By: Lydia Crawley
The Parsons Advocate
The Friends of the Blackwater have launched a website dedicated to preserving first person accounts of the early mining history of Tucker County. The site, called Early Mining Voices, was announced by the group in their February newsletter. The Parsons Advocate spoke with Friends of the Blackwater Assistant Director Loki Kern about the site and its plans for the future.
The website was birthed from an event held in November 2024 in which dramatic reading of first hand accounts of the mining history of Tucker County were presented.
“We had a community get together and performance,” Kern said. “Folks were reading edited versions of transcripts. These transcripts were from tape recordings from 1967.”
The 1967 recordings were gathered by Professor John Stealey of Shepherd University, according to Kern. As a WVU student in 1967, Stealey interviewed miners in North Central West Virginia.
“Over the past year and a half we have been compiling all the footage, formatting all these transcripts and collecting photographs for a digital archive for this place to live,” Kern said.
The result of the organization’s work is the Early Mining Voices Website. Currently, 12 stories are collected on the site with more to be added in the future, according to Kern. Included on the site currently are the recollections of past residents Charles Shaffer, Frank Lencek, Charlie Losh, Frank Colabrese, Pete Barmer, Charles Nichols, S.L. Elza, Julie and Patsy Ballassone, Patsy Greco, Carl and Margaret Perkins, Jennie and Jack Klevisher and William Kline.
“A big part of the effort was also experimenting with more modern forms of digital storytelling,” Kern said. “For example, every character that was portrayed in this 2024 show has been given kind of like their own TikTok to kind of give you an idea of who they are and what they experienced.”
A link to the Youtube video of the performance from 2024 is also available on the site, as well as a talk by Professor Stealey. The full transcripts, history, photographs and more are available on the website, also.
“There’s some names that still have a lot of weight in the community,” Kern said. “We got a Colabrese in there among other communities that maybe folks, particularly those not originally from here, would be surprised to see a lot of Eastern and Southern Europeans.”
The name Colabrese may be familiar to many in the Thomas area due to seeing it on the side of a building or its association with Albert Falls also known as “Barber Shop Falls.” The name Barber Shop Falls, Kern said, stems from its association with Frank Colabrese’s barbershop once being situated at the foot of the falls.
“We also had Peter Barmer, who was also an interesting character,” Kern said. “He worked in the mines in Coketon, but he was also the minister for the local black church.”
Kern said during the 2024 performance, Barmer’s great-grandson traveled to Tucker County to deliver the performance of his ancestor’s transcript.
Friends of the Blackwater have enlisted the help of a new Americorp staff member, Jerimiah, to continue work on the recordings. Kern said in all, the total number of recordings numbers around 70. The goal is to expand the available number of recordings on the site beyond the initial 12.
