A coal town collapse, part 1
Betty Mae Maule was one of 60 students who attended the two-classroom Shallmar School in November 1949. When teaching principal J. Paul Andrick asked Betty Mae to write a problem at the board one day, the 10-year-old girl stood up at her desk and promptly fainted. Betty Mae and her siblings hadn’t eaten anything all day. Their last meal had been the night before when the eight people in the family shared a couple apples. This is how bad things had gotten in the little coal town on the North Branch Potomac River. What had once been the jewel of Western Maryland coal towns was dying. Operating only 36 days in 1948, the Wolf Den Coal Corporation, which owned Shallmar, came into 1949 struggling in vain to stay open. The mine shut down in March, having operating only 12 days Read more…
Western Pennsylvania Ghost Towns
Susan Tassin was hiking with her husband one day along a Pennsylvania trail when they came across stacked cut stones in a large rectangle. Tassin recognized what she was seeing as the foundation of a house. The home was long gone, and the stones were all that remained to mark that someone had once called that out-of-the-way place home. “I was excited,” Tassin said. “We saw some other hikers and told them what we had found.” The other hikers didn’t understand the Tassins’ excitement. The hikers pointed out a historical marker that told readers the site had once been more than a place for a single home. An entire home had been located there. It was all gone, though. All that was left was a ghost town. When most people think of ghost towns, they picture dusty streets flanked by Read more…
Living near the entrance to Hell
The story of Centralia, PA, has always amazed me. I wonder if anyone has written a book about it. It’s hard for me to imagine that a fire has been burning underground for more than 50 years. Centralia was a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. In 1962, a fire started in one of the mine shafts and spread throughout the network of shafts of under the town. Since it was a coal mine, the fire found plenty of fuel. If that wasn’t bad enough, the residents had to deal with poisonous gases leaking out of the mines and sinkholes appearing. Yahoo News reported, “The mine fire has transformed Centralia into a macabre tourist attraction. There’s an intact street grid with almost nothing on it, clouds of steam waft from the cracked earth, and visitors gawk at the ruins of an abandoned Read more…
Flickers, Clackers & Bingles: Hunting Coal Company Coins
It might surprise you to know that even into the 1940’s, some American coal miners weren’t paid in cash or with a paycheck. They worked for flickers, clackers, lightweights and bingles. They were a form of currency generally known as coal scrip. Coal Scrip Scrip was a private currency issued by a coal company that was generally good only a businesses owned by the coal company like the company store. It allowed the coal company to make an additional profit supplying needed household goods and food to their workers. Other businesses might accept the currency, but if they did, they did so at a discounted value. This eventually led to many states requiring that the coal mining scrip be accepted at its face value. “It was extremely rare to find in Maryland to begin with because the state Read more…
1949: Tracking the Underground Pony Express
Herds of ponies once roamed Maryland, though they were rarely seen my most people. They were mining ponies whose job it was to haul the coal from Maryland’s coal mines. In one instance, Ray O’Rourke wrote for the Baltimore Sunday Sun Magazine, “Twenty-odd ponies that haul coal from under some 2,000 acres of Maryland territory are never seen in this State, and never breathe the air over it.” These ponies hauled coal for the Stanley Coal Company in Crellin, Maryland. Though the mine was under Maryland, the entrance was in nearby West Virginia. Miners had to walk from Crellin across the state line and then backtrack once they were in the mine. The mine’s location also created some political headaches with Maryland and West Virginia governments fighting for the tax revenue from the mine. Eventually a compromise was reached where Read more…
Saving Shallmar: Christmas Spirit in Coal Town
If you’re looking for a great Christmas gift, consider getting a copy of my latest book, Saving Shallmar: Christmas Spirit in a Coal Town. It’s a true story that will also give you a picture of what living in a coal company town was like in the mid-20th Century. In fall turned to winter in 1949, the residents of Shallmar, Maryland, were starving. The town’s only business, the Wolf Den Coal Corp. had closed down, unemployment benefits ended and few people had cars to drive to other jobs. When children started fainting in school, Principal J. Paul Andrick realized the dire situation the town was in and set out to help. He set out to try and get help for the town’s residents and succeeded beyone his wildest dreams just in time for Christmas. You can order a copy here.
How coal miners showed their toughness
Ever wonder how a disabled person got by before Social Security, disability and all those other programs? Well, if they were coal miners, they found a way to work. Here are some of the coal miners from Maryland and West Virginia who worked because they needed to do. They come from the unpublished memoirs of a miner named Kenny Bray. John Schooly had been crippled by polio and was only able to walk with the aid of crutches. Schooly actually had two sets of crutches; one was normal length and the second pair was only three feet long. He used the short crutches to drag himself through the mine headings to the face of the mine. When he got there, he braced his hands on the rails and pushed the coal cars into place with his shoulder. Then he would Read more…
The Mystery of History. Boring It's Not!
You would think that with history, things would be set in stone. I mean, history’s happened so the facts of what happened are there for everyone to see. That should make my job as a writer who likes historical topics easy. Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve run into two instances recently that have both frustrated me and intrigued me because they are a bit of a mystery. This morning I’ve been culling through the internet, my research library and making calls to try and find out how a baseball league, that by all accounts ceased playing in 1930, was still competing in 1934. I went through an article I had from my idea folder and made notes about the season opening for the Chambersburg Maroons in the Blue Ridge League in 1934. I took the specifics of the event from the Read more…
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