Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6008-4628

Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

History

Committee Chair

Jessica Wilkerson

Committee Member

Austin McCoy

Committee Member

William Hal Gorby

Committee Member

Lou Martin

Abstract

In several small Appalachian communities, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company dominated the local landscape. The company stripped the mountainsides of spruce trees for pulpwood and used rivers for industrial processes and waste disposal. The small towns along these rivers and between these mountains relied on paper mills for employment. Corporate control over the natural environment, and water more specifically, was a necessary requirement for paper production, but also acted as a source of power over employees and their communities. When paper workers sought to organize, the company responded by leveraging their control over the environment against them to prevent unionization. In Davis, West Virginia, a prolonged strike led to the company pulling out, taking the community’s water supply with them. In Luke and Westernport, Maryland, and Piedmont, West Virginia, company officials reframed their environmental control to portray themselves as environmentally conscious, in hopes that employees would vote for the company union. After unions were established, the company still took on ecological projects to foster goodwill, as they did in Covington, Virginia, all while threatening to leave if seriously threatened by regulation. Using union, company, and newspaper records as well as oral history sources, this thesis seeks to examine how paper companies solidified this environmental power as well as how workers were affected by and responded to that power dynamic over the twentieth century in Appalachia.

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