It was the month of September, 1977. We sat in the kitchen area of a modest frame house in the center of town. A tear in the screen door allowed several young cats to wander in and out at will. Joseph T. Williams, ninety years of age and with lucid memory, supplied fascinating details of Rendville life for a period which exceeded his own residency of over eighty years. Disabled for most of his life, he nevertheless served as Mayor in the 1930's, and for many people as unofficial oral historian of this declining but still proud community.
Williams was a thoroughly literate man though he never spent a day in school. His thoughtful answers to my numerous questions continued during a late afternoon supper which a neighbor girl had brought him on a tray. Outside, rows of box-like houses radiated gradually outward and then upward along the hillside form the tiny town center. Though picturesque, there was little in the quiet scene itself which would elicit wonder.
Yet, as Williams and the historical record have revealed it, this unassuming little town was once a prosperous coal mining town with a population of over 2,000. Its main street was lined with bustling stores and in its earliest "boom town" years was alleged to have had as many as nineteen saloons. Indeed, the present population of under fifty is but a fragment of its former self. Much of the south end of Main Street was raised in 1970 to widen the state highway while lamentably also a number of older buildings - some with their characteristic balconies overhanging the sidewalk - have been lost forever, due as much to the ravages of regional disinterest and a lack of resources as to time and neglect.
But the story of Rendville is a unique and instructive one in many ways. Like binoculars it magnifies the cultural details of a particular historical era. It enhances a piece of our immediate past helping us to discern who we thought we were - and are. It is the intrinsically human saga of a people who struggled to carve out a qualitive existence, who longed as much for a meaningful community life as for a livelihood.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, for thirty years or more there flowered a vigorous and supportive town culture with a distinguished group of leaders. Tragically, however, the entire enterprise was founded on the fortunes of a single industry and resource.
What might have endured as an early beacon of hope in the integration of Black citizens into American life went the way of many another mining town. For the gradual depletion of the coal seams upon which it was founded, also brought its gradual decline.
It was the expansion in 1879 of the Atlantic and Lake Erie Railway (called shortly thereafter the Ohio Central Railroad) southeast of Lexington, along Sunday Creek, that cleared the way for the delvelopment of the town of Rendville. And it was later served by a second railroad with construction in 1889 of the Shawnee and Muskingum River Railroad.
Community development in those days was anything but a gradual process. Indeed, it was an orchestrated event; it was a calculated economic venture, proceeding the more rapidly when there were resources to be extracted, land to be bought and sold, labor to be utilized (or exploited, whichever the case may be), and ample capital to move the project forward.
According to an April 1, 1880, article in the new Lexington Tribune, the Ohio Central Railroad had bought up over 8,000 acres in the area. The original site for the town was known as "Buxton's Mill", an earlier grist mill settlement.
One captain T.J. Smith in cooperation with William P. Rend bought up property within the precincts of the emerging township and began to sell lots for houses and businesses. The town was incorporated on May 2, 1882, the first mayor and village clerk being respectively John Q. Rathburn and F.N. Turner. The population at this time already exceeded 1200 persons.
These were the 1870s - an era of unprecedented industrial growth which had been set in motion by the Civil War. Energy sources were in much demand. And because the Hocking River Valley with its rich coal reserves were within convenient range of the established industrial heartland, towns began to spring up confidently, almost randomly, along railroad lines and spurs in many a secluded notch or hollow throughout the region.
What was astonishing was the "intentional" nature of these towns - the almost instantaneous rise of every facet of community life. Mineshafts had scarcely been sunk and tipples, screens and scales constructed before the echoing clack of hammers and the smell of fresh paint on company houses had time to dissipate downwind of the settlement. (Post World War II tract development had its historic precedent.) Construction of the company store and the usual rooming-house-hotel were followed in rapid succession by churches - (which in the case of Rendville were half- subsidized by the Ohio Central Coal Company) - the school, an additional wooden frame store building - the upper half of which served as living quarters for entrepreneurs attracted in by the flow and circulation of an expanding payroll.
But construction alone does not a community make. An influx of strangers may descend on a place overnight, but on the morn they will have to adapt to their fellows and make common cause with them if they hope to survive there very long.
Still, it was unadulterated self-interest - indeed an understandable survival urge in an age of rapid economic growth, of immigration and massive population increase that brought people to Rendville. In fact, this was the very year, 1879, when American Blacks, but one generation out of slavery, had begun their first large-scale migration within the United States. Oppressed by the hopeless economic restraints of tenant farming in Louisiana and Mississippi, sixty thousand impoverished people had made the trek to Kansas in search of land and a new beginning.
As ever, it was the market which constituted the essential bedrock for community development. In the past, a community might help to shape the market and restrain it but what was new historically from 1865 on was the increasingly trans-regional scope of the market and the seemingly abstract or mechanical processes by which it affected all human endeavor. What was also new, as we have seen, was the combustible nature of its creative powers.
But group identity, commitment and trust - and by implication social stability and control - the very things that community life both economic and social are based on - are anything but inevitable virtues. Could they then be taken for granted in a place which was "starting from scratch", in a settlement void of all tradition, in a maelstrom of cultures, races, languages, and class interests? There was of course no way of knowing the answer to these questions. No way short of venturing forth and living life itself.
But there was still the problem of the market itself. The market base was exclusively coal - a commodity exceedingly sensitive to the wider oscillations of the economy. Coal could activate the delicate trial and error process of communal development. But an overweening dependence on a single resource and industry could also bring untold suffering and an eventual decline.
The town of Rendville was founded in 1879 as part of the growing economic interests of Colonel William P. Rend, a Chicago businessman. Born in 1840 in County Leitrim, Ireland, and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, he rose to the rank of Colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War. Thereafter, Rend went to Chicago where he expanded a freight- hauling business with a line of teams into the largest soft coal business in the West. he operated five mines in Western Pennsylvania, in two of which he owned half-interest; and five in Ohio , in three of which he was half-owner. The firm owned eighteen hundred freight cars and gave work to over two thousand men.
Considered a "progressive" in the coal business because he favored arbitration in his relationship with labor, he was once "locked out" of the access to coal cars by Hocking Valley coal companies and the Hocking Valley Railroad for taking labor's side in a dispute. He promptly petitioned the Federal Courts to enjoin the railroad to provide him with the necessary cars at the going rates.
Rend leased land from the Ohio Central Coal Company, affiliated with the railroad of the same name, and among others opened No. 3 mine and operated No. 9 on Sunday Creek only one mile north of the newly created town of Corning. This was only months after the Ohio Central had itself sunk mines in the Corning area. Indeed, Mr. Rend was on hand to personally supervise construction of the town and the mines in the early years of its existence.
No. 3 mine, the largest in the area, was under construction even before the railroad was fully ready to haul the freight. It was subsequently to become the only all Black mine in the region.
The Ohio Central Coal Company and others built well over three hundred houses in the two neighboring towns - many of which were of the small, two-room variety. But though they both had company stores, Rendville and Corning were by no means "company towns" as was the case with the neighboring town of Congo, founded in 1891. It was in fact beneficial for the future of these towns that a high percentage of private houses were built and numerous small businesses were allowed to develop.
Within three years of its founding, population in the Rendville area had risen to an estimated 2,500, though census figures (1890-1970) within the incorporated precincts of Rendville never exceeded 900. This was by no means small for that day and age; statistics for the preceding decade showed that only one of four Americans lived in a town this large.
By 1883 Rendville boasted a post-office, two church buildings, a large union school, a hotel, a cooperative store based on the Rochdale system on Manchester, England , and a number of businesses, including seven saloons. The first election in the uncorporated Rendville took place on Aug. 10, 1882. From its founding there were frequent railroad connections between Rendville, New Lexington, and Columbus.
As might be expected, in its early years Rendville's population, according to census reports, was over 66% males. Single men searching for work were freer to move to areas offering new opportunities. The New Lexington Tribune reported that many lived in "Bachelor's Hall" or in the numerous houses which had been built to accommodate the influx of workers.
Rendville from its inception had a polyglot character which was unlike most of the Hocking Valley towns. According to the census, the proportion of foreign born in 1880 was 42%. Colonel Rend favored the recruitment of immigrants, assuming apparently that he could assemble a more pliant work force. The Irish predominated but Welshmen, Swedes, Scots, Germans and Englishmen were all represented. The German contingent remained strong for several years, but many like the Swedes who had no mining experience or cultural predisposition to this type of work stayed for only a brief period of time. Some immigrants left before salary advances covering railroad fares and board bills could be deducted from their wages.
When over one hundred Black miners, mostly from the New River region of West Virginia, were recruited by Ohio Central and Colonel Rend, it precipitated what came to be called "the Corning War." The Black workers had not been hired as strike breakers, but they did not know that their "sliding scale contract" was being strongly protested throughout the Hocking Valley.
In the autumn of 1880 a band of several hundred miners from nearby towns, the exact number is uncertain, marched on Rendville either to scare or dissuade the Black workers from continuing with their contract. The arriving hay wagons were said to conceal rifles, and it was only when Governor Foster finally called out the National Guard, complete with the newly developed Gatling Gun, that the would-be assailants gradually scattered. Newspaper reports stated that three or four men were wounded during a brief skirmish.
Tension between the races continued in Rendville on into October, 1880, when on one evening white residents patrolled the streets with guns on their shoulders for fear that the inhabitants of "Ebony Hollow" would descend on them and "clean them out." Black miners slept peacefully through it all. No one knew who started the rumor.
With an excess of single males lacking constructive recreational alternatives after work, drunkenness, fighting and disorderly conduct were not uncommon occurrences in mining towns, and Rendville was no exception. Rendville and Corning had an average of one saloon for every twenty-five men. there were six murders and one lynching between 1880 and 1890 - crime being as much a symptom of a transient work force and loose community ties as a disrupting element in and of itself.
When the Murray brothers crashed a wedding party in November, 1882, Marshal Joseph Inman threw them out three times. They subsequently attacked him for it, but he beat them up with a "mace" and shot one of them in the body. The next year Marshal Inman was himself arrested for picking a pocket in a saloon owned by a Mrs. Hickey. In 1886 the same Joseph Inman shot and killed Moses Hatchet, a Black man, during a barroom argument. He was "conveyed to the New Lexington jail for fear that he would be lynched by enraged citizens, both white and colored." In February, 1884, Richard Hickey, a white man, was hung by an enraged mob from a sycamore tree in the center of town for having shot and killed a young miner named Peter Clifford. the strengthening of community bonds is often impeded in mining towns by the turnover of workers. In Rendville work stoppage due to market fluctuation (the average number of workdays in Ohio, 1890-1917, was 182.5 days.) Caused a constant outmigration of workers with new ones continually arriving whenever production got underway again. In the late 1880s large groups of Black miners left for the coal mines of Washington territory, some of whom, according to newspaper reports, returned months later not having found steady work.
Before 1882, constructive changes in the haphazard"boom town" social structure of Rendville had been mostly of a formal legal nature on the local level. But in that very year it was a new state law which, as much as anything else, would set in motion the creaky processes leading to greater tranquility and a more stable social order. The General Assembly passed a new Sunday closing law, which required every liquor dealer to put up a heavy liability bond. The New Lexington Tribune reported that fifteen of the nineteen saloons had been wiped out by the act in Rendville because they could not raise the money. The correspondent concluded that it had made a great difference in public demeanor.
As the rhythm of the industrial workday drew divers ethnic elements together, the sinews of community gradually began to grow stronger and tighter. Common understandings began to arise around the shifting fortunes of the coal economy. It became a focal point for public discussion and human relationships which brought workers and local businessmen together. Paradoxically the coal market which sustained the town also threatened it; but in either case it heightened a sense of communal awareness as people concerned themselves with every facet of the industry. Furthermore the absentee nature of the mine ownership unified the town against the seemingly "Phantom" machinations of distant entrepreneurs and interests, while it minimal managerial apparatus on the local level had not as yet brought the cut and dried fragmentation of bureaucracy. Nor had the town size outgrown the bonding advantages of daily conversation, recognition of individuals, and the give and take of personal relationships.
The imminent dangers of a mining town were also powerful unifying factors. Not a month went by without a serious accident. A ten-year-old boy has a leg broken by falling slate. A man slips under some railroad cars and has his hand severed. A mine boss is killed while crawling under some railroad cars to cross the tracks. A locomotive bumped the cars. A five-year-old is killed by a horse kick. 37 Racial and ethnic differences dwindled in importance as neighbors supported each other in times of grief.
With the organization of the Presbyterian Church in 1884 , the town had five protestant churches. These became a veritable hub of community activities sponsoring services, Sunday schools, choirs, camp meetings, missionary societies, literary societies, picnics, and an almost perpetual round of revival meetings.
Fraternal lodges also flourished, as they did almost everywhere in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They offered the special sense of belonging which only semi-inclusiveness, secrecy, and mystery can engender. Something of the popularity of these associations can be seen in that the Odd Fellows were allotted quarters upstairs in the town's first brick building. The town was not yet a year old, housing was still in short supply and most of the stores and all the churches had not yet been built.
Odd Fellows, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of the Free and Accepted Masons, Knights Templars, Knights of Pythias, Knights of the Wisemen, and the Sons of St. George conferred an aura of "significance", belonging, historic continuity, and national connections. It would appear that lodges and church activities proliferated in direct proportion to the fragility of community life in a rapidly developing country. yet they often provided basic relief and insurance protection for widows and families in a nation not yet offering social welfare benefits.
In March, 1885, a remarkable change came over the town. An unusually large revival swept the town. There had recently been a mass meeting of miners at which time Colonel Rend and others explained that market prices demanded a cut in wages. Granted the workers' anxieties, the revival had been organized or advertised. Nonetheless, as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., tells it in his autobiography, Against the Tide, it was a phenomenon which had been prayed for and anticipated since January of that year by many church people and which began in a quiet way to spread throughout the population.
Powell characterized Rendville as "the most lawless and ungodly place I have ever seen. Every house on Main Street except the mayor's office and the post office was used as a gambling place." Then with an abruptness which no one could explain, the barrooms and gambling dens were deserted. Saloon keepers who attended the services emptied their liquor barrels on Main Street and gamblers made a bonfire out of their gambling equipment. It was as if, people determined as with one voice and at one time that they wanted quit to the vice and disorder in that place. they had deliberately chosen to work in Rendville and many had purchased their own homes. They desired, therefore, to pursue a decent life there.
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