Curated by the Watts Museum at WVU
WVU Downtown Library, 6th Floor Reading Room
Summer - Fall 2026
Libertas e Fidelitate: Rights and Revolution in West Virginia’s Coalfields examines how the foundational rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—set forth in the Declaration of Independence—shaped the lives of mining families in the state’s coal communities. Composed of historical images and interpretive text, this seven-panel exhibit explores how America’s founding principles strengthened miners’ efforts to improve their workplaces, livelihoods, wellbeing, and future, often in revolutionary ways.
The concept of liberty through loyalty, or “Libertas e Fidelitate,” as inscribed on the reverse of the West Virginia state seal, is twofold. Many mine operators promised opportunities for workers if they pledged allegiance to the coal companies; labor organizers, in turn, offered increased rights in the workplace through fidelity to the union. Like American colonists who revolted against tyrannical British rule, miners and their families abandoned their loyalties when the coal industry treated them oppressively—and molded their own sense of citizenship and civic duty in the coalfields.
Libertas e Fidelitate invites viewers to consider not only what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness meant to the nation’s founders or to coal camp citizens, but also what these ideas mean to us in 2026.