Dunbar, West Virginia

Episode 112 / 28 March 2019 / 129 min / full

Hitchhiking Was Never Safe

"We're going to Dunbar, West Virginia here. It's in southwestern West Virginia, smack in the middle of the pan, in Kanawha County." about 0:06:23

The case: Kidnapping and assault of four boys near Dunbar (June 24th, 1971); Murder of Daniel Collins (March 1971). Read the case file.

The figures, as told in 2019

Population

7,571

Median age

about 47

Median household income

about $42,000

Median home value

$82,100

Two-bedroom rent

about $840

Cost of living

about 80

Religious

37%

Property crime

▲ slightly high

Violent crime

▲ slightly high

History, in brief

• The land Dunbar stands on was originally occupied by Native Americans and was later granted to George Washington for his military service. about 0:08:17
• Some say the town was named after Mary Dunbar, who inherited the land from Washington; others say it was named for a prominent banker called Dunbar Baines. about 0:08:33
• Dunbar was a farming community for much of the 1800s until industry took off. about 0:09:03
• Glass and bottling plants began opening around 1912 and became a big part of the town. about 0:09:31
• In 1912 the county was the site of the Bloody Mine Strike. about 0:09:42
• There were 96 coal mines in operation around Dunbar employing 7,500 miners before the strike; 41 of the mines were unionised. about 0:10:03
• Non-union miners were paid two and a half cents less per ton than union miners, and raising everyone to the same rate would have cost the operators about 15 cents per miner per day. about 0:10:17
• The union called a strike on April 18th, 1912, demanding recognition, free speech and assembly, an end to compulsory trading at company stores, fair weighing and an end to cribbing. about 0:11:16
• The operators hired the Baldwin-Felts detective agency and sent more than 300 mine guards to break the strike; Mother Jones arrived in June and mine owners began evicting workers. about 0:14:23
• The miners marched 3,000 armed men to the steps of the state capitol and read a declaration of war to Governor William E. Glasscock. about 0:15:21
• On July 26th, 1912, miners attacked a mine and twelve strikers and four guards died; by September 5,000 miners had joined the strike and the governor imposed martial law with 1,200 state troops. about 0:16:19
• On February 7th the sheriff and detectives attacked the Holly Grove miner settlement with an armoured train called the Bull Moose Special, machine-gunning a striker's frame house and killing him. about 0:17:57
• Governor Henry Hatfield ended martial law, released Mother Jones and brokered a settlement; the strike was estimated to have cost about $100 million. about 0:18:19
• The gravely plough was invented in Dunbar in 1916, and the town had the Dunbar Glass and Kanawha Glass companies and the Dutch Hollow wine cellars, listed on the Register of Historic Places in 1970. about 0:19:33
• Dunbar was not incorporated until 1921, by the West Virginia legislature. about 0:19:54
• In 1974 the county's English Language Arts Textbook Committee recommended 325 books, including America Reads and The Language of Man, which introduced multiculturalism and provoked a boycott led by a fundamentalist minister's wife. about 0:20:14
• On June 27th, 1974, a thousand local residents protested, and 9,000 of the county's 45,000 elementary pupils were kept home from school. about 0:23:20
• Bombs were planted at an elementary school and a school board building, another school was dynamited, school buses were shot at and the homes of children still attending were stoned; Marvin Haran was sentenced to three years for the bombings. about 0:24:26
• By 1975 the school board had put all the disputed books in the schools anyway. about 0:24:39
• Dunbar's population peaked at 11,000 in 1960. about 0:25:08

The reviews read out

Open the episode file