Few coal miners wanted anything to do with the stranger in the black cassock who arrived in town in 1933. It was the Great Depression in West Virginia—food was scarce and shifts were irregular. So nerves were raw in the pits when miners spoke about unionizing against deadly conditions. The last thing anyone wanted, as they emerged at sundown, was a young Catholic priest pressing his unfamiliar ways upon them.
Father Charles Carroll understood he was an outsider. In Anmoore, Wendel, Philippi, Brownton, Rosemont, Galloway, and Bridgeport, most families were rock-ribbed Appalachian Protestants—Bible-only believers who trusted Scripture, not Rome. The Catholic population was thin in this remote stretch of north-central West Virginia, where cold creeks cut through mountains and rolling green hills, and streams meandered into hollows.
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