My name is Glen Rowe. I was born in Breathitt Co. KY August 3, 1906. My father, Sam Rowe, was a good man. In fact the finest man I ever knew. He was a hard worker, but he had no education, so the only way he had to make a living was by hard work. He worked on the farm, in the woods, and in the coal mines. He was also a Blacksmith. My father’s folks mostly lived in Breathitt Co. His father went by the name of Row. Alf Row. He had been adopted. His real name was Watkins. Dad’s mother was Louise Trusty. Dad is gone now he died Jan 22, 1967 in Alger, Ohio.

My mother was a good woman. She was boss in the home and she really knew how to use a hickory switch. I should know, she used it on me plenty of times. She died April 22, 1967 in Ohio. They were both taken back and buried in the mountains of Kentucky that they loved so much.

My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Hays, and my grandfather was a Davis. John Davis, better known as Growler John Davis. They mostly came from Perry Co.

I had a lot of relatives in KY when I left there, like uncles and aunts and cousins. I had a lot of cousins by the name of Pitts. Now I have 2 uncles there that I know of. Clifton Fugate who is 81 years old and Sheldon Fugate who is 89 years old.

When I was a kid the kids worked too. They didn’t gad up and down the roads like they do today. They didn’t get into trouble. They didn’t have time. I remember when I was about 4 years old my dad moved farther up in the mountains. About the last 5 or 6 miles there was no wagon road, just a trail you could ride a horse on, so men had to go ahead of the wagons and cut a road. That was all virgin timber. Our nearest neighbor was 5 miles away and you had to cross a mountain to get to them.

A couple of years later they started building a narrow gauge railroad up into that country to take the timber out. When I was hardly 8 years old my dad was making ties for the railroad. That was what they called pole ties. You cut down a tree and scored and hewed it on two sides and you had a tie. Some trees would make 5 or 6 ties in what was called a string. That’s the way we skidded them out, then we sawed them up on the roadbed. I wasn’t big enough to use an ax so my dad did that. I did the skidding with an old mule. Sometimes I had to skid them for a mile on the ground. We got 15 cents a tie put on the roadbed. Back in them days the logger’s pay was $1.00 to $1.25 a day, and that meant all day from daylight until dark. At this time we lived on a creek they called Big Caney in Breathitt Co.

I was born and raised until I was 10 years old in the backwoods of Eastern KY. I had never even been to the county seat. My father decided to move to the coal mines to work. We only had about 85 or 90 miles to go, but that was some trip for me. One I will never forget. It took us two days to get there. The first 25 or 30 miles we rode on a little narrow gauge log train in a little old box car. It had a big hole burned out in the floor and my mother just about had to guard that hole to keep one of us kids from falling into it. There were four of us kids, and I was the oldest.

It was way after dark when we got to the end of the line at the big mill on the main Kentucky River. There was a big sawmill camp there, but no hotel or anyplace to stay. So my dad took us out in the camp and finally found a family that would keep my mother and the three smaller kids overnight. My dad, my uncle, and I, went to a dump where they burned a lot of junk from the mill. Each one made his own bed. I found a big barrel and I turned the open end towards the fire and crawled in. I slept like a coon in a hollow log.

The next day was Election Day. November 1916. My dad said we would ride the passenger train to where we were going. The L&N Railroad came in there, but we had to wait until that evening before it came in. That day me and my dad walked about 3 or 4 miles into the county seat which was Jackson, KY. That’s where I saw my first car. It was a Model T Ford. Boy that sure was something for me to see. It was sitting on the street running, and shaking like it had the shivers.

That night the train took us to Hazard and we moved to the coal fields up on the Kentucky River in Perry County to a little mining town called Diamond Block, about four miles up the river from Hazard, KY. I remember the winter after we moved there. I had the measles, and took a backset, and came awful close to dying.

Through WWI I sold newspapers as they had no radio then. I went to school and I had a little mail route. I made 2 trips a day, 4 miles a trip, 6 days a week. I got all of $10.00 a month for this. I didn’t get home until a way after dark. My dad bought me a small kerosene lantern. I couldn’t use the regular size. I was so small it would drag the ground.

When my father moved to the mining camps there was all kinds of people. My mother figured if I got into a fight I had a whipping coming when I got home. My dad was no trouble maker but no man walked on him. And no man ever walked away from his door hungry. My dad knowed what I was going through so he laid the law down to my mother. Then he talked to me. He said "now son be nice to people and don’t start any trouble but if you have to fight, fight to kill." After that things changed. I remember two brothers, either one of them was bigger than me. They had beat me up several times. I had a trot line set in the river so one day they decided to take it from me. But this time I didn’t run. I broke my oar but I broke some heads too. By the way, a trot line if you don’t know is a line we stretched across the river with a lot of hooks on it to catch fish. I remember their mother when she came leading her boys up to show my mother what I had done to them. Before that when they beat me up she laughed. She sure wasn’t in a laughing mood that day. From that day on I never took guff from nobody.

In 1919 we had union trouble and my dad got fired for joining the United Mine Workers Union. Then we moved to another mining town not far from there. It was at Christopher, KY. He worked for the Columbus Mining Co. Late in 1919 I started to work for the same company. My dad was a teamster. I started on the conveyor chains throwing out coal for the wagons to haul. They promised me $2.00 a day but when payday came the old general said I did so well he would give me $3.00 a day. I was only 13 years old at that time. Later I was moved to the head house as a sand dryer and sprayer, then later I was took inside the mine as a trapper and dispatcher. About the time I was 16 years old I was put on as a brakeman, which was the dream of all the young fellows working in the mine. When you got to be a brakeman you were then a man, or so we thought. Of course the bigger pistol you carried, the bigger man you were.

I was a brakeman there for 2½ or 3 years. I should have been a motorman before then. I was very small for my age and I was very fast and that’s what it took to be a good brakeman in that low coal. I saw I would never be a motorman there so I left. I worked for a couple of other mining companies for a short time. I ended up at Barridge, KY, another mining town. It was owned by the Columbus Mining Co., the same company that I started to work for only at another location. It was a big company. They owned a lot of mines. The one where I first started was #3. The one at Barridge was #10. Barridge was the Post Office, but the camp was called Green Ridge.

When I went to work there I never told them that I was a brakeman. I went to work as a coal loader. I was tired of being a brakeman. That was O.K. for awhile, then one day I cleaned up early and came to the top. The top is when you come out of the mine to the outside. Anyway, when I came outside there was 3 or 4 of the big shots from #3 mine where I had worked before. I had been gone from #3 for about a year. So they let the cat out of the bag. They asked the super why he had me loading coal, that I was the best brakeman they ever had. Good brakemen were hard to find so finally I went back as a brakeman.

In the next couple of years several things happened. I was so darn bashful that I wouldn’t look in the mirror. But finally I spotted a nice little round butted girl. Boy, I thought to myself that looks awful nice but I was still afraid of girls. But she caught me. It happened this way*. I got in a little fracas and got shot in the leg, and about every day she would come to see me. I didn’t propose, but she did. It was an insult to say no to a woman. So what could I do but say yes. I couldn’t run. On March the 7^th, 1928 she led me to the preacher’s house. She had to lead me as my leg where I had been shot was pretty sore. That day Lula Chaney became my wife.

We lost our first three babies. My wife couldn’t carry a baby to it’s time. In the meantime my wife’s parents, Richard and Armina Chaney, had moved to WI. The doctor said if my wife got in the family way again the only way to save her was to set down and set it out. So she did get in the family way again. The first week in Nov. 1930 I took her to her mother’s in Wisconsin. I went back to KY to work. The baby was born the 4^th day of March 1931 and I got there the 18^th day of March 1931. We went back to KY and Verna was born there the 2^nd of April 1933. The first week of Nov 1934 we went back to Wisconsin. It was hard times back in them days. That was in the big depression. It was almost impossible to get a job anywhere. We stayed with Lula’s folks that winter. I got a little relief and a little work at the mill in Newald.

We had been there sometime before Glen and his family moved there. The mines then were only wagon mines. They brought coal out of the mountain side and run coal down a chute into wagons. The railroad had now come through when we first moved there. We had only one country store and got our mail there.

My dad at this time didn’t work in the mines. A big logging company had a logging and tan bark job there and my dad was working for this logging company. My mother ran the boarding house for this company. She cooked and washed their clothes for them. They built the house we lived in and a bunkhouse where the men lived and slept. The train only came as far as Hazard, KY then. We had to get our groceries at what is called Lothair now. We had to have them delivered by wagon. Fruits and vegetables we bought from farmers and chicken and most of our meats too. But we were healthy and well fed and we didn’t know no other way of life back then.

The logging company took the bark off of some kind of tree. Don’t know the name of it now. I know it stained your hands and clothes. A one legged man with a cork leg hired us kids or let us help him load the bark in box cars. The bark would stain our hands and clothes. He would pay us some money. He was not too stingy with us and was a kind and gentle man. Treated us kids real good. Our mother was not so kind if we didn’t wear some old clothes when we helped him.

A big coal company called the Columbus Mining Co. came and bought the coal leases and opened up a mine. So with this came the railroad from Hazard, KY. It went right through this town and on up the river. The first train I can remember seeing had just come through the Hazard tunnel and set huffing and blowing steam. The coal company built a lot of houses and this big store where we could buy about everything we needed. The store didn’t carry everything in the way of school clothes and some other things and we had to go Hazard for those. I remember my mother would hire a friend of hers to take care of us kids, get on the early passenger train to Hazard and get back that same evening.

Then later Glen’s mom and dad moved here from the same county we came from. I can remember this skinny dark haired boy around. His hair was so curly his head looked like a stump full of grand daddys. I played with his sister but didn’t see too much of him. I went to school some with him at 2 schools. I can’t remember if I ever talked to him or not but I sure never thought that one day he would be my husband. Later he was working on the coal conveyers and every time I saw him he was all coal black. His dad drove the company teams hauling coal to people’s houses. Us kids, both girls and boys, would go to the tipple and help his dad pick out his load of coal as it came down the conveyers to haul to the houses. Glen was a little way from us picking out the slate rock as it came by and would be as black as could be.

Then we moved away to Carr Fork and his folks also moved to another coal camp. Glen stayed at this Christopher Coal Co. so I didn’t see much of him for a long time. After a time though we began to see each other as boy friend or girl friend. He was still shy in a lot of ways and was awful careful about his manners around girls and other people. Lots of girls were trying to chase him but I’m the one who caught him. When we married I was 19 and he was 21.