The McDowell County Courthouse was the site of a significant event in West Virginia’s Mine Wars. On August 1, 1921, Sidney “Sid” Hatfield, former Matewan Chief of Police and a hero to union coal miners, and his friend Deputy Ed Chambers arrived at the courthouse to answer charges stemming from a shooting at Mohawk, a mining camp in McDowell County. As Hatfield and Chambers, with their wives beside them, walked up the courthouse steps, Baldwin-Felts detectives shot and killed both men. The detectives were retaliating for Hatfield and Chambers’s involvement in the Matewan Massacre, in which seven detectives, two bystanders, and Matewan Mayor Cable C. Testerman were killed in a shooting. Sid Hatfield’s murder led to the Miners’ March on Logan. After the shooting, Charlie Everett Lively, George “Buster” Pence, and William Salters were arrested and charged with murdering Hatfield and Chambers. Their trial took place in McDowell County’s Criminal Court, where Lively and Pence claimed self-defense. Salters testified that he was standing by the courthouse entrance when the shooting began and did not fire his weapon. Jurors acquitted all three men of murder.