Blair Mountain
The Department of the Interior is dropping its appeal of a ruling that said the agency shouldn’t have removed the site of the Blair Mountain labor battle from a list of historic places. In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia yesterday, the department and Secretary Sally Jewell filed a motion to drop the appeal. In April, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington ruled the department was wrong in removing Blair Mountain from the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. A lawyer for coal companies that owned potential mining sites in the area pushed for the delisting. Environmental groups had challenged the delisting. In 1921, some 10,000 unionizing coal miners battled police and hired guns at Blair Mountain. Sixteen men died before miners surrendered.