Here’s a quick look at coal production and employment in Eastern Kentucky.
First, some modern day coal employment numbers for surface and underground mining, and a total. One can see employment has pretty much plateaued since the 1990s, fluctuating within a range. It seems surface mining employment has been pretty stable in the recent past.
Taking the same numbers, but smoothing it a bit by showing the stats for every fifth year.
…in order to compare with production. Here’s the same years, but for coal production in tons. One can see production is dropping off from the high in around1990s (the actual high might be in a year somewhere on either side of this, assuming some spikeyness in production from year to year).
So, mining employment was falling even during a time of high production (1979-1980 to 1995), and the declined to a plateau at the same time production was declining.
Now, lets take the long view, at a century of coal production in Eastern Kentucky, starting in 1900, in five year intervals.
One can see the two lows in production, but what’s really remarkable is the explosion in production after the 1960s. This is quite impressive especially considering that the pre-war era was often considered the heyday of the Appalachian coalfield. I label the peak “Peak Coal” as an allusion to the concept of “peak oil”, but I don’t know if reserves are running out. Production has declined off that peak, but whether due to no more coal worth mining or other reasons (less demand?) is the question.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find mining employment stats for Eastern KY as whole going back to 1900. Instead, here is the combined population number from the census for the 20 coal producing counties of eastern Kentucky as of 2004 (except Greenup and Boyd)
One can see the population explosion after 1900 due to the development of mining, peaking around 1940-1950, then the decline in the early postwar era. One can assume this is due to out-migration as mining jobs became scarce because of automation and reduced production.
This is a familiar story, the decline of Appalachia, but what’s not well-known was that demographic rebound during the 1970s, where the aggregate coal county population increased, and then went steady-state after 1980.
Perhaps due to the increase in production because of the1970s “energy boom”,? Or maybe retirees returning home from the urban North?. Or an increase in birthrate? One would have to take a closer look at census data to make sense of this.
Taking a closer look at coal county employment and wages as an economic impact, for the top mining counties in Eastern Kentucky, here’s some interesting numbers. Employment is actually rather low, exceeding 20% for only Knott County. But the impact of the
payroll can be big deal, being a significant portion of the total payroll for all of these counties. For example, mining is only 14% of employment in Harlan county, but accounts for nearly 31% of all wages.
Now, lets revisit the population history, looking at these counties. One can see what an impact mining had on the population of these counties, and how drastic the post WWII decline was for some of them.
(2007 numbers are a census projection)
The demographic rebound of the 1970s appears in most cases, strongest in Pike, fairly weak in Harlan, which was hit the hardest by the postwar population decline.
After 1980 population declines at a varying lower rates, in some of the smaller counties a fairly slight decline.
One thing I thought was interesting is the size of these counties at the beginning of the development of mining, back in 1900. How small they were. I was curious what the trend would have been if there was no coal. So I compared some of these higher production counties with a non-coal Appalachian county. The county I chose was Lewis , on the Ohio River, county seat Vanceburg. In 1900 Lewis would have had a fairly advantaged location, being on the river and on a railroad. I compared Lewis with similar sized counties in 1900 and then projected the population out to 2000
One can see how the early 20th century coal boom gave a strong demographic advantage to some of these counties. They started out smaller or slightly larger than Lewis, and never declined to even close to their starting position.
For Breathitt, there was a smaller increase in population during the early coal boom, perhaps meaning mining wasn’t as big a player as in the other counties. So the postwar decline brought it back into the same population range as Lewis county, tracking Lewis’ nearly steady-state population numbers after 1960.
It’s a good question as to what will happen after coal. In many cases we already are “after coal” since coal isn’t the dominant employer in even the higher employment counties. The big impact is payroll, which is still pretty large even in a somewhat post-coal era.
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Mining has never existed here.
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