In 1895, Fayette County, West Virginia, a leading coal county in the southern West Virginia coal fields, experienced widespread strikes by miners. The strikes were remarkable because, in an American industry known for violent labor relations and intensive union organizing since the appearance of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania before 1880, this was the first major strike in southern West Virginia. We might attempt to understand the role of law and public authority in these strikes in terms of legal repression by means of the labor injunction, labor conspiracy laws, and strikebreaking by the police and military. But none of these occurred in Fayette in 1895, though the later history of labor conflict in West Virginia is replete with all of them. In another way, however, the legal events accompanying these strikes are far more remarkable and challenge us to examine more subtle connections between class conflict and law.

The study of urban systems has generated a considerable volume of work designed to allow one both to categorize urban areas at a point in time and to describe their development through time. This has resulted in the examination of the growth of individual cities, their phases of development, and the relationship between cities and their hinterlands or regions. The study of urban areas and urban systems from so many different perspectives is a measure of the complexity of the forces that operate on the development of an urban area. This article attempts to examine one particular force operating on one particular city in an attempt to get a clearer picture of its development during its formative years.

While families have historically provided the basis of business organization in the United States, in the late nineteenth century the development of corporations and managerial capitalism weakened their role in business, especially in management (Bell 1962; Chandler 1977; Farber 1972; Hall 1977,1988; Kanter 1978; Mills 1956; Shammas et al. 1987). Chandler (1977) has postulated a historical decline in family management, control, and decision making in firms with the growth of industrial capitalism; others have asserted a continued presence of the family in business ownership (Davis and Stern 1980; Lansberg et al. 1988).

By the end of the nineteenth century most of the economically advanced European nations had adopted some form of public social insurance. In the world’s richest nation, however, widows and the aged, sick, and injured received little support from the state. Without the help of the state, how did American workers and their families survive in the face of sickness, accidents, old age, or the death of the primary earner? The traditional answer is that they survived rather badly, if at all. Social reformers of the early twentieth century and most modern historians argue that voluntarism was a failure, that it was not suited to the needs of an increasingly industrialized, urbanized populace.

Most of the information released by the Census Bureau has always consisted of summary population counts cross-tabulated by individual or family characteristics. Although these data form the basic description of the American population, they are not ideal for analytical research. The Census Bureau cannot anticipate all the needs of social scientists, so many topics are inadequately covered in the published census volumes. For historical research, the problem is especially acute, because the published data are fairly sketchy for the period before 1940. Moreover, the classifications employed by the Census Bureau have changed over time, making long-term comparisons difficult or impossible.