The Watts Museum develops exhibits that support its mission of preserving and interpreting West Virginia’s mineral resources and related industries. We design our exhibits in hopes of generating new ways for visitors to consider how our industrial past connects to our lives and communities today.
Mineral Matters: Artmaking and West Virginia's Mineral Resources
Often extracted for their “economic interest” and “usefulness to society,” mineral resources from West Virginia have been transformed and commodified by the forces of industrialization. Yet the state’s mineral resources still hold values, qualities, stories, and associations all their own. Mineral Matters features artworks that highlight the resources themselves–by interpreting them in personal, practical, ecological, ancestral, or other conceptual ways.
Drawing the Battle Lines: Editorial Cartoons from the West Virginia Mine Wars
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, coal miners and coal companies in West Virginia clashed in a series of brutal conflicts over labor conditions and unionization, known as the Mine Wars. Drawing the Battle Lines features editorial cartoons depicting the divisive issues that triggered the West Virginia Mine Wars. Using sources that range from the mainstream to the radical, the exhibit explores the role of print media in the struggle for labor rights.
Timber/Timbre: Falling Trees and Rising Voices – Logging and Music in West Virginia, 1880-1930
This exhibit highlights the role that folk music played in West Virginia’s logging communities as the timber boom transformed the state’s eastern mountainous counties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Timber/Timbre explores how migratory timber workers and local mountaineers turned to the power of song to express the changing social, cultural, and economic conditions that came with the industrialization of logging in the Allegheny Highlands.
Man Power, Mine Power: The Evolution and Impact of Coal Mining Machines
From mining by hand with picks and shovels to using longwall equipment today, mechanization has replaced muscles with machines in underground coal mines. Man Power, Mine Power investigates how the introduction of machinery drastically altered the workplace structure, labor relations, and daily lives of people within the coal industry.
Molded in the Mountains: The Glass Industry in West Virginia
Large deposits of sand, minerals, and fossil fuels helped make West Virginia an important glassmaking center in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over time, competition and production costs increased, and glass manufacturing largely vanished from the state. Only a few producers—such as Blenko and Marble King—still operate today. The popularity of glass artistry, however, has heated up in recent years, with artisans preserving and expanding upon the Mountain State’s tradition of hand-crafted glass.
A Byproduct of Change: Oil and West Virginia in the Twentieth Century
From the expansion of America’s highway systems to the oil embargoes of the 1970s, the petroleum byproducts industry in West Virginia has played a key role in economic and industrial development across the globe. A Byproduct of Change looks at how these developments, and the cultural changes that resulted from them, have impacted our lives in countless ways—our technology and transportation, our manmade and natural environment, and our health and daily habits.
Outside the Mine: Daily Life in a Coal Company Camp
From the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, mine operators built company-owned towns to attract mining families to remote Appalachian coalfields—but also to control and monitor their workforce. Outside the Mine discusses four components of the region’s coal camps—commerce, religion, domestic work, and leisure—and the ways in which these communities brought both solidarity and division to the coalfields.
The Story of Engineering: West Virginia University, 1887–2012
Celebrating 125 years of engineering at West Virginia University, The Story of Engineering focuses on the curriculum, research, student body, and facilities of WVU’s engineering departments and colleges. The exhibit places the growth of engineering education at WVU within the context of local, national, and global events by relating its history to developments and issues both within and outside the engineering field.
Defying the Darkness: The Struggle for Safe and Sufficient Mine Illumination
Defying the Darkness presents the complex and contentious evolution of mine lighting technology. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of deadly mine explosions prompted the design of safer lamps for use in gaseous mines. This exhibit considers the perspectives of mining companies, miners, governments, and inventors who urged—or resisted—the development and use of new, safer mining lights.
Helmet Men: Mine Rescuers of Appalachia’s Coalfields
Until the early twentieth century, rescue missions at coal mining disasters in Appalachia were haphazard events, undertaken by anyone near the scene. The formation of “helmet men” teams, however, turned these uncoordinated rescue attempts into organized group operations. This exhibit explores the development of mine rescue teams in Appalachia, spotlighting the men who risked their own lives to save their fellow miners.
Light/Lubricant/Liniment: West Virginia’s Early Oil Industry, 1860–1900
Light/Lubricant/Liniment traces the development of West Virginia's oilfields after 1859, when Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in the United States. The exhibit focuses on the three main uses of liquid petroleum in the late nineteenth century—lighting, mechanical lubrication, and medicinal treatment.