Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [28]
Middlesboro shed its most grandiose aspirations (along with most of its wealthier residents) and settled down to the hardscrabble life of an Appalachian company town. The place more closely resembled a remote settlement of impoverished wage earners than a conventional urban or rural place. The local government carried a heavy debt; without a penny in the treasury, the city routinely paid its schoolteachers and other employees in devalued city scrip. The rest of Middlesboro’s breadwinners, with the exception of the factory superintendents and a small professional class, scratched out a living where they could, doing day labor and working for the mines, works, and factories that still operated. European immigrants had helped build Middlesboro, but almost everyone who stayed was a southern-born American. More than one fifth of the city’s 3,500 residents were African American.
Middlesboro heeded southern racial norms, with segregated schools and much of the black population consigned to work in the meanest jobs and to live in the thickly settled sections known as “Alabama Row” and “Over the Rhine.” (The latter name recalled a defunct German brewery that had once perfumed the area with the sweet stench of hops.) In the fall of 1897, the everyday life of Middlesboro was tied more closely than ever to the furnaces and the mines that fed them. In mid-November, the local newspapers buzzed with the first really good news that anyone had heard in a long time. The Ducktown iron mines over Cumberland Mountain were set to reopen. Soon trains would carry ten cars a day loaded with ore to Middlesboro. The furnaces would run at full blast again: “Prosperity is certainly coming to this section,” the Middlesboro Weekly Herald promised.17
Prosperity never came. Smallpox did.
It started in the Over the Rhine section. In late October, an African American miner named Scott had left the smallpox-infested coal camps around Birmingham and traveled more than three hundred miles for a new job in the Mingo Mines, located just across the border from Middlesboro in Tennessee. He found housing in the Over the Rhine section. Scott was a member of a fast-growing occupation. The number of black miners and quarrymen in the United States doubled during the 1890s. Like the vast majority of African Americans (roughly 90 percent), most of them lived in the southern states. And like roughly one third of all African American breadwinners at the end of the nineteenth century, they worked at least part of the year in nonagricultural occupations, often in rural industries such as mining, turpentine production, and lumbering. The age of Carnegie generated enormous demand for coal. And the rapidly expanding southern railroad network brought southern coal reserves within easier reach of the national market. In southern Appalachia, the coal-rich region stretching from central Alabama to West Virginia, one third of all miners were African American. The work was dirty and dangerous, the jobs mostly nonunion, the bosses white. Typically the first let go when business slowed, a black miner like Scott had to be ready to move.18
Although he had no way of knowing it, he carried a bit of Birmingham with him when he did. A Marine-Hospital Service surgeon stationed in Birmingham during the smallpox epidemics of 1897–98 described black miners as “the great disseminators of infection. Essentially itinerant, they travel from mining camp to mining camp, from town to town, carrying the disease with them.” About a week after his arrival at Mingo, Scott came down with a fever and chills. A week later came the eruption. Someone called