Unveiled on Labor Day 2022 as part of Monument Lab’s national Re:Generation cohort, Courage in the Hollers is a new, multi-faceted public memory project led by the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, co-created with communities in both Marmet and Clothier, WV. Through permanent sculptural monuments and new interpretive signage at both locations, Courage memorializes and honors the multi-ethnic and multi-racial unionist mine workers that challenged corporate power and aggression, leading to the armed Battle of Blair Mountain (1921) and a fight for human rights.
At the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, it is our mission to document and disseminate these monumental stories of coal mine workers and their little known struggle for justice in these Appalachian hills and hollers. Courage in the Hollers is just the beginning of a broader project to create interpretive spaces of memory along the 50-mile route, where mine workers marched in search of civil liberties for the working class over one hundred years ago.
