06/03/2026
The Pencil Stub School — Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931
During the Harlan County War, miners trying to unionize were evicted from company houses. Families lived in tents in the woods through the winter of 1931.
Teacher Emma Bell Miles, 38, had been fired from the company school for attending a union meeting.
She started a school in a tent. She had no books, no paper, no pencils.
Children brought what they could find: stubs of pencils from the mine office trash, backs of flour sacks, pieces of coal to write with.
Emma taught reading from the Sears catalog and from union leaflets. She taught arithmetic by counting scrip tokens.
When company guards came, the children would hide the papers in their clothes and pretend to be playing.
One boy, 10, walked four miles each way through snow to attend. He later became a lawyer for the United Mine Workers.
Emma kept a box of pencil stubs. When a child learned to write their name, she gave them a whole pencil, bought with her own egg money.
She taught in the tent for two years until the union won recognition and the company reopened the school. She was not rehired.
Former students pooled money in 1964 and bought her a headstone. It reads: “She taught us with stubs.”
