Tucked away in a steep hollow at the foot of a sprawling commercial and retail center on the outskirts of Morgantown, WV, Osage is a community lost in time, awash in memories of King Coal’s heyday and the New Deal’s promise of a better life for all; it seems barely cognizant of the chain restaurant and box store signs glaring down at it from the top of the hill. The town is one of a dozen communities established as coal camps along Scott’s Run in Monongalia Country prior to America’s entry into World War 1. The camps drew in coal miners and other laborers representing nineteen different ethnic groups from the southern United States, Europe, and Mexico. The mines boomed through the 1920′s, but the Great Depression knocked the bottom out of the coal industry and drove the residents into deep poverty. In 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt traveled to Scott’s Run to fight for social justice and civil rights and build a blueprint for the New Deal at Arthurdale in nearby Preston County. Nearly a century later, the Scott’s Run Museum and Trail documents the area’s bittersweet history, its exploiters, its champions, and its resilient residents, whose memories live on in their oral histories.
