Lafayette historian Nicholas Bernhard was fascinated by the story of the six local coal miners killed during a 1927 strike by state militia at Erie’s Columbine Mine.
“It changes your perspective,” said Bernhard, who wrote a book about the 1927 strike. “You think of this as a boring, stable place. This used to be a pretty wild town. There’s a lot of labor history here.”
To share that history with the community, he organized a memorial on Sunday, for Labor Day weekend, at the Lafayette Cemetery. Five of the six miners are buried there, with their graves marked by a memorial stone added 30 years ago through a community fundraising effort. The sixth miner was buried in Louisville.
The 1927 strike was organized by the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as Wobblies.
Coal mining, Bernhard said, was backbreaking and dangerous work with a high mortality rate. Common causes of death for miners included drowning, electrocution, falling rocks, runaway mine carts and explosions.
Along with the danger, he said, the companies took advantage of the workers, shorting them on pay by under-weighing the coal and not paying them for the work they did on the mines to get to that coal. Plus, he said, a company doctor investigated accidents, assigning blame to the miners if they were injured or died.
When the miners began striking in Colorado, he said, they risked jail time and were called un-American. In 1927 at the Columbine Mine during the strike, the state militia opened fire when the strikers came over the closed gates.
“The mine guards claimed (the workers) had weapons, but none were ever found,” he said.
As a result of the violence, he said, the mine’s owner signed a permanent agreement with the union.
He ended by saying that many people fought for the right to “speak our mind.”
“People died for those freedoms,” he said. “I hope this motivates people to be vigilant in protecting them.”
In the 1980s, local labor activists and historians found the unmarked grave sites of the five miners in the Lafayette Cemetery and, after several years of fundraising, the gravestone was placed in 1989.
The ashes of Joe Hill, an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World who wrote the songs used in strikes, also were scattered around the gravestone.
Lafayette labor activist Gary Cox, who worked on the gravestone effort, said securing some of Hill’s ashes inspired people to give more money, helping to raise the $10,000 needed.
Hill’s fame came after he was convicted of murder — on trumped up charges, according to labor activists — by a Utah court and executed by firing squad. Before he died, he asked to have his ashes scattered in every state except Utah, where he had been organizing against the owners of copper mines.
One packet of Hill’s ashes was seized by the U.S. Postal Service and later given to the National Archives, which returned the ashes to the union in 1988. That’s how the Lafayette activists came by his ashes.
“It was a pipe dream to think we could afford this thing,” Cox said. “Little miracles happened.”
At Sunday’s memorial, local labor activists Linda Gore and Elena Klaver performed some of the strike songs, while Klaver also sang “Joe Hill’s Last Will.”
“People forget what organized labor has fought for,” Klaver said, listing the prohibition of child labor, the eight-hour work day and other benefits. “So many people don’t know the history.”
