Himlerville: Hungarian Cooperative Mining in Kentucky - The Filson ...

1992] HimlerviUe 529
the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages
was forbidden bY the Eighteenth Amendment, illicit trade was
big business. Kentucky, from the earliest frontier days, had a
tradition of drinking. Moonshine stills were prevalent in the hills
and hollows of the state. However, Himler, unlike many Ameri-
cans, took prohibition seriously. He rigorously banned alcohol
from his town. In 1921 he discovered that one of the immigrants,
who operated a boardinghouse for men, was selling moonshine
whiskey to his boarders. Himler immediately summoned the
immigrant to the company's offices and threatened to turn him
over to revenue agents unless he sold his property and stock in
the company, renounced all association with Himlerville, and
left the community within forty-eight hours. Before the time
had elapsed the man was far from tIimlerville. Himler later
explained the offender's absence at a meeting of the company's
board of directors: "I kicked him out. He was selling liquor to
my miners.''
Because of Himler's hatred of liquor, Himlerville did not have
a big problem with drunkenness. Steve Balazs remembers that:
We never had no too many people that drank, and got drunk, not that
they was a lot of people who drank whiskey, now don't get me wrong,
but they knew when to quit. Ever once in a while somebody might have
too many drinks, didn't want to fight, or do anything wrong, they just
got helpless, and was ashamed the next morning, didn't want anybody
to look at them.53
A bachelor's hotel was erected in the center of town..Like the
single-family housing units, the bachelor's hotel was modern in
all respects, having electrical lighting, running water, and indoor
bathrooms. This facility was built to counter the moral and
hygenic dangers of the boarding-boss system, an institution that
developed among immigrants in other Appalachian coal camps.
52 Bagger, "Himler," 187.
53 Balazs interview.
54 Immigration Commission, 229-32 discusses the boarding-boss system as it
appeared among immigrants in the Appalachian coalfields; Bagger, "Himler,"
150; Chapman, "Influence of Coal," 231.