Ten-year-old Clarence Watkins went to work in the mines

In April 1880, Wadsworth's coal miners walked off the job. The mine owners had changed how they paid the men. Coal that fell through a sizing screen didn't count, even though the owners still sold it. A miner already earning fifty cents to a dollar for a day¹ of hand-digging in a shaft four feet high was suddenly earning less. They struck on April 14.

Erastus Loomis, who owned the Silver Creek Mines, went looking for replacements. He couldn't find them in Wadsworth. He sent recruiters to Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. The men they found had been enslaved barely fifteen years earlier. They were promised work in Ohio. Nobody told them the work was underground.²

Roughly two hundred of them came, with their families. Loomis housed them behind a timber stockade at the edge of town. Striking miners threatened them. The county sheriff couldn't hold the line, so Cleveland sent twenty-five deputies. When that wasn't enough, the Ohio Militia was called in.³ One account says the Black families believed their lives depended on the soldiers being there.

Among those sent into the mines was a ten-year-old boy named Clarence Watkins. Later in life, Watkins said the work “wasn't too much different from slavery, except that they could 'go home' at the end of the day.”⁴

The strike settled within about six weeks. The militia left. Most of the recruited men moved on. Fifteen families stayed.

They tried to attend Wadsworth's existing churches and were turned away. So they built their own. Aaron Pardee donated the land on Mills Street. Pastor J.C. Kauffman and Reverend S.C. Goss helped fund the building. The families raised the walls themselves. They called it Rising Mount Zion Baptist Church. It still stands today, now known as First Baptist Church, and descendants of the 1880 families still hold reunions there.⁵

By the 1900 census, twenty-seven of the thirty-five working-age Black men in Wadsworth worked in the mines.⁶ They stayed underground until the industry wound down. The last Wadsworth mine, owned by John Malaney in Silver Creek, closed in the mid-1930s.

Wadsworth still sits on those mines. A network of hand-dug shafts runs under much of the city. Ohio permits building over abandoned mines, and every so often a Wadsworth homeowner reports cracks in a basement wall. The ground has settled into a chamber a miner dug by hand a hundred and forty years ago. Ohio DNR keeps a searchable map of the network.⁷

The stockade is long gone. The mines are on a downloadable map. The church is still on Mills Street. Descendants of the men who built it still gather there.