The Einhorn (Unicorn) Press

****In his well researched work entitled Monongah, The Tragic Story of the Worst Industrial Accident in US History, Davitt McAteer tells us, “The No. 6 mine, which was equipped with a pressure gauge and clock to constantly record the pressure, showed the time of the disruption as exactly 10:30 A. M.”  For a well documented but easy read of the Monongah tragedy of 1907, I recommend this book.

*****According to McAteer, this bridge, seen here running to the east side of Monongah, was largest steel trestle built in the United States in the 1890's.  I obtained this postcard, dated 1916 on the back, from Germany.  It is—judging from all the 1908 black and white postcard photographs of the Monongah mines in Ebay auctions—an accurate representation of the No. 6 mine trestle and coal-mining operation in 1907.

The power plant supplied electricity to the mine on the west side of the river as well as to a four-story coal preparation plant or tipple, machine repair shops, and mine offices on the east side.  The smoke in the background is rising from some of the 320 beehive ovens producing coke from Monongah's coal, in competition with Connellsville and Uniontown coke ovens, to feed the fiery ovens in West Virginia and Pennyslvania steel mills. 

Other coke ovens were blazing away a mile up the river, behind the No. 8 Mine tipple, on the same side of the river.

Coke is a carbonized product of coal.  It is produced by a decomposition process of heating bituminous coal to a high temperature, about 1800 degree Fahrenheit, in a closed chamber out of contact with the air.

The intense heat drives off volatile matter, such as gas, tar, ammonia water, and oils.  The residue, or char, that remains is called coke.  At one time, smoke from nearly 50,000 coke ovens darkened the American skies. 

In the early 1900’s, the coal supplies in the United States were estimated to be large enough to supply the furnaces of the world for centuries to come.

This old one-cent stamped postcard, postmarked “Fairmont, W. VA, Nov 8, 4 PM, 1921” that I purchased on Ebay recently should present a good firsthand personal view of the smoke problem generated by the coal operations in Monongah.  It also gives us a figure for the amount of coal exported in 1920.  I cannot very well make out the writing on the back—which looks about like mine—but I will try deciphering the vertical portion of it here.  I believe it says:

“1020 Fairmont ave. Fairmont W Va. This picture will show you why I complaine of a smokey city—Count the smoke stacks on this bldg.  These multiply it by— In 1920 there were shipped out of this Country 4,888 841 tons of coal— But today is clear—and as warm as [. . . name of a place ?]—after several days of rain—Love to you and all [Carrie?]”

If anybody can read the writing any better, and wants to fill in the brackets and/or make any corrections, please let me know, and I will add the input to this page—if it makes more sense.

By the time I arrived in this world in 1943, beehive coke ovens, resembling beehives in shape, were becoming obsolete.  These ovens, which poured great volumes of black smoke over the countryside, were prodigiously wasteful of the by-products of coal, and much better methods of producing coke were in operation by then, to save the valuable by-products that previously escaped into the atmosphere.  The Wonder Book of Knowledge tells us that “one ton of good bituminous coking coal, when processed at a by-product plant, will produce from 1,400 to 1,500 pounds of coke; between 10,000 and 11,500 cubic feet of gas; from 9 to 10 gallons of coal tar; 20 or more pounds of ammonium sulphate and smaller percentages of benzol, toluol, xylol, and crude naphthalene.”

And to think, after all these by-products were released into the atmosphere, my mother survived!  And to add insult to injury, she also had to daily breath volumes of smoke from my father’s three-pack-a-day cigarette-smoking habit for over 40 years, the black residue from steam engine smoke stacks pumping torrents of smoke across the West Fork River into our house, and all the other smoke-belching chimneys in Monongah that pumped out volumes of smoke daily.  Yet, she survives today, in excellent health, with no breathing problems whatsoever—at 87 ripe years of age.  This does not speak well for the nicotine nazis, who argue that the insignificant secondhand smoke from cigarette smokers like those in the steel mill above is a huge problem today.

If these powerful paper pushers are allowed to continue to get away with this enormous scam to steal money from the poor pockets of hard workers like these, with their heavy and unjust taxes, their perverted whims will soon be satisfied with a huge tax on the fat food consumed by obese eaters

—many of whom have grown into their bloated condition because they stopped smoking!

These hypocrites should, however, remember:  “What goes around comes around,” and, “Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones!”

Nevertheless, most of Monongah's secondhand smoke had vanished by the early 1960's when I left Monongah to join the Army.  Most home coal fireplaces had been replaced with natural gas furnaces, steam engines with diesels, and the operation of the coke ovens had ceased long before that time.  Upon one of my visits to the old home town recently, I discovered that the Nol 6 coke ovens, the tipple and the No.. 6 Mine buildings, except for the old powerhouse that Consol now uses for offices, had vanished.  The steel gate across the entrance to the No. 6 mine on the west side had also been removed, as well as the huge exhaust fan that blew air across the path where, as a kid, I had run my rabbit hounds.

A wooden bridge with two decks had once spanned the West Fork River at the No. 8 mine (No. 63 later) a mile up the river.  The top deck carried coal laden mining cars across the sulfur-filled river to the tipple dumping coal in waiting railroad cars below.  The bottom deck, laid with huge, rattling wooden planks, spaced several inches apart, simultaneously supported trucks and automobiles crossing over.  As a little boy on my way to pick blackberries near the old No. 4 mine with Jim Davis, as we walked across the noisy bridge with heavy mining cars rattling across above, I often wondered if they would shake us down through one of the cracks between the planks into the river below.

Upon one of my recent visits there, I discovered that nothing was left of the Number 8 trestle except a stone support on each side of the river and a lone pillar standing in the middle.  I guess their huge stone blocks were too heavy and inaccessible to tote off. 

Beyond those pillars, on the West side of the river, once ran the tracks and overhead electric cables for the Monongahela Valley Traction Company’s streetcars.  They had been removed in the late 1940’s; so their absence was no surprise to me.  However, a nostalgic look back reminds me of when the trolleys on the interurban line, later called the Monongahela West Penn Trolley, zipped right past the front of our house, to and fro from Fairmont, through Monongah, to Clarksburg, Weston and several mining towns between.  They were among the most modern and fastest at the time.  The 36-mile trip from Fairmont to Weston took a lightning 36 minutes or less, which is less time than the treacherous trip requires now—on the meandering West Virginia roads—by the automobiles that replaced them.

The traction company's Monongah streetcar and power station sat near the entrance to the west side of the old automobile bridge crossing the West Fork River to downtown Monongah.

To my sad surprise, that old brick structure had also been razed, as one of my 2008 colored photographs below, of the vacant spot at the end of the bridge, shows.   The old wooden-floor bridge with the bent railings in the photograph above brings back memories of my walks over it to the old Monongah movie theater—pictured below a little before my time, with its horse and buggy.  One of the last films I saw in the old movie house was in 3D, and we had to wear glasses with red and blue plastic lenses to see “King Solomon’s Mines.”  Those paper goggles brought the film's big lion leaping right out of the screen into the audience, or so we thought for a moment.

Afterwards, with visions of the lion still in mind, I hurried back across the creaky bridge in the dark, past the ghostly streetcar station that had closed its doors for good by then.  Some years later—after old Max Rauer moved out—his old brick home fell to the wrecking ball.

However, the station's long concrete stairway pictured below, running up to the road above, still remains.  A close-up of the bottom of the stairs is pictured above by the trolley tracks, with the kids holding on to its steel railings.

They were much steadier than the floppy banisters along the wooden walkway, a pontoon bridge, temporarily strung across the West Fork River after the old bridge was torn down.  The west end of the new bridge in 2008 is shown above, and at its 1952 dedication in the old out-of-focus photograph below.

That was five years after my mother had helped me down our steps and a couple of hundred yards along the trolley tracks, which ran past our house on Traction Avenue (pictured below) to the streetcar station to ride to Fairmont, to visit Santa Claus at Hartley’s Department Store.

The old fellow, with his wrinkled face and long beard, almost scared me to death when I was placed on his lap for a photograph, so the shocking experience still jars my memory.

On the opposite side of the river from the vacant streetcar tracks that slipped me down to see Santa Claus, the bustling B & O railroad tracks had also been ripped up and carried off at some time after the No. 63 mine closed in 1961.

In the early 1950’s, those shiny rails still carried many smoke-belching steam engines, chugging along as they pulled long trains of coal cars.  Those iron monsters and their rattling hoppers were dirty and noisy, but quite charming creatures at times.  My old childhood neighbor, Jim Davis, who claims this is a “true story,” in an email to me, attests to the fact when he wrote:

“When a steam engine would regularly pull coal from the No. 63 Mine [old No. 8] at night, it would stop right across the river from our homes at 9:15 p.m., disconnect from the coal cars, go down to Monongah’s water tank by the company store, and fill up with water.  I can still hear the squeak in that arm sliding down from the water tank, to pour water into the thirsty steam engine.

“Once he drank enough water, he would back up, connect to his trip of coal cars, and begin to pull with a loud Chug! Chug! Chug!  The faster he would steam down the track, the more the click! click! click! rattled the rails.  The ‘click’ was caused by loose ‘fish plates’ on the rails, which bolted them together. 

“How do I remember this?  Well, when the train was coming down the track, my brother Bob would always get ready for bed, at 9:15 p.m.; and he always said the sound of the train would put him to sleep.  He can tell the story better than I can.  The train usually started to pull the trip of coal cars at roughly 9:30 p.m.”

I can also recall the sounds generated by that engine (and many others), both from its regular stops to release its cars and its backups from the water tank to reconnect to its idle train of coal cars.  This allowed for an efficient use of the engineer’s time if the No. 63 Mine tipple was filling any waiting empties.  When the engine finally stopped to release its load, there was always an almost endless chain of rattling and banging as the hopper-car couplings rammed each other.  Again, when the old iron horse backed up from its drinking hole, to reconnect, I heard another loud procession of metallic noises, as the coal-car couplings banged against each other in the opposite direction.  Then the steam engine lurched forward with a few loud initial chugs, followed by softer sounding efforts as it began to distance itself; and the same coupling noises once again preceded the rhythmic sounds created by the laboring engine as it rolled on down the line to Fairmont.  The regular clicks generated by its hoppers' wheels rolling across loose fish plates—like the hypnotizing ticks of a clock—were obviously what put Bob to sleep.

My old coal-mining buddy tells me that “I remember the old steam engine moving out after idling.  That noise you heard when he lurched forward was the slack being taken up in his train of coal cars.  In mining terms, he was ‘tightening the Jennys.’  The Jennys (couplers) keep all the coal cars properly connected.  When we ran a ‘trip’ (train) of coal cars through the mine, we kept the slack out of the Jennys.  Otherwise, we had big trouble!  Trips of coal running down the rails inside a mine can be compared to trains of coal running coal down the tracks across the West Fork River—except instead of a steam engine pulling a train with a caboose tagging along, one electric motor pulled the trip of mining cars while another pushed.  The push-pull combination usually allowed us to manage a trip of 30 to 50 cars, with each bearing about 50 tons of coal.”

Jim’s notice encouraged me to do a little research.  I found that in 1897 Andrew Beard patented an improvement to railroad car couplers commonly called the Jenny Coupler. His invention safely accomplished the dangerous job of linking railroad cars together.  Beard had lost a leg in a car coupling accident.  The missing appendage inspired the ex-railroad worker to come up with an idea that probably saved countless lives and limbs thereafter, and his ingenuity paid off indeed.  He received $50,000 for the patent rights to his Jenny coupler.  That was a lot of money in those days!

The Jenny Coupler should not be confused with the Janney coupler.  The Janney coupler was named after Eli Janney who patented the invention in 1873 (U.S. patent #138,405).  The Janney coupler had been an improvement in railroad car couplers that became the standard for the railroad freight car couplers—and some are still used today.

 

Before I went to school, I used to sit on my front porch on Traction Avenue, across the river from the railroad tracks, and spend hours counting coal cars coupled together with Janneys or Jennys.  Sometimes, two steam engines were pulling the loaded hoppers, so I received a good lesson in math on those occasions.  My calculations show that the steam engine above, hardly the largest ever built, must be pulling around 12,000 short tons (2,000 lbs. per ton) of coal.  I base this estimate on information provided by my old buddy in another email.   He wrote:

“When I was working in the mines, the hopper would hold 100 tons of coal, give or take a few tons. The unit trains still carry 100-ton hoppers, and sometime a unit train will be 100 cars.  Some mines, such as the one I worked at Robinson Run, Consol 95, at Shinnston would supply the power plant next to it by belt line, and a tonnage meter attached to the belt indicated the number of tons of coal that passed over it in a 24-hour period.  Coal mining has come a long way in the past 50 years.  A coal miner can sit outside and look at a computer screen while the computer figures out everything he needs to know about that coal mine.  Amazing!”

Above we see an example of one of the people and a little bit of the electrical equipment controlling coal-mining operations at the Four-States, West Virginia coal mine, in 1981.  The coal miner is Larry Martin (deceased), a rotary-dump operator.  On the right are some of the electric relays, wiring, and other devices performing the tasks. Note Larry's standard coal-miner's dinner bucket sitting on the table, and the telephone box on the wall.  Some things just don’t seem to change a whole lot, as the postcard below indicates.  This faded memento is postmarked August 10, 1912.  I wonder if the fellow had ever run into the weather-forecasting groundhog anywhere in the mine?  That little furry fellow's natural instinct seems to regularly overshadow the sophisticated computers of the Weather Channel.

Nevertheless, returning now to the observations made on one of my trips to Monongah, I found that its old West Fork River flowed clean and clear—no longer yellow as it did when I was a kid. 

Modern environmentalists, free from subservience to the old coal Barons, apparently have put the plugs on some of the yellow sulfur that drained into it from the old mines.

It looked like a little boy could catch a fish there now. 

Otherwise, the remnants of a once-bustling town and what was left of the mighty Monongah coal mines were a sad site to see.  Time changes everything!

I would like to thank Janet Lieving of Consol Energy and James Edward Davis—who once mined coal from the old Monongah No. 8 Mine—for their help with the acquisition of some of the information and photographs on this Web page and others.

Larry Brian Radka