New book recounts the wild, complex past of Sunday Creek

The small Perry County villages of Corning and Rendville are fairly sedate places today, but such was not always the case.

In the late 19th century they were rowdy mining towns where the law held little sway, and brawls, gunfights and even lynchings were not uncommon. Some of this violence was probably due to heavy drinking, in communities where saloons were abundant. But much of it was also the result of labor unrest, and ferocious struggles by poorly paid mine workers to wrest concessions from their employers.

Now a man who grew up in Corning has delved into the local history of the period, and come up with a remarkable book. In “Clash at Sunday Creek: Rum, Romanism & Rebellion in Corning and Rendville,” author Jobie Joseph Siemer tells a richly detailed story of violence and mayhem in the two villages, as well as the relentless struggles of their inhabitants to build better lives for themselves.

Siemer, who will speak at the Perry County District Library next month, is a former Green Beret who saw combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later earned a master’s degree in military history. He readily admits that writing his book was a labor of love — a way to better understand the nature of a community in which his family has had roots for many generations. One of his forebears, in fact, Joseph A. Siemer, a Corning tailor and dedicated socialist, plays a significant role in the narrative.

“I was always involved in local history,” Siemer explained in a phone interview from his home, noting that he has had connections since his high school years with the Shawnee-based history group Little Cities of Black Diamonds. He said that reading about the area’s past, and talking with older people in his community, had already made him long familiar with some of the names and episodes chronicled in “Clash at Sunday Creek,” but that his research for the book uncovered some new and surprising facets of the tale.

One had to do with the role of the then newly-formed Ohio National Guard in suppressing a miner’s strike in 1880. The first part of Siemer’s book tells of “the Battle of Corning,” in which Guard troops — equipped with the latest in weapons technology, the Gatling gun — stood off a large group of striking white miners, enraged over a coal company’s having brought in Black and European scabs to fill their jobs. There were casualties on both sides.

“I did not realize that the Battle of Corning was the first time the Ohio National Guard had fought a battle,” Siemer said. “I was an 82nd Airborne Infantry officer and then I served with the Army Special Forces. So I was in the National Guard, and I go to battlefields all the time. So to find out there was a battlefield in my home town, and they had Gatling guns, was like, ‘Wow!’”

Another surprise for Siemer was learning of the role played in the drama by his direct ancestor Joseph A. Siemer, a socialist organizer who in 1894 put new words to a popular song of the day, “After the Ball,” turning it into the lament of an ostracized replacement worker called “After the Strike.” With lyrics like “Many the heart is aching/Though the hope seems bright/That many a scab will vanish/After the strike,” the song quickly became an anthem for striking union coal miners in the region.

Siemer recalls this being mentioned to him once years before, by a now-deceased Ohio scholar of Appalachian culture and music. “I remember talking to Dr. Ivan Tribe in high school, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re the relative of the songwriter!’ And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ But I didn’t realize how big of a part my great, great, great grandfather played in this. I was just going to put him in as a side story, but he ended up being a huge part of it.”

The book looks at the complex interplay of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, politics and class in the turmoil of post-Civil War Perry County. It is by no means a simple story, with workers from many different backgrounds — Germans, Italians, Irish, African Americans, Anglo-Saxon Americans, protestants, Catholics and more — living in relatively close quarters and often competing for jobs, while labor unions and political parties vied to win their support.

Another factor Siemer investigates is the role of alcohol in all the sometimes chaotic conditions around Sunday Creek. “There was no TV or anything,” he noted. “The only place to get your news, to get local gossip, to hang out, was the saloon. But I think a lot of it was, in the 1880s these men were working horrible jobs, horrible hours. And so I think to unwind, they would drink, and a lot of them were not drinking beer, but whiskey, and they would get drunk really quick. And I think that helped push the temperance movement, because people saw what it was doing to families… And for the Democratic Party, bars were like a Petri dish for votes among the labor unions. That was their strategic base, the saloon.”

Among the high points of the book are the profiles it offers of some important figures who deserve to be better known. These include Alex Adams, a stubborn union organizer who, feeling the United Mine Workers were too docile towards the coal companies, tried with little success to lead an exodus of Sunday Creek miners out of the union. Siemer believes Adams died of black lung disease from working in the mines, and hopes to research his life further.

Finally, the story Siemer tells is a tale not just of diversity and conflict, but also of people from different backgrounds finding common cause. His book recounts an episode, for instance, in which striking white miners, marching with bloody intent toward a mine manned by Black scabs, end up trying to persuade the Black miners to join their union.

“Eventually, labor was the one thing that united everyone under a common banner,” the author said. “In 1880, there was the battle of Corning. And then four years later, during the Hocking Valley mine strike, the Black Sunday Creek miners are handing money donations for the union, to support the people that were trying to kick them out four years earlier.”

Siemer’s book is published by The History Press. His program at the Perry County Library in New Lexington will take place on June 15 at 11 a.m.

Email at jphillips@logandaily.com