Forgotten Voices: Excerpts from Valentina’s Journal is a middle-school, coming-of-age story of a young girl who lived in eastern Kanawha County in 1913. During that time, she, her family, and members of the local community were subjected to the brutality of the coal barons in which the coal miners fought for recognition of their labor union, the United Mine Workers of America. On the evening of Valentina’s 13th birthday, a mine owner commissioned an armored train to take the Baldwin Felts detectives to shoot up the sleeping community of striking miners, many of whom lived in canvas tents alongside the tracks. Valentina’s sense of outrage and what she did during the days that followed changed her ideas and the woman she would become.
Although Valentina and the story itself are fictional, the story is based upon documented facts of what is now called the 1912 -1913 Coal Mining Wars in West Virginia. This incident is now considered the longest labor strike in American history.