation,
in Mahoning, Columbiana, Portage, Stark, Wayne, Holmes, the western part
of Coshocton, and the northwest portions of Perry and Hocking counties.
This overburden is primarily composed of noncalcareous till, residual
sandstone, and acid silt shale. Group Two spoil banks are in the unglaciated
portion of Ohio, including southern Columbiana, Carroll, Tuscarawas, Coshocton,
Muskingum, Perry, Hocking, Vinton, Jackson, Scioto, western Harrison,
and western Guernsey Counties. The overburden in these areas is formed
by sandstone and silt shales. The resulting spoils have a low clay content
and, due to their friability, water-holding capacity, and aeration, they
hold out the possibility of reforestation. Group Three spoils are located
in unglaciated counties of Jefferson, Harrison, Belmont, eastern Guernsey,
Morgan, Washington, and Adams, where the overburden is comprised of sandstone,
marly clay shales, and limestones in addition to the material of the soil
profile. Percentages of the calcareous shales and limestones are great
enough to produce highly calcareous spoils. Quantities of clay and clay-forming
shale are sufficiently great in many places to effect a tight, impervious,
poorly aerated material upon disintegration and settling. Report of
Strip Mining Study Commission, 13-15; Julian Feldman, "The Development
of a Regulatory Policy for the Coal Stripping Industry in Ohio" (Master's
thesis, The Ohio State University, 1950), 28.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 49
coal-stripped land in the county suffered a 94 percent
decline in assessed valuation. This compared with a 22 percent decline
in the valuation of agricultural land.6
A survey of a strip-mined farm in Tuscarawas County, drawn
from a set of four case studies done by Charles Victor Riley in the mid-1940s,
is illustrative of the damage done as a whole to the land and its inhabitants.
The land Riley labeled "Unit II" had a topography of rolling to hilly
and in 1915 was a farm of 168 acres, with three orchards and two grazed
woodlots of approximately fourteen acres. At the time the land was assessed
at $7,290, or $43 per acre, but three years later the farm was sold to
Wayne Coal Company for $16,800. By the late 1940s Unit II was classified
as abandoned farmland, with fifty-five of the original 168 acres stripped
or affected by mining operations. Full-time farming had been discontinued
in 1918 and the fields were covered with poverty grass, goldenrod, cinquefoil,
broom sedge, aster, sheep sorrel, and other opportunistic plants. All
the fields suffered from severe sheet and gully erosion, with gullies
varying from three to fifteen feet deep and from six to sixteen feet wide
at the top. Soil samples indicated a pH ranging between 4.7 and 5.9, making
it acidic, and available phosphorous and potassium were low. Of the two
small streams crossing the unit, one was polluted by mine waste. In this
condition, the assessed value of the land in 1940 was $1,059.46, or $10.29
per acre. In 1946, the gross income from the property was $115, most of
which came from an oil lease. Typical of stripped land throughout eastern
Ohio, Unit II was practically worthless after coal operators had finished
with it.7
The devastating impact on farm land raises a question
about why property owners would lease or sell to coal surface mining companies.
Operators maintained that farms were being abandoned coincidentally at
the same time they developed an interest in mining. This was probably
true to some extent. Between 1935 and 1945, Harrison County alone lost
420 farms, and the number of acres farmed declined from 215,000 to 195,000
during the war.8 Not all of these and other losses of farm and dairy production
in Ohio were due entirely to stripping, yet surface mining in a local
area was often an important factor in a farmer's decision to sell off
crop or grazing land. Residents frequently banded
6. HR. Moore and R.C. Headington, Agricultural and
Land Use as Affected by Strip Mining of Coal in Eastern Ohio (Ohio
State University Department of Rural Economics, Bulletin No. 135), 36,
in Feldman, "The Development," 66; Charles Victor Riley, "An Ecological
and Economic Study of Coal Stripped Land in Eastern Ohio" (Master's thesis,
Ohio State University, 1947), 147.
7. Riley, "An Ecological and Economic Study," 47-57.
8. Cadiz Republican, 13 September 1945.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 50
together to resist selling out to strippers initially,
but once isolated individuals began to sell the process could snowball
until an area was nearly depopulated. H. L. Bower, the Master of the Harrison
County Grange in the mid-1940s, explained one particular case of a dairy
farmer: "I don't know as [Mr. Griffon] thought he could get more money
[by selling to a strip operator rather than farming] but everybody else
was selling, and it was to his advantage to get out of there and he moved
to town, he was an elderly man, he was about past working, and he moved
to town, and his son moved to the west part of the state."9 In other cases,
farmers were hard-pressed just coming out of the Depression or were simply
enticed by the money offered by strip mine operators. They were reluctant
to insist on reclamation procedures, however, for fear the coal company
would not buy the land or, in the case of a lease, lower the royalty payments.
As a result, without a state law stipulating reclamation procedures, between
a third and a half of the lands surface mined before 1947 were not reclaimed
in any way. When operators did reclaim they often did little more than
attempt typically unsuccessful reforestation, without leveling the spoil
banks.10
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, reclamation of surface-mined
lands was promoted by state agricultural experiment stations, while the
problem of acid mine drainage was addressed largely by engineering experiment
stations and the U.S. Public Health Service. These agencies carried on
their own research and funded other studies, investigating the possibilities
for establishing forests, creating wildlife havens, and constructing recreational
lakes at former strip sites. In 1937, the U.S. Forest Service established
the Central States Forest Experiment Station, which quickly took the primary
role in research on reforestation of stripped lands. With its headquarters
in Columbus, most of the work of the agency was concentrated in Ohio until
1946, when it began conducting studies in other states in the Central
region as well, particularly Indiana and Illinois. In 1940, six large
coal companies with operations in Ohio formed the Ohio Reclamation Committee
to facilitate their participation in government research as well as to
provide a cooperative forest planting service to its members. The organization
was renamed the Ohio Reclamation Association in 1945, when it had a membership
of thirty-one stripping companies, which combined performed 65 percent
of the coal surface mining in the state. By 1947,
9. Report of the Strip Mining Study Commission,
12.
10. Feldman, "The Development," 85; Jack K. Hill, "Social
and Economic Implications of Strip Mining in Harrison County" (Master's
thesis, The Ohio State University, 1965), 61-62.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 51
the Association had planted 1.8 million trees on spoil
banks and surrounding areas. Yet none of these spoil banks were leveled
before planting and, rather than supply saw timber, the Association claimed
that the forests were meant to produce mine props and posts for underground
coal mining. Most of the agricultural land disturbed by strip mining could
not be restored for crop farming by merely leveling spoil banks anyhow.
It might be converted to grazing land that way, but even this was only
being done on a very limited scale.11
Responding to the lack of reclamation in some areas and
its inadequacy in many others, William F. Daugherty, a Democratic member
of the House of Representatives from Wellsville (Columbiana County), introduced
the first strip-mine control bill in the Ohio legislature in 1937. The
bill provided that future strip-mine contracts, for the extraction of
coal as well as other minerals, include provisions for "the replacement
and leveling up of the earth ... so that the land is left in substantially
the same condition after the completion of the mining operations as it
was before the mining operations began." By exclusively regulating strip-mining
contracts, however, the act would not have affected operations in which
the land was purchased outright. It also failed to establish administrative
machinery to insure enforcement and some of its standards for reclamation
were vague enough to be left open to wide interpretation by the courts.
As weak as it was, Daugherty's bill never made it out of the House Conservation
Committee. Two state senators from eastern Ohio proposed similar legislation
in 1939 and 1941, with the added requirement of a performance bond equal
to or greater than the tax assessment valuation of the land to be mined,
but their bills also died in committee. Following these initial regulatory
efforts, war-created demand led to the spread of unregulated coal surface
mining and a dramatic increase in production.12
With peace declared in 1945, there was a renewed attempt
to impose controls on the industry. In that year the state legislature
considered five different bills to regulate strip mining, all of which
dealt only with coal and each of which were introduced by legislators
from eastern Ohio counties. Only one of the proposals reached the House
floor, where it was debated and amended. This measure was sponsored by
Representatives J. A. Gordon of Cadiz (Harrison County), Gilbert N. Frash
of Malta (Morgan County), C. A. Craig of Cambridge (Guernsey
11. David Brooks, "Strip Mine Reclamation and Economic
Analysis," Natural Resources Journal, 6 (January, 1966), 18-19;
James Bristow, "Wildlife Havens from Strip Mines," Outdoor America
(April-June, 1943), 42-44; Feldman, "The Development," 86-87; Report
of the Strip Mining Study Commission, 11-12.
12. Coal Age, 40 (February, 1935), 60-62; Feldman,
"The Development," 99-100.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 52
County)all Republicansand C. T. McCort, a
Democrat of St. Clairsville (Belmont County). Their bill required operators
to post a bond of $100 per acre, level mine sites to "pre-existing contour,"
and make a quarterly deposit of six cents per ton of coal mined with the
county auditor, a small part of which was to fund reseeding. In June,
when the proposal came up for debate on the House floor, amendments halved
the bond requirements, weakened replanting provisions, and established
safeguards for operators to the right of appeal from administrative decisions.
Yet even in this watered-down form the bill was voted down 5853.13
Ten days after defeat of the Gordon proposal the legislature
passed Senate Bill 344, establishing a Strip Mining Study Commission (SMSC)
to investigate the need for controls on the industry and to draft another
regulatory bill based on their findings. The Commission was to be composed
of nine members, three from each house chosen by the president pro tempore,
with no more than two of those of the same political party, and three
public members designated by the Governor. Some of the members selected
had ties to strip-mine operators while others were proponents of strong
regulation, including Representative J. A. Gordon, Milton Ronsheim (the
crusading editor of the Cadiz Republican), Edwin J. Bath (former
Director of Legislation and Public Affairs for the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation),
and W. A. Stinchcomb (Director-Secretary of the Cleveland Metropolitan
Park District). After holding its initial meeting in October, 1945, the
SMSC conducted a number of inspection tours the following month in fifteen
Ohio counties as well as areas in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, states
which had already passed control legislation. Formal hearings before the
Commission began in December in Columbus, providing an opportunity for
both opponents and proponents of regulation, as well as supposedly impartial
experts in the fields of agronomy, conservation, forestry, and taxation,
to make their case. Twenty-five witnesses spoke in favor of regulation,
sixteen appeared in opposition, and fourteen gave "neutral" testimony.
Although tours and hearings did little to change the views of individual
Commission members, in the following year they agreed on the draft of
a report that included another control measure.14
The SMSC bill regulated surface mining operations producing
250 tons of coal or other minerals in one year. It required mine or quarry
13.Ibid., 100-06.
14. Ibid., 110-13; Report of the Strip Mining Study
Commission, 6. Unfortunately, the testimony for the SMSC hearings
has been lost and the arguments of the witnesses are available only second-hand,
by way of the Commission's Report and Julian Feldman's thesis.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 53
operators to secure a license for a small fee, put up
a bond of $100 per acre with a $1,000 minimum and a five-year liability,
cover all exposed coal seams with a minimum of three feet of earth, bury
all pyritic shale, seal off any breakthrough to underground workings in
a coal seam, provide access roads for fire control, plant a cover crop
of trees or grasses on the banks, and level off peaks and ridges of spoil
banks to a minimum width of fifteen feet cross section. This last provision
caused some controversy among SMSC members, with Gordon, Ronsheim, Bath,
Stinchcomb, and Clingan Jackson in favor of it, and the four others opposed.
But otherwise, the Commission reached a consensus on the legislative proposal.
In a separate recommendation, the SMSC also suggested that the chief of
the Division of Mines be charged with licensing and regulating the strippers
and the director of the Agricultural Experiment Station be given authority
to administer all planting and any other reclamation.15
The Commission delivered its report to Governor Herbert
and, in January 1947, he presented it to the General Assembly and urged
passage of the recommended control bill. Strip mining could not be prohibited,
he said in an address to the legislators, but "it would be the height
of folly for the people of Ohio to spend large sums of money to conserve
natural resources and at the same time to permit unscrupulous operators
to mine coal in a manner which is in complete conflict with the general
policy of conservation." Bills modeled on the SMSC proposal were then
introduced in each house, including one by Clingan Jackson, a senator
and member of the Commission, and another by Ray White, a member of the
House and Democratic newspaper editor from Holmes County. Their proposed
legislation was virtually identical to one another except for the size
of the bond and the financial liability of the operator in terms of revegetation.
Jackson's bill called for a bond of $100 per acre and a replanting liability
of $50 per acre, while White's bill set a $200 bond and $100 replanting
obligation. In the House, efforts to lower the size of the bond failed,
but amendments exempted operators mining less than 250 tons per year and
allowed for replanting to be waived by the director of the Agricultural
Experiment Station.16
When debate moved to the Senate Conservation Committee,
Evert E. Addison, a Columbus (Franklin County) Republican and chairman
of the SMSC, offered two amendments to eliminate the provisions that required
coal operators to level spoil banks and cover exposed coal seams.
15.Ibid., 23-33.
16. Cadiz Republican, 30 January 1947; Feldman,
"The Development," 43, 45, 116-18.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 54
Committee members rejected these changes but they did
lower the bond to $100 per acre and set replanting liability at $50 per
acre, in line with Jackson's bill and the recommendations of the Commission.
Addison and several other lawmakers then walked out of the meeting before
the Committee recommended passage of the modified act, House Bill 314,
on a 6-0 vote. In June, the full Senate passed the proposed legislation
on a 32-2 vote, with one of the "nays" cast by Coshocton Senator Carl
Schurtz, who took the position that the bill was too weak. On June 14,
the House concurred with the changes made and, shortly after, a conference
bill went to Governor Herbert for his signature.17
In addition to setting bond amounts, defining the liability
for revegetation, and exempting small operators, House Bill 314 included
provisions explaining the need for the law and elaborating on what would
be required of operators. The bill's preface deemed the legislation "an
exercise of the police powers of the state for the public safety, the
public health and the general welfare of the people" by providing for
the conservation and improvement of stripped land, aiding in the protection
of wildlife, decreasing soil erosion and floods, and aiding in the prevention
of pollution of lakes and waterways. The law was to become effective January
1, 1948, after which all coal stripping companies would be required to
apply to the chief of the Division of Mines for an annual permit and pay
a $50 fee. The penalty for operating without a permit was $100 to $1,000,
with each day counted as a separate violation. Operators were also required
to submit a detailed report one month after stripping began and six months
after completion of the mining. Bonds would be released after satisfactory
restoration, as determined by the Experiment Station director on inspection
of the site one year after leveling and replanting. Restoration standards
were similar to the practices specified in the SMSC report, including
leveling "off peaks and ridges of spoil banks to minimum width of fifteen
feet cross section," planting trees, shrubs, or grasses (as recommended
by the director of the Experiment Station), covering coal faces, and sealing
breakthroughs to deep mines. Forfeited bonds, including those covering
mines where restoration was not completed within five years after mining
ceased, were to be deposited in a reclamation fund. Monies of the fund
would be made available to the Agricultural Experiment Station for restoration
of abandoned sites.18
17. Columbus Dispatch, 6 June 1947.
18. Ohio Laws 1947, p.730; Feldman, "The Development,"
118-20.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 55
"The
People" and Their Arguments
During the process leading up to passage of H.B. 314,
proponents of regulatory legislation promoted their position in various
ways, both as individuals and as groups. Milton Ronsheim, the Harrison
County editor of the Cadiz Republican, was the sparkplug of the
effort for controls. He routinely published stories and editorials on
coal surface mining in his paper through the 1930s and 1940s, he convinced
Frank Lausche to take up the issue of strip-mine controls during Lausche's
successful campaign for Governor in 1944, and he served on the Strip Mine
Study Commission. Throughout the debate and campaign for controls in the
1940s, Ronsheim tended to see the effort to pass a strip mine bill as
a contest between vested coal interests and common people typically locked
out of the political process. "The demand for legislation to regulate
coal stripping has come from the people," he declared, "with no money,
no organization and no lobbyists in Columbus, such as the operators have."
The campaign was "a cry for self preservation."19
Once aware of the degradation caused by coal surface mining,
Lausche himself began a personal crusade for regulation. Speaking in Cadiz,
Ohio, in the summer of 1945, he described strip mining as "sheer butchery,
disemboweling of the land and leaving its ugly entrails exhibited to the
naked eye." The hillsides and streams, Lausche declared, "must be kept
as the homes of the people." Earlier that year, during his first term
as Governor, he had played an important role in the emphasis put on control
bills during the legislative session. Later, in 1947, he was instrumental
in passage of the bill establishing the study commission, and he selected
its public members. His appointments to the SMSCRonsheim, Bath,
and Stinchcombwere ardent supporters of regulation of the strip
mining industry and their presence certainly made for stronger legislation
in the end. Lausche also set the tone for the work of the Commission when,
prior to the organization meeting in October, the members met in his office
and he told them that no problem in Ohio was "more acute and more deserving
of attention" than the damage from coal surface mining.20
The most important groups involved in the campaign for
regulatory legislation were farmers' organizations, particularly the Ohio
State Grange, Ohio Farm Bureau, and their respective county chapters.
Most
19. Cadiz Republican, 21 June 1945.
20. Senator Lausehe to Charles M. Perry, 14 February 1964,
Box 165, Frank J. Lausche Papers, The Ohio Historical Society; Cadiz
Republican, 39 August 1945, and 25 October 1945.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 56
of those who offered testimony before the study commission
in December 1945, and at Senate hearings in March 1947, were farmers'
representatives. Other prominent groups echoed the sentiments and arguments
expressed by the Grange and Farm Bureau leaders, while also raising issues
of their own. These others included national and local sportsmens' organizations,
a statewide group of rural pastors, the state organization of County Commissioners
and its Associations, the Federated Women's Clubs of Ohio, organized homeowners,
and the Teamsters union. Both major political parties also adopted planks
in their platforms supporting the creation of a study commission as well
as regulation. Independent of these organizations and parties, members
of farm families and sympathetic persons from their communities participated
in lobbying for passage of strip-mine legislation by writing letters and
sending telegrams to the governor and state legislators.
The arguments the Ohio farmers and other rural dwellers
made for regulatory legislation in the 1940s can be grouped into three
categories: economic, spiritual, and aesthetic. First and foremost, proponents
of controls on stripping were interested in protecting the agricultural
productivity of the land, not only to sustain individual material gain
but also to preserve the integrity of rural life. As one Whipple, Ohio,
resident simply put it, "I think our country would be better fit for farming."
Those in favor of regulation maintained that farmers worked the soil with
a long-term perspective and their ability to continue to use the land
productively was intimately linked to the stability of local communities.
Strippers, on the other hand, were purportedly motivated by greed and
had little interest in either the health of the soil or the well-being
of the surrounding communities. Support for state regulation was also
based on a belief in the land as a creation of God, which carried with
it a mandate for stewardship. Control advocates portrayed strippers as
violators of this mandate, desecrators of sanctified land, and they counter-posed
farmers as the more legitimate caretakers of the natural world. Finally,
the push for regulatory legislation was a matter of aesthetics as well.
The gouging of the earth to get at coal seams violated the beauty of the
land. Unencumbered by any law requiring reclamation, the farmers and other
rural dwellers maintained, mine sites were left as barren testaments to
strippers' disregard for the aesthetic pleasures of the hills.21
The most common argument proponents of regulation made
concerned agricultural productivity and competing land use, and the links
these had to community stability. In 1943, the Ohio State Grange
21. James Lent to Representative O'Neill, 19 May 1947,
Folder "Strip Mining," Box 2, William C. O'Neill Papers, The Ohio Historical
Society.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 57
Conservation Committee noted that strip mining left "the
land in a condition which is untillable and not suited to good agriculture
and conservation practices," and it called for cooperation with unspecified
agencies in solving this problem. Three years later the committee expressed
opposition to "the needless destruction and wanton waste of natural resources
being brought about by strip mine operations," and recommended immediate
remedial legislation. In 1947, the Deputy Master of the Morgan County
Grange, representing 200 members of twenty-two local Granges, explained
his county organization's position. "We believe that strip mining is a
menace to the agriculture and the very life of our county," he wrote,
"unless some control measure is taken." As with apparently all other eastern
Ohio County Grange and Farm Bureau chapters, as well as the state organizations,
the Morgan County Grange favored H.B. 314 to save eastern Ohio agriculture.
But even sportsmen's organizations emphasized the harm strip mining did
to good farm land. "The membership of the Western Tuscarawas Game Association,"
its president explained to Governor Herbert, "feel that in the interest
of the State of Ohio, our County and the heritage to be handed to our
children, there must be some regulations provided for the Strip Mining
of Coal ... Strip Mines must level their Spoil Banks and the land put
in a tillable condition."22
Linked to the argument about land use was the notion that
farming, unlike coal strip mining, sustained communities. A petition signed
by forty-five people and transmitted by John E. Thompson, pastor of a
church in Beverly, Ohio, made this connection. "We the undersigned," it
read, "view with deep concern the vast strip mining operations being carried
on in Noble, Guernsey and Harrison Counties. These operations [are] resulting
in the disfigurement of the country side-causing valuable acres of farm
lands to be taken out of agricultural productivityreducing the population
of these communities, and creating serious economic conditions in these
communities." As H. L. Bower put it in the case of the Harrison County
dairy farmer who sold out, mentioned above, "The community, as a whole,
has suffered a very distinct loss because of the fact that, not saying
anything about the money value, Mr. Griffon was a very good citizen of
the community.
22. Journal of the Proceedings of the Ohio State Grange
(1943), 85 (hereafter cited as JPOSG) ; JPOSG (1946), 119; John R. Schofield
to Governor Herbert, 10 June 1947, and H.D. Gerber to Governor Herbert,
25 May 1947 Folder "HB 314 To Regulate Strip Mining," Box 23, Thomas J.
Herbert Papers, The Ohio Historical Society (hereafter cited as Herbert
Papers); County chapters of the Ohio Farm Bureau in support of HR 314
included: Ashtabula, Athens, Belmont, Columbiana, Delaware, Gallia, Guernsey,
Harrison, Knox, Meigs, Morgan, Morrow, Muskingum, Perry, Pike, Portage,
Richland, Ross, Seneca, Stark, Trumbull, Tuscarawas, and Washington.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 58
That community, I might say, is almost wiped out." Farmers'
organizations and rural eastern Ohioans argued that farming was better
than strip mining for the community because it involved a long-term interest
in the land, as opposed to a desire for short-term profits that was supposedly
characteristic of strip operations. A hardware store owner in Athens County
explained, "If the income from a ruined farm could be computed over the
next hundred years in dollars and cents it would be many more times than
the few quick dollars made by destroying absolutely the land." Other critics
dismissed the claims made by surface miners that their motives could not
be reduced to simple greed. Attempting to dispel the notion that strip
operators had increased production during the war as an act of patriotism,
a Perry County Commissioner and small-scale stripper told the Strip Mining
Study Commission, "They did it for profits and nothing else." Somewhat
along these lines, Morgan County Herald editor W. D. Matson brought
the developing Cold War into the debate. "People of Morgan county," he
wrote, "the Russians are not going to buzz-bomb us-we are to be mined
out of our homes and our Fatherland despoiled by American coal barons
who seem to care nothing for aught but the dollar sign."23
Proponents of regulation also made an argument that God
had given people the land and its resources to use but not to destroy.
Many called strip mining a crime against God, including the hardware store
owner quoted above. These same control advocates also suggested that failing
to be Christian stewards by disrupting the harmonies of the God-made land
would bring retribution. As would be expected, rural pastors from eastern
Ohio were most forceful in making spiritual arguments against strip mining.
One resolution sent to the state Public Affairs Department by pastors
from Harrison and neighboring counties stated:
Believing the Creation of the Human Family and the Sacred
Soil to be the Divine work of our Father god; Believing that Life and
the Fruits of the Soil are inseparable and that each are a trust in
our hands from God; And recognizing the extensive and unchecked destruction
of great areas of farm pasture land by the strip mining of coal, with
its consequent undermining of community life and land values for generations
to come in those areas of our State; We again advocate the control and
regulation of strip mining by our state government.24
23. Petition sent to Governor Herbert from John E. Thompson,
19 March 1947, and Fred S. Wheaton to Governor Herbert, 24 May 1947, Folder
"HB 314 To Regulate Strip Mining," Box 23, Herbery Papers; Feldman, "The
Development," 31; Cadiz Republican, 20 December 1945; W.D. Matson
editorial included with letter, Milton Ronsheim to Governor Herbert, 13
May 1947, Folder "HB 314 To Regulate Strip Mining," Box 23, Herbert Papers.
24. Cadiz Republican, 7 February 1945.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 59
From the pastors' point of view, farming was not a threat
to a natural, God-designed equilibrium, but strip mining certainly was.
Some of the same religious leaders also used their moral weight and positions
of influence to make non-spiritual arguments against coal surface mining.
In January 1945, the Annual Ohio Pastors Convention, with 2,300 Protestant
Ohio pastors registered, unanimously passed a resolution demanding regulatory
legislation. Controls were needed, the resolution explained, "to provide
for public health and safety and to properly protect both private and
public property rights and to insure the usefulness of land" impaired
by stripping for coal and other resources.25
Additionally, farmers and other rural people in eastern
Ohio were proponents of regulation because they viewed strip mining as
destructive to aesthetic qualities of the landscape. Speaking at a Harrison
County Farm Bureau picnic in 1945, representing the state organization,
Herbert Evans pointed to the surrounding soon-to-be stripped hills and
exclaimed, "The farmer says it's all right to take the coal out of these
hills but they must not be left an unsightly dump." In a letter to the
Cadiz Republican, a Mrs. Householder, a Harrisville resident, described
the changed aesthetics she saw on her car trips through eastern Ohio stripmine
country. "Until now the ride from Harrisville to Cadiz and over other
nearby roads was a pleasure," she wrote. "The lovely farms, with the green
fields, nice homes and outbuildings, stock grazing, and every thing to
make the trip pleasant. Now we go when we have to for it's no pleasure
to see where those lovely fields have been turned upside down, farm homes
destroyed and in their places those awful unsightly piles of dirt, that
never can be restored to their original beauty." For Mrs. Householder
and others, coal surface mining meant the disappearance of a beloved and
beautiful pastoral scene.26
Strip mine control advocates also made all or a combination
of these argumentabout agricultural productivity, Christian stewardship,
and aesthetic ruinat once. In 1945, Joseph Fichter, Master of the
Ohio State Grange, addressed delegates at the organization's annual meeting:
"How long will it be before we learn that exploitation of people and of
our God-given natural resources does not pay? We have a conservation problem
in Ohio which is the result of the exploitation of land and water resources.
The defacing of land and the displacement of farm homes through strip
mining of coal cause us to resort to demand for government regulation
in order to prevent such waste." Though reluctant to bring the
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 30 August 1945; letter to the editor from Mrs.
CE. Householder, Cadiz Republican, 25 July 1945.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 60
state into the problem, Fichter and other conservative
farmers saw no other way to deal with the sinful exploitation of the land,
destruction of rural communities, and impairment of scenic beauty by coal
surface miners. Hence, they played a central role in passage of the first
regulatory legislation addressing the problems of stripping.27
Shifting
Opposition
Once it was signed by the Governor, coal operators denounced
the 1947 control law and filed a suit in court to test its constitutionality.
But when Frank Lausche was elected Governor again in 1948, opponents and
proponents of the control legislation met at his urging to craft a compromise.
One morning James Hyslop, then vice president of Hanna Coal Co., showed
up at the Cadiz Republican offices to tell Milton Ronsheim that
his company was through fighting and "the coal people" wanted an "agreed"
bill. Ronsheim cleared some clutter off his desk and the two sat down
for the first of several long sessions to draft new control legislation.
The newspaper editor later claimed that the bill they wrote "left much
to be desired," but the operators dropped their law suit and agreed to
the general principle of reclamation in return for amending the earlier
law. The compromise measure met no opposition from the coal lobby in the
legislature and, with only minor noncontroversial changes in phrasing
in committee, it sailed through both houses in June and July, 1949.28
Other amendments were made to the 1949 law during the
following decades, often in response to pressure from the Ohio Grange
and Farm Bureau. In 1952, the Conservation Committee of the Ohio Grange
bemoaned the lack of enforcement of the regulatory legislation, and its
rhetoric echoed earlier complaints. Strip operators had ruined the productivity
of two million acres of lands formerly devoted to farming and forestry,
the committee insisted, and since most of these lands were devalued for
tax purposes they had become financial liabilities for those counties
where they were located. As a solution to these problems, the Grange advocated
transferring administration of the control law to the newly created Division
of Lands and Soils within the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR).
A year later, in 1953, the Conservation Committee claimed that "land in
the strip mining areas of Ohio are [sic] left in such condition that it
is practically worthless," and called for
27. JPOSG (1945), 28-29.
28. Feldman, "The Development," 120-26; Cleveland Plain
Dealer, 10 April 1966.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 61
leveling of land by the operators for farming where practicable
and reforestation where not. The Division was transferred to the ODNR
in 1959, but at the end of the decade the Grange was still demanding that
the agency "require the strip mine operators to improve the restoration
and leveling of their spoil banks so as to leave them in good condition
for seeding and planting trees."29
The Ohio Farm Bureau also continued to advocate for better
enforcement and improved control legislation. In 1965, the legislative
representatives for both the Grange and the Bureau convinced the General
Assembly to overhaul stripmine regulations. But the new controls included
an only slightly less vague requirement to grade spoil banks "so as to
reduce the peaks thereof and reduce the depressions between the peaks
of such spoil banks to a gently rolling, sloping, or terraced topography."
The act also charged operators with responsibility for clearing the surface
of large rocks or other obstructions to permit the operation of farm machinery
and make the area more suitable for revegetation, and it included a provision
requiring the prevention of acid mine drainage and siltation of streams,
"if possible," on adjoining lands. Despite this latter provision, delegates
to the 1966 Annual Ohio Farm Bureau convention adopted a policy statement
calling for legislation protecting landowners from silt on adjacent strip
mines. The delegates had received reports of damages resulting from silt
and clay washing onto lands and the difficulties farmers had getting reimbursement.
Following passage of the resolution, the Bureau sponsored a bill granting
the chief of the Division of Reclamation the right to deny a license to
strip mine operators when he judged that operation might result in damage
to neighboring land. But two years later, the farmers' organization was
still insisting on strict enforcement of reclamation laws and, like the
Grange, calling for the broadening of controls to cover other types of
surface mining besides coal. 30
By the late 1960s, Ohio farmers and their designated representatives
were being displaced as the primary advocates of surface-mine controls.
As agriculture declined in the eastern Ohio strip-mine counties, many
of the new opposition leaders in the state were self-styled conservationists
and environmentalists. Their concerns were somewhat different from those
of the farmers. At a 1970 stripmining symposium in Cadiz, Ohio, for example,
most of the 400 participants were students, and symposium
29.JPOSG (1952), 103-104; JPOSG (1953);
JPOSG (1960), 71-72; Ohio Laws, 1959, 1231.
30. Ohio Acts, 1965, Amendments to Section 1513, 495-96,
503; Fed-O-Gram (April, 1965), 3; Buckeye Farm News (January,
1969), 31.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 62
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A
Hanna Coal Company stripping shovel removes overburden from a coal
seam. (Sc 1 539, OHIO HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTIONS.)
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sponsors included the Ohio Conservation Foundation, the
League of Ohio Sportsmen, the Ohio Audubon Council, as well as the Sierra
Club's state chapter. When the Hanna Coal Company expanded its stripping
operations in Belmont County in 1972, it drew opposition from the newly
formed Citizens Organized to Defend the Environment (CODE) and the somewhat
older Appalachian Ohio Research and Information Group. The two groups
articulated a critique of Hanna's strip mining that blended familiar economic
concerns with increasingly prevalent environmental concerns. They objected
to the subordination of the public good to private interests, but they
were also alarmed "at the serious disruption of the intricate ecological
balances, the stability of which were produced only through millions of
years of natural processes."31
Members of CODE and other Ohio groups concerned about
coal surface mining also became disillusioned with state remedies. Beginning
in the early 1970s, activists from various Appalachian states began to
create a regional movement for federal action, with some proposing
31. Times Leader (Martins Ferry and Bellaire, Ohio),
7 December 1970; Mountain Life and Work, 49 (January, 1973), 18.
Ohio Farmers' Opposition to Coal Surface
Mining
Page 63
regulatory legislation and others demanding abolition.
In October 1971, opponents from Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Virginia
met in Huntington, West Virginia, to form the Appalachian Coalition, which
would coordinate efforts to ban stripping at the national level. In June
1972, 900 activists gathered at the Environmental Center of Union College,
in Middlesboro, Kentucky, for a National Conference on Strip Mining. This
conference drew some of the most prominent members of a growing opposition
movement and produced a resolution for federal regulatory legislation
that was delivered to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
By the mid-1970s, then, there were few opponents of strip mining who still
seriously considered working on state-level regulation, but the early
concern expressed by the likes of Ohio farmers had been an important step
forward in the campaign for federal government intervention.32
32. Mountain Life and Work, 47 (February, 1971),
15; Carole Malisiak to Ken Hechier, 24 August 1971, Folder 8, "Strip Mining,"
Box 169, Ken Hechler Manuscript Collection, Morrow Library, Marshall University.
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