Feb 9, 2015 By Miles Layton jmlayton@heraldstandard.Com 10 min read

Editor’s note: The following story is part of a monthly series of articles that examine the people, culture and history of the small towns that dot the landscape of Fayette County.

In the small coal patch town of Smock, residents feel like they were raised in an idyllic place, a close-knit community that was different than the world they know today.

“I always felt growing up, maybe even today, I can knock on that door and say, ‘Can I have $5?’ or ‘Hey, you know, I need this’,” said Nadine Sethman, 61, to her friends and neighbors sitting around kitchen tables at the Smock Community Center. “People give you the shirt off their back. That’s how I was raised. I knew the whole town. I was safe. You didn’t have to worry about anyone grabbing you. These kids now will never know what we knew — to be loved at home, to be loved in town.”

Now a national historic district with a population of less than 600, according to the 2010 Census, Smock is a small patch of homes on the border of Menallen and Franklin townships. The once blustering town, named after wealthy farmer, blacksmith and land speculator Samuel Smock, became the home of Eastern European immigrants who settled there to work in mining.

For decades, large families lived in small homes within the town, when decades ago, it had its own grocery stores, a movie theater, car dealership and bowling alley. Those amenities have vanished over the years.

The coal mines and coke ovens are also a distant memory. The company store that thousands frequented for generations serves as the community center, where a small branch office of the U.S. Post Office remains. St. Hedwig’s Roman Catholic Church closed its doors about two years ago.

The town was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. Sethman said in contrast to many coal patch towns, many of the homes share different architectural styles in Smock that were common across the nation.

“Smock was one of the patches recognizes even though it was a patch house, Smock patch houses had different architectural styles,” Sethman said. “When you go to other surviving coal mining patches, the house are exact same. But in Smock, some of the styles were blended, particularly with the homes’ roofs. The placement of front doors was intermingled. These houses preserve our town’s history.”

But for those who have made Smock their home for decades, the memories of what made the town special endure.

“The people didn’t have cars. Nobody went anywhere. We all stayed in town. We shopped here at the local stores. There was no TV. Everybody visited each other on Sundays. People used to go over and sit on folks’ front porches and talk. That was our entertainment — visiting and talking. There was a lot of camaraderie then. People liked each other,” said 75-year-old Tom Link.

King coal

A portrait of President Franklin Roosevelt hangs on the wall at the Smock Historical Society in a room that is a replica of Cicconi’s Union Tavern. It was there that where men met in secret as they tried to unionize against the coal company. A bullet hole in FDR’s chest is forever enshrined within the portrait’s broken glass.

Link and Joseph Kopachko, 78, said the shot was intended perhaps as a warning to the bar owner.

“(The owner) had just bent over, otherwise the bullet would have hit him in the heart,” Kopachko said.

Though coal was king in the patch town, life for the miners and their families was hard.

“People didn’t earn paychecks sometimes because everything they earned at the mine was spent back at the company store,” Link said.

According to many accounts, Smock boasted the world’s largest underground conveyor belt system to move a river of coal at all hours of the day and night in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

“There was a lot of favoritism if you worked in a mine,” Link said. “If they had anything against you, they would have you load slate all day. You didn’t get paid for loading slate. If you didn’t get to load coal, you didn’t make any money. So you did what they said.”

Kopachko, who grew up and later retired to Smock, added, “If you lived in a company house, they threw you out onto the street with the kids, the furniture and everything if you got fired or they found out you supported the union.”

Link said his grandparents, John and Mary Lenk along with their six children that included Link’s father Andrew Lenk, were thrown out the family’s company house. For several months, they had to live in an empty coke oven.

“That was a different time — it was terrible,” Tom Link said. “Nobody should have to live like that.”

Link, whose father changed the spelling of the family’s last name, said after this experience, his grandfather bought a farm so that he would never have to worry about getting thrown out of company house again.

Link and Kopachko recalled how this social system, which they described as borderline slavery, caused the workers to unionize.

A war between miners and management resulted.

“Nobody had cars or money, so how could afford to pick up and move? You (were) stuck,” Link said.

Kopachko said the men organized in secret at Cicconi’s Union Tavern on Sundays. The mining company hired armed deputies to patrol the town to bust up those attempts, Link said.

And while the company officials tried to stop it, the union organizers fought just as hard to bring all of the miners into it, leaving soot palm prints on workers’ doors. Those who opted not to support the union had three days to leave town, Kopachko said.

Good times

Residents fondly remember the good times after World War II — an era of good will that they say is fading fast.

“It’s different now,” Link said. “I don’t know probably 70 percent of the people in this town. Older people have died off. Their children have moved to get jobs. When their parents die, they sell the homes. We don’t know who those people are that move in, so it’s entirely different now than it was. It was a more cohesive society when we were growing up.”

Sethman added, “When I was growing up, there were more cars, but there were still people that didn’t have cars. My generation got to see mothers still at home with the kids. Growing up, I had a dad at work and mom at home with the family.”

Meals were not a fast food experience, but homemade dishes like soup, Italian meals with pasta and sauce, bread, milk and dairy produced locally, as well as meat that most likely was raised and butchered at home.

People shared what they had.

“If you had an apple, your friend might ask you if you can save him cobs,” Kopacko said. “What does that mean? When I got close to the apple’s cob, I would give it to you and then you’d finish it.”

And pizza was a little more organic.

“You cut off a piece of loaf and added some kethchup – that was pizza for us kids,” Kopacko said.

Until to mid-to-late twentieth century, outhouses — outside toilets — were common. Link and Kopacko agreed that pages from a Sears’ catalog worked better than paper from glossier magazines.

And folks laying underneath warm covers on a cold night thought a little more about their visits than folks do these days.

“Women in those days like me and my sisters had to have bladders of steel,” said Sethman, whose parents got indoor plumbing in 1965.

Fading values

Children could, within reason, roam freely about the town without fears that have become more commonplace in recent years, said Bob Szelc, 66, a longtime resident of Smock. He remembers days when kids could play baseball at five fields spread through the area including Pig Turd Alley, so called because families had their pig pens situated along that alley.

Szelc recalled that when a child stepped out of line, discipline was swift and determined.

“Remember the saying, spare the rod, spoil the child?” he asked. “My dad was a good man, very generous and everything, but we had to behave. You didn’t go over to the neighbors and do something wrong. … If I thought about doing anything wrong, I worried about whether he would find out about it.”

Before counter culture values changed the nation and Dr. Benjamin Spock made the kid, not the family, the center of the ego-driven “me first” generation, there were concepts known as discipline.

“Discipline from the 30s and 40s was carried over to the 50s and 60s,” Sethman said. “You were taught respect. You were taught that you work and then you play. That was still instilled into us.”

But there was a certain freedom offered by the values instilled by the greatest generation that made Smock more than just a dot on a map. An awareness of community forged the people from Smock and other places in Fayette County.

“I think it was the closeness of the people, the discipline, the caring,” said Link, a retired research physicist. “Everybody was your friend, almost your brother or sister. That’s the way you felt. You were a family. I think it was because we didn’t have much. We didn’t have TV, things, we had to make our own entertainment. And the way to do that was with the other kids in our town. That’s the way we grew up.”

Those values created success, some residents said.

“You work hard for everything that you have,” said longtime Smock resident Donna Mortichesky. “Nobody gives you anything. You work very hard, you get it. Young kids today get everything handed to them. … The value of money means a lot more to people of another generation than it does to kids today because they’ve been handed so much.”

Sethman added, “You can’t believe how many doctors, attorneys, dentists, military academy (graduates), teachers, professors, artists, musicians came out of this little patch,” Sethman said. “That’s all because of the values that parents instilled. You weren’t handed everything. You were instilled with you will finish school and go on from here.”

Though the town has changed, Sethman is optimistic it will remain a part of Fayette County for future generations.

“As long as we carry on what we were taught in the past, we will endure,” she said. “Growing up, we had respect for our neighbors and role models within the community. If we can carry that forward, Smock will live on.”

Link added, “I think Smock will endure because the remaining people are very close and have a lot of pride in our community.”