St. Charles Catholic Church
Eastland, Tennessee
1950

Strange---and perhaps unique in Tennessee ---is the membership of St. Charles mission church in the backwoods of White County.  Three generations of one family make up its 40-odd parishioners!

Smith, McDaids, and Baltimores, the descendants or in-laws of Scottish-born Thomas and Jane Smith, hear mass in this little frame building that shines with newness and owes its existence to an energetic Paulist priest from Winchester, Tennessee, and to a girl who died in a coal miner’s shack in the village of Eastland nearly 50 years ago.

St. Charles is the most recent of seven Catholic churches built by the Paulist Fathers of Hundred Oaks since they came into the Cumberland Plateau country as missionaries half a century ago.

The moving force behind St. Charles was Father Peter Davitt, who was able to see the church consecrated October 1, before being transferred to a new post in Missouri.  Until gifts and mission funds made the new church possible, he married, buried, and said mass for the more than 40 Smith descendants as his uncle, Father Hugh Swift, had done 35 years ago, in whatever shelter was available—house, schoolroom, or grove of trees.

And what explains the presence of a little band of Catholics in the over-whelmingly Protestant White County?  A priest’s chance visit to his brother is part of the answer.  Thomas Smith’s stern determination to work out the $600 paid for his and his family’s passage to the United States in another part.

The story begins on a bitterly cold day in late winter about a year after the Bon Air Company brought 20 Scottish miners and their families to the booming mines at Bon Air, Ravenscroft, and Eastland in 1903.  On that day, Annie Smith lay dying of pneumonia.

In Glasgow, a priest would have visited the house often at so unhappy a time, but the Smith’s had not heard mass nor seen a church since they left a snug stone cottage in Scotland for a new life in America.

The very house in which the 11 Smiths lived was unfinished and all around them the mining village was only beginning to take shape.

Providentially, at the moment when the need was greatest, Thomas and Jane Smith found a priest for their dying daughter.  He had come to Eastland to visit a brother, a construction engineer, and the Smiths discovered him at the Bon Air Coal Company board house.  He hurried to Annie Smith’s bedside and gave her the last rites of the church.  In that moment, the Catholic Church began to live on Bon Air Mountain.  It would be 45 years, however, before it could live under a roof of its own.

During those years, the history of the church on the mountain was also the history of the Scottish Smiths.

More than a decade before they quit Glasgow, a countryman named George Thom left Scotland for America and worked his way up to bank boss (foreman) for the Bon Air Coal company, predecessor of the Bon Air Coal and Iron Corporation which, in 1900’s, sank huge sums of money in coke ovens near Eastland before discovering that the coal there contained too much sulphur to stand up to the coking process.

The Bon Air Company decided to expand and Thom sent word to old friends in Scottish mines that jobs awaited them in the United States.  About 20 miners accepted the offer of prepaid passage for themselves and their families from Glasgow to Bon Air.  The money was to be repaid in labor at the company mines.

The Scots left Bon Air as quickly as they could---some of them without having worked out their passage.  They didn’t like the crudity of the backwoods, nor the kind of homes hastily thrown up for them.

On the other hand, the young Smith s reveled in their new freedom.  “We were right out of the city and all this country life was brand new,” says Archie Smith, who was among the youngest of the 10 children Jane and Thomas Smith reared.  “We went wild, climbed trees until our clothes hung on us in shreds.  Somebody gave us a rifle and we went down to the station and took pot shots at the trains until we were stopped.”

Thomas Smith abided by his bargain.  For better or worse, he stayed with the mines.  Of the children, Nellie, Pete, and Robert, all dead now and John, James, and Archie followed his example.  The latter three are still on the plateau.  Across the mountain, at Bon Air, lives another of the Scots who stayed on, spry old Henry Johnson Chittick, who came over in 1905 at the age of 28 and became a foreman at the Ravenscroft mine.

The unknown priest who attended Annie Smith may have been the first priest at Eastland but he was not the last.  One month, they came up from Hundred Oaks at Winchester to hold mass in Catholic homes, bury, marry, baptize, and hear confessions.  Their names changed---O’Connor, Hardin, Skinner and Barry were a few---but the welcome did not.  It was always hearty; and sometimes it included a hunting trip, especially for Father Barry.  Archie Smith remembers the nights when his family drove to the schoolhouse to hear mass and sang, “The Rocky Road to Dublin” there and back.

When the mines operated at full production, there was work for 1000 men on the mountain.  Henry Chittick remembers when the Eastland mine once produced 3000 tons of coal in a single day, but more often that figure would represent the combined output of Ravenscroft, Bon Air, and Eastland.

In 1917, Tennessee Products Corporation, with W. J. Cummins of Nashville at the helm, took over Bon Air Coal and Iron Corporation.  Millionaires from the East and Middle West allegedly poured big sums into Tennessee Products Corporation.  During World War I, the mines boomed but by 1922 Bon Air was shut down.  Clifty closed in 1928 and Eastland in 1934.  Ravenscroft continued to operate until 1936 and was reported to be the only shaft mine in Tennessee.

Today the ill-fated coke ovens are in ruins and hidden by a growth of your hardwood trees.  Frogs croak in the watery roadbed where loaded coal cars once rumbled.  The tracks to Sparta were pulled up; the houses at Clifty and Eastland were dismantled years ago.  Of two of the coal towns, almost nothing remains.  Bon Air and Ravenscroft have been saved from limbo by the trade that comes to them over Highway 70.  Long gone are the Labor Day picnics that flourished at Eastland when Cummins’ management was in full flower.  Special trains brought the miners in from other towns.  Food and drink was fee to all comers and a baseball game was usually the major entertainment.

Sandy-haired, stocky Archie Smith is the spokesman for his tribe.  The Smiths who stayed did so, he says, because the mountain is home---“all that we’ve known most of our lives.”  The grandchildren have a way of scattering: the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, California, Texas and Michigan.  They haven’t forgotten the mountain, however.  When St. Charles was a-building on the tract next to Archie Smith’s neat white farmhouse, the seven children of Nellie Smith (who married a McDaid) sent $100 apiece to the building fund in memory of their mother.

The Nashville Tennessean Magazine
October 29, 1950
By Bill Woolsey
George J. Flanigen Archives Library
Aquinas Junior College
Nashville, Tennessee