Judge rules that removal of West Virginia labor history site from National Register did not make it more vulnerable to mining
(CN) - Removing the Blair Mountain Battlefield from a list of protected historic sites will not increase the risk of harm to the site from surface mining, a federal judge ruled.
Blair Mountain was the site of a 1921 labor confrontation that ended an unsuccessful three-year struggle to unionize coal miners in several counties in West Virginia. The showdown between 10,000 coal miners and heavily armed police, which left at least 16 dead, ended only when the miners surrendered to federal troops.