immigrant patrons whose families supported his business for generations.
By Stephen Smoot
Despite the uncertain weather forecast, crowds gathered last Saturday morning in Enterprise. As gray clouds piled on each other, trying to fulfil the promise of rain, patrons of all ages lined up and waited patiently.
Crowds came not to see a famous rock or country star. Neither did they come to see stars of sport, stage, or screen.
Family, friends, colleagues, and those curious in the community stopped at Bice’s Greenhouse to celebrate its first opening day of the year. And also the fact that the business they came to celebrate and patronize has opened its doors to those looking for seeds, plants, and supplies for their gardening needs since the same year that Calvin Coolidge enjoyed his second inauguration as President of the United States.
Also notable in 1925, the New York Football Giants held their first season of play in the National Football League. The Detroit Panthers, Pottsville Maroons, and Providence Steam Rollers also joined the NFL that year.
And in Enterprise, West Virginia, to serve a bustling, growing, and changing community, W. O. Bice took a leap of faith. A longtime manager of the Viropa Company Store that served miners working for that coal company, Bice started growing and selling plants to mining families looking to start up or maintain food gardens.
One hundred years later, Bice Greenhouse’s story of success and survival looks much more like the New York Giants than the Pottsville Maroons.
“The immigrant miners in the Viropa area where my grandfather worked in the Company store were Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Ukrainian,” shared Bob Bice II, owner and operator of Bice Greenhouse today.
A massive influx of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe flooded into the central Appalachians to work in both extractive industries and manufacturing. For example, approximately 1,500 left the Asturia region of Spain to work for a zinc factory in Spelter on the eve of World War I.
The burgeoning coal industry had a voracious appetite for incoming labor. As Ron Lewis, Professor Emeritus of History at West Virginia University once wrote, “In West Virginia, the number of foreign miners among their mine labor force was less than one thousand in 1870. By 1907 their number had reached nearly sixteen thousand, and on the eve of World War I (1915) after the flow of new immigrants had stopped and at least half of the immigrants had returned to their native lands, immigrant coal-miners in West Virginia still totaled almost thirty-two thousand.”
Lewis described the dynamic as resembling a “beachhead” established by the first from a nation to settle. When they sent back positive news, it encouraged others to join them.
He added that coal companies sought in their labor force a “judicious mixture” of a broad range of ethnic groups and American blacks coming from the South. Companies hoped at the time that a diversity of backgrounds would prevent workers from organizing themselves.
They came from areas that had known poverty and neglect for generations, or even centuries. Some came from lands in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire so impoverished that males did not enter puberty until their 20s. Most Italians who arrived and settled in West Virginia came from the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, an area held in the grip of crime and poverty for millennia.
By the 1920s, prosecutors such as Frank Amos of Marion County and Will Morris of Harrison had targeted immigrant criminal gangs, such as the Black Hand Society, that oppressed and terrorized fellow immigrants whose American Dream lay in a good job, feeding ones’ family, and providing better opportunities to ones’ children than they had themselves.
The presence of criminal gangs, financial and language barriers, and the needs of employers all added to the uncertainties of strangers in a strange land. When they found businesses who worked to earn their trust through fair, instead of sharp, dealing, immigrants patronized loyally.
“About 1985,” remembered Bice II, “an older Italian man – Frank I., came into our business in Enterprise and asked to speak to Mr. Bice.” The “Mr. Bice” he referred to was the original owner W. O., also known as “Walter.”
“When he was introduced to me, he had a puzzled look on his face and in his broken English, he stated that he wanted to speak to someone about the Mr. Bice who ran the Viropa Company Store years before,” said Bice II, who explained to the gentleman that the man he was looking for was his grandfather.
“He proceeded to tell me his story,” said Bice II.
The gentleman told of his childhood in the early 1900s living with his family in “the Barracks,” which was a “communal type of housing for multiple families of coal miners to live together who could not afford housing of their own.” Work remained unsteady and miners often saw long stretches pass with little or no work.
Of course no work meant no money. No money meant no food.
“Frank told me,” related Bice II, “that the miners’ families would have starved had it not been for Mr. Bice, the company store manager who saw to it that the families had food to eat – even when there was no money to pay for it.”
“He was so appreciative of this man, my grandfather, for helping his family, along with many other miners’ families during the hardships the miners endured when work was slow or non-existent. Frank and I became friends over his last few years and he never left after visiting us without blessing our family and business before he left.”.
Bice II explained that “many of these (immigrants) became the primary customers of my grandfather.” W. O. Bice saw that the immigrants sought out plants “that they were accustomed to in their own countries – which are basically the same staple plants we grow today – tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, melons, squash, potatoes, and onions.”
As Bobby Bice III added, immigrants who patronized the Company store relied on its manager to take care of as many needs as the store could. Bice III shared that “many of the families didn’t speak English fluently, but they developed a trust with W. O. because he (as the company store manager) was their contact person for anything they needed.
He could help them peruse the catalogues kept on hand for orders. In addition to managing the store, Bice also served as Postmaster and even stoked the fires of the local schoolhouse on chilly mornings.
Immigrants, especially those from Italy, could take the most fundamental of foods and create family and celebratory feasts from them. The company store would order seeds for them to purchase, but these took weeks to arrive. Then the families had to endure the uncertainty of whether the seed would germinate, as well as the extra time needed for the plant to grow into something productive.
When W. O. Bice took that leap of faith to establish his own business after years of managing the Company store, he had legions of loyal customers that he had earned over the years.
(Next week will be Part Two of the Bice Greenhouse story. Thank you for reading!)
