Falmanac: The Fallston Almanac of American History
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(Wikipedia) The Buffalo Creek Flood was an incident that occurred on February 26, 1972, when the Pittston Coal Company's coal slurry impoundment dam #3, located on a hillside in Logan County, West Virginia, USA, burst four days after having been declared 'satisfactory' by a federal mine inspector.
The resulting flood unleashed approximately 132 million gallons (500,000,000 L) of black waste water, cresting over 30ft high, upon the residents of 16 coal mining hamlets in Buffalo Creek Hollow. Out of a population of 5,000 people, 125 were killed, 1,121 were injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless. 507 houses were destroyed, in addition to forty-four mobile homes and 30 businesses. The disaster also destroyed or damaged homes in Lundale, Saunders, Amherstdale, Crites, Latrobe and Larado. In its legal filings, Pittston Coal referred to the accident as "an Act of God." Continued
(Bluefield Daily Telegraph) Some of the bloodiest and most important moments in the American labor movement happened in the coalfields of southern West Virginia. But most who live beyond its rugged mountains, and even many who live in them, don’t know the stories.Doug Estepp is trying to change that, one busload of tourists at a time. Continued
(Aegis) ... She said the quarry dates back to the 1840s, when speculators from Lancaster County started moving west to York County.
Slate's heyday was around the early 1900s and it was primarily used as roofing material, until the Industrial Revolution produced synthetic shingles that were cheaper, she said.
The quarry's manpower largely left during World War I, she said.
Robinson noted the site still contains slate, and remaining piles of it were used for various purposes. In the 1950s, the slate was taken for highway paving material.
Hard facts about Funkhouser Quarry's operating history are hard to come by. Continued
(Wikipedia) The Klondike Gold Rush, sometimes referred to as the Yukon gold rush, was a frenzied gold rush that drew thousands of would-be prospectors from all over the world to the Klondike River near Dawson City, Yukon, Canada after gold was discovered there in 1896. The gold rush lasted only a few years, essentially ending in 1899. Of the many, who set out for Klondike, only a fraction got rich. As a paradox, it is estimated that the money spent getting there exceeded the value of gold found during the rush.
... News reached the United States in July 1897 at the height of a significant series of financial recessions and bank failures in the 1890s. The American economy had been hard hit by the Panics of 1893 and 1896, which caused widespread unemployment. The first successful prospectors sailed from the Klondike, arriving in San Francisco, California on July 15 and Seattle, Washington on July 17, bringing with them large amounts of gold and setting off the Klondike stampede. Many who were hurt by the financial crises were motivated to try their luck. Continued
(Providence College) The "Molly Maguires" were miners in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania who organized into a union during the 1860's and 1870's. These miners were chiefly, although not exclusively, Irish and the union was called the Workingmen's Benevolent Association. In general, the members of this union were also members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a semi-secret fraternal society, which had its origin in Ireland as a completely secret and anonymous association.
This organization of Irish miners was dubbed the "Molly Maguires," after a group of Irish peasants who dressed up as women to antagonize their landlords. This group was infamously known as murderers and assassins and the press and police in America applied the name to the Irish miners. The label was used by both the press and the owner-operators of the mining companies to their distinct advantage. They called anyone who was pro-union a "Molly," inferring that they were criminals at best. This helped to subdue, even if only slightly, uprisings in the work place. The conditions of the mines were horrendous: there were no provisions for safety nor proper ventilation within the pits. Mine inspectors were figments of the imagination - not until 1870 was legislation passed mandating a second exit for escape in case of explosion, fire, cave-in, etc.
The legislature was largely under the influence of the coal mine operators and ignored the workers, as the mine owners perceived them as having no power. The initiative behind the eventual passage of the 1870 legislation was the Avondale fire in 1869, in which 179 men died. Even then, however, it was only in Schuylkill County that this legislation was passed, which stated there must be a second opening, force ventilation, and the appointment of state mine inspectors.
These laws were, however, extremely weak and rarely enforced. It was not until a mine operator was one of the men killed in a severe explosion in the Ravensdale Collier in the Pottsville district that a need was finally seen for the grievances the miners had been voicing for years. In Schuylkill County alone, 566 miners were killed and 1665 maimed in seven years. Continued
(Wikipedia) The first observance of Father's Day actually took place in Fairmont, West Virginia on July 5, 1908. It was organized by Mrs. Grace Golden Clayton, who wanted to celebrate the lives of the 210 fathers who had been lost in the Monongah Mining disaster several months earlier in Monongah, West Virginia, on December 6, 1907.
It is possible that Clayton was influenced by the first celebration of Mother's Day that same year, just a few miles away. Clayton chose the Sunday nearest to the birthday of her recently deceased father. Continued
(Baltimore Sun) The wreck of the Clara Nevada in Alaskan waters at the height of the Klondike gold rush in 1898 has a Baltimore connection and is the subject of a recently published book, "The Clara Nevada: Gold, Greed, Murder and Alaska's Inside Passage." "It's a fairly well-known story in southeast Alaska," said Steven C. Levi, an Anchorage freelance and technical writer. "They tell it on the ferries, and the first time I heard about the Clara Nevada, I didn't believe it and decided to look into it, and the more research I did, the stranger the story became," he said in a telephone interview last week. Continued
(Baltimore Sun) A new company offering tours of West Virginia's coalfields has added a second trip for the fall as well as two railroad tours that trace the development of mining and logging in the state.
Adventurous travelers and history buffs alike have signed up to explore the region's mine wars through trips organized by Coal Country Tours LLC.
The West Virginia Mine War Tour has received tremendous support, said owner Doug Estepp, adding that the inaugural trip in June is almost sold out. Continued
1946 ARC Identifier 12505 / Local Identifier 70.218. This documentary film starts with the history of the steelmaking process, explaining the operation of the blast furnace and the open hearth furnace. It goes on to cover the mining of ore and limestone, transportation and coking of coal, open hearth and rolling mill operations, and plating and finishing. In addition, it also illustrates many of the applications of steel mill products. The film is partly animated. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Mines. Pittsburgh Experiment Station. (1934 - 01/19/1975)
(wvmetronews.com) The Coal House, which was built back in 1933, housed the Tug Valley Chamber of Commerce and served as an unofficial museum for Mingo County according to Office of Emergency Services Director Jarred Fletcher.
"You go through the archives of the county, the Hatfields and McCoys and the different things we have to offer here in our county were lost,” Fletcher said. “It's kind of the showplace of the county with all the souvenirs and different things they had on display there." Continued
(LoC) On October 3, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt met with miners and coalfield operators from the anthracite coalfields in Pennsylvania in an attempt to settle the strike, then in its fifth month. The country relied on coal to power commerce and industry and anthracite or "hard coal" was essential for domestic heating. The miners had left the anthracite fields on May 12, demanding wage increases, union recognition, and a shorter workday. As winter approached, public anxiety about fuel shortages and the rising cost of all coal pushed Roosevelt to take unprecedented action. Continued
Images: 1. Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. John Mitchell, President of the UMWA (United Mine Workers of America), arriving in the coal town. His open four-horse carriage is surrounded by a crowd of boys. 1902. 2. Unidentified coal miner during the UMW labor strike against CF&I, in Ludlow, Las Animas County, Colorado. 1913 or 1914 (Library of Congress).
(Mail Online) ... A single 'hurrier' pulled the heavy cart of coal, weighing as much as 500lb, attached by a chain to a belt worn around the waist, while one or more 'thrusters' pushed from behind. Acrid water dripped from the tunnel ceiling, soaking their ragged clothes.
Many would die from lung cancer and other diseases before they reached 25. For, shockingly, these human beasts of burden were children, some only five years old. Continued
(Summit Times) On September 10, 1897, at half past three in the afternoon, a group of over 400 striking immigrant coal miners marched toward the Pardee Mine outside of Lattimer, Pennsylvania. Most of the miners were Poles, but with them were also Slovaks and some Italians, Hungarians, and Lithuanians. They had been on strike for some time, and had had several violent confrontations with strikebreakers, the infamous "Coal and Iron Police," and local law enforcement. The strikers were unarmed and marching peacefully behind a large American flag.At about quarter to four, nearing the mine, they were confronted by Sheriff James L. Martin, brandishing a revolver. Hidden behind a low rise, along the line of march, were some 60 sheriff's deputies, armed with Winchester rifles. Continued
Image: Wikipedia
(LoC) The major financial catalyst for the panic of 1857 was the August 24, 1857, failure of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company. It was soon reported that the entire capital of the Trust's home office had been embezzled. What followed was one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history.
Almost immediately, New York bankers put severe restrictions on even the most routine transactions. In turn, many people interpreted these restrictions as a sign of impending financial collapse and panicked. Individual holders of stock and of commercial paper rushed to their brokers and eagerly made deals that "a week before they would have shunned as a ruinous sacrifice." As the September 12, 1857, Harper's Weekly described the scene on the New York Stock Exchange, "…prominent stocks fell eight or ten per cent in a day, and fortunes were made and lost between ten o'clock in the morning and four of the afternoon."
The Report of the Clearinghouse Committee, produced in the years following the panic of 1857, found that "A financial panic has been likened to a malignant epidemic, which kills more by terror than by real disease." Yet behind the reaction of New York's bankers to the closing of a trust company lay a confluence of national and international events that heightened concern:
To compound the problem, the SS Central America, a wooden-hulled steamship transporting millions of dollars in gold from the new San Francisco Mint to create a reserve for eastern banks, was caught in a hurricane and sunk in mid-September. (The vessel had aboard 581 persons—many carrying great personal wealth—and more than $1 million in commercial gold. She also bore a secret shipment of 15 tons of federal gold, valued at $20 per ounce, intended for the eastern banks.) Continued
(LoC) Frederick Law Olmsted, nineteenth-century America's foremost landscape architect, was born on April 26, 1822. Son of a well-to-do Hartford, Connecticut, merchant, Olmsted spent much of his childhood enjoying rural New England scenery. Weakened eyesight forced him to abandon plans to attend Yale. Instead, young Olmsted studied engineering and scientific farming, putting his agricultural and managerial theories into practice on his own Staten Island farm.
A tour of England and the Continent inspired Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852) and a new career in journalism. Later that year, the founding editor of the New-York Daily Times (soon renamed the New York Times), Henry J. Raymond, engaged Olmsted to report on conditions in the slaveholding states. His articles were subsequently published as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas (1857), A Journey in the Back Country (1860), and in a two-volume compilation of material from all three books, The Cotton Kingdom (1861). Together Olmsted’s keen observations created the most complete contemporary portrait of the South on the eve of the Civil War, concluding that slavery harmed the whole of Southern society. Continued
(Wikipedia) The Buffalo Creek Flood was an incident that occurred on February 26, 1972, when the Pittston Coal Company's coal slurry impoundment dam #3, located on a hillside in Logan County, West Virginia, USA, burst four days after having been declared 'satisfactory' by a federal mine inspector.
The resulting flood unleashed approximately 132 million gallons (500,000,000 L) of black waste water, cresting over 30ft high, upon the residents of 16 coal mining hamlets in Buffalo Creek Hollow. Out of a population of 5,000 people, 125 were killed, 1,121 were injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless. 507 houses were destroyed, in addition to forty-four mobile homes and 30 businesses. The disaster also destroyed or damaged homes in Lundale, Saunders, Amherstdale, Crites, Latrobe and Larado. In its legal filings, Pittston Coal referred to the accident as "an Act of God." Continued
(NYTimes) ... As I discovered on a three-day trip this year, the passage, which travels 132 miles from McKeesport, Pa., to Cumberland, Md., is part industrial history lesson, part nature excursion and part fun house, with thrilling and spooky moments: barely lighted corridors through mountainsides, whitecaps on rivers a hundred feet below and the lonely sound of a freight-train whistle.
Word is getting out that the trail is a world-class biking destination. Continued
Photo: MDRails
(mental floss) By 1879 Bodie boasted a population of 10,000 and was second to none for wickedness, badmen and “the worst climate out of doors.” One little girl, whose family was taking her to the remote and infamous town, wrote in her diary: “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.” Continued
Photos: Library of Congress
(Baltimore Sun) - ... At the end of Church Lane, just off York Road in Cockeysville, Brighton is leading about a dozen archaeology students in what historians believe is the first survey of an Irish immigrant village in the United States. The students have unearthed numerous bottles, coins, buttons and shards of pottery that help tell the story of the Irish quarry workers and their families, who settled the area and named it Texas, after the original destination that they never reached. Continued
Photo: 163 Church Street, Texas, Baltimore County, MD (Library of Congress).
