Coal Mining Experience – Ohio Co. KY
After being discharged from the
army in 1905, my grandfather, Jasper Newton Cox (1884-1974), returned home,
where he got a job working at the Broadway Coal Mining Company at Simmons, Ohio
County, Kentucky. He was working there
when he and my grandmother married, although he only worked in the mines a few
months. My grandmother, Eva Caroline
Smith (1889-1988), daughter of James Thomas Smith and Sarah (Sanders), didn’t
like for him to work in the mines because it was simply too dangerous. The
Hartford Herald and The Hartford
Republican frequently reported mining accidents, which were all too common.
In 1907, the Broadway Coal
Mining Company in Ohio County, Kentucky, where he worked, began operations that
lasted until 1934, providing a livelihood for some 250 employees, who dug,
loaded, and hauled tons of bituminous coal daily from its depths. The daily capacity was about 1100 tons, from
Vein Number 9, a seam of coal about four to five feet in thickness. Coal seams were not called by names, but were
given numbers as a form of identification.
The trade name for the Broadway Mine was the Lewis Creek Mine.
Every day, equipped with hard hats and carbide lights on their forehead,
the miners descended a vertical shaft on a lift, about 40 to 50, maybe 60 feet
or more, down to the bottom. Underneath,
in the miles of tunnels, they spent ten hours a day without seeing
sunlight. Once on the floor, they wound
through a maze of shafts to begin the day’s work at the seam of coal where
their shift had ended the day before.
Each night, using dynamite, the
shift’s miners blasted out the next day’s work.
Granddaddy said he went back
many nights to blast out coal after finishing his day job and worked to make
extra money. The next morning the day
shift miners, using picks, began digging out coal from seams formed more than
300 million years ago. After it was dug,
the coal was loaded in cars on rails.
Tons of coal were dug, loaded and hauled out daily from the depths of the
mine. It was dirty, grueling work. At the end of the day’s shift, every man
emerged to the surface, bone-tired and covered thick with dust “as black as
coal.”
My grandfather told me:
"In the coal mines, I
ran a machine to cut boards. Worked eight hours a day
and went back lots of
nights and worked extra, blasting out the next day's work
so loaders could work the
next morning taking coal out. When the coal mines
went on strike, I went to
farming on Ben Amos' farm. Raised mostly corn and
tobacco. I did that for two or three years and then
went back to the mines."
The second time he worked in the mines about two years later was at the
McHenry Mines for nearly three years, more or less, during a period from about
1911 to 1914.
One morning when I was visiting
my grandparents and my grandfather was telling me about his life, Grandmother
had come out on the screened-in back porch and sat down in her rocking chair
and was listening to what Granddaddy was telling me. When he said he went to work in the coal
mines after they were married, she said:
“He
only worked in the coal mines for about three months, as I didn’t like for him
to work in there. It was too dangerous.”
At this point, it reminded
Grandmother about a real incident that happened in the coal mines to her. She described how she and my daddy (as a
young child) went down in the mines with my grandfather once, and she told this
story:
“One
time your daddy and I went down into the coal mines with him at night when they
were to blast out a section so there would be coal to dig out for the next day’s
work. We wore carbide lights on our
foreheads. When the blast went off with
a huge and deafening noise, we stood behind one of the coal pillars. And after it was over, we were all covered
with coal dust and were black as could be.
And I had worn my new red dress.”
Grandmother laughed at her remembrance, and
continued:
“I
had to give all of us a bath in a zinc tub, and it took lots of scrubbing to
get clean.”
The large pillars of coal, that
she mentioned, were left to support the rock between the mine’s roof and the
surface. There were times when coal
pillars were removed that it caused the ground to collapse.
~.~
As mentioned, it didn’t take
long for my grandmother to realize that she didn’t want her husband to be a
coal miner. And she didn’t like being a coal miner’s wife. Her husband’s work was much too
hazardous. Every morning she handed him
his lunch bucket as he started to leave and said a prayer to herself that he
would return home safe and sound at the end of the day.
The family was listed in the
1910 census living near Rosine: Jasper N. Cox, age 24; wife, Eva, 21; and one
child, Gilbert O. Cox, age 1. Living
next door to them was John Henry Stewart and his wife, Susannah Miranda (Cox);
sons, Roy T.(hompson), 17; Warren C., 15; and Ethel C, age 13. Susannah was my grandfather’s oldest sister.
When he left the coal mines
after they went on strike, Granddaddy bought a little farm
near Cromwell from his
brother-in-law, John Henry Stewart, and went to farming. My grandparents were living on their new farm
when their first daughter Eula Mae was born in April 1912. (Two more daughters were born in Texas after
1922.) He was working over in his corn
field, shocking corn with a neighbor, when the horse kicked their three-year
old son (my father) in the head down at the barn lot. (But that’s another story.)
~.~
Granddaddy said there was no
money in farming. Farmers are at the
complete mercy of the weather and perhaps the seasons had not been kind to
farmers in the area that year. So when
Auntie and Uncle, (Lizzie and Everett Sandefur), came home for a visit, they
talked my grandparents into moving to Louisiana. Her sister begged my grandfather to come live
with them in Edgerly, so that he could get a job in the oil field, where a lot
of activity was going on at the time.
Grandmother sold all her things
at auction in preparation for their move.
They had handbills printed about the auction – date and place – and
grandmother and her sister went in the buggy and tacked the handbills up on
trees to advertise their auction. It turned out great, she said. On some things they received more money than
what they had paid for them originally, such as her dining room table, which
she said was a really nice one.
They left Kentucky for Louisiana
by train from Beaver Dam
in October 1915. In about 1919, they moved to Texas.
Courting Days and Marriage
After an absence of about five
years while he served in the army, my grandmother saw Newton Cox, as he was
called by family and friends, for the first time after he came to join several
friends and young people at her home in about 1907. My grandfather had brought her a rose, which
she later pinned on his coat. She was
eighteen and he was twenty-three. He had
come “calling” out to her home near Select and she said she had
no idea of going with him, but,
she said, “I pinned the rose on his
coat.” And that very night he asked
to start courting.
In a taped oral interview with
family around the table, she told me about her first time to go on a date with
my grandfather.
“We
went to Bald Knob Church. And then I
thought, well, I wasn’t going to go with him at all. But then he asked for a date the next day,
and I went with him the next day to Mt. Pleasant. (Laughter.)
But really, I didn’t have any intention of going with him. But we just kept on, and the second date was
better.”
When I asked how they met each other and about
their courting days, Grandmother told this:
“We
were raised in the same community, being neighbors, and we attended the Select
School together. The first date we ever
had was to
go
to church. Daddy did not have his own
buggy and always hired one to go courting in.
I always thought he tried to pick the wildest horse he could get at the
livery stable.”
(My grandmother called my
grandfather “Daddy” and he called her “Mama” because that’s what they got used
to saying to each other when their children were small.)
Thus began a courtship that lasted
about a year.
At this point in my interview, I asked Granddaddy
to tell me about his marriage.
“Well,
after I asked her to marry me, I went to our Baptist preacher by the name of
Preacher Gordon and asked him to marry us at a certain hour of the day. The preacher told me he was sorry but that he
had already promised to marry somebody else at that particular hour. Preacher Gordon said, “Could you wait until
another time so I could have time to marry both couples that day?” Granddaddy
said he told him: “No, I can’t change the hour, but I can
change preachers.” And I did, and so
Pendleton Taylor, another Baptist preacher, married us. We had a home wedding at her house with just
family and friends there.”
"Aunt
Pru, my step-mother, (formerly Prudence Taylor) prepared a wedding supper for
us and we spent the night at my father's house after we were married, before
going to the mines the next day.” (His
father was James William Cox.)
They set up housekeeping in one
of the company houses that were rented to the miners and their families, and
they traded at the company store. The
pay scale was a little above average, but hardly enough to live on by the time
they paid their bills at the company store.
Goods at the company store were marked up higher and workers had very
little choice but to trade there.
My beloved grandparents were married on Sunday, September 6, 1908 and
had been married sixty-six years when my grandfather passed away in his sleep
at home in September 1974. My grandmother died at Tyler on December 4, 1988.
Jasper
Newton and Eva Caroline (Smith) Cox
Photo
from Golden Wedding Anniversary
September
6, 1958
~.~
Ohio County Coal Mining Facts
In an internet article about
Kentucky Coal Heritage, concerning coal camps and communities, Ohio County was
listed with mines at Aetnaville, Beaver Dam, Center- town, Coffman, Deanefield,
Echols, McHenry, Prentis, Render, Reynolds, Rockport, Simmons, Taylor Mines and
Whitesville. For the period of this
report, 14 communities represented 27 different coal companies, spanning
operations for 49 years from 1903 through 1952.
Between the years of 1903
through 1952, 27 mines operated in various sections of Ohio County in various
years, although mining had been going on prior to the turn of the
century. Four companies began operations in the county in 1903:
Deanefield Coal Company at Aetnaville; Taylor Coal Company at Beaver Dam;
Central Coal and Iron Company at Render; and Taylor Coal Company at Taylor
Mines. Williams Coal Company at McHenry began operating in 1904; Green River
MM&T Company at Coffman began in 1905 and closed in 1906.
McHenry Coal Company at McHenry,
where my grandfather worked for about two or three years, operated from 1905
through 1921. Greenriver Coal Mining Company at Coffman began and ended
their operations in 1907 under that name; Broadway Coal Mining Company at
Simmons, south of McHenry, also began operations in 1907 that lasted through
1934, a span of 27 years.
Taylor Coal Company of Kentucky
at Beaver Dam employed the largest number of miners/employees with 350 working
there (1911-1915). Next was Williams Coal Company at McHenry operating
from 1904-1915 who employed 300 workers.
Two hundred and fifty employees worked at Beaver Dam Coal Company at
Beaver Dam (1916-1937); 250 were reported as being employed at Beaver Dam Coal
Company at McHenry (1916-1937), and at Simmons where my grandfather worked for
a few months, the Broadway Coal Mining Company employed 250 workers
(1907-1934). The year 1952, the latest
year of operation listed in this particular report, was for Central Coal Company
at Render (1948-1952).
In my research about coal
mining, I found that the Western Coal Field Region included all of Butler,
Daviess, Grayson, Hancock, Henderson, Hopkins, McLean, Muhlenhberg, Ohio, Union
and Webster Counties, and parts of about seven other counties, although not all
of the counties contained coal.
The most successful weapon of
the miners to obtain safer working conditions and better wages was the
strike. A strike meant that all workers
quit working and refused to return until their demands were met by company
officials. Business conditions also
affected the miners’ paychecks, especially in summer months when the demand for
coal decreased, so most miners were often unemployed for a period of weeks in
the summer.
For the local Ohio County area,
the job of the modern day coal miner has above average benefits, due
to the risks involved. Mining continues to be a dangerous occupation.
Today, mines still operate in
Ohio County, including strip mines, where coal is located less than a hundred
feet or so deep. Much coal information can be found on the internet about
the Western Kentucky Coal Fields.
~.~
To learn more about coal mining
history, a number of websites are available with information about the towns,
the coal camps, working conditions, and Kentucky mine photos, as well as
pictures of the miners. Browse some of
these websites at:
~ by Janice Cox Brown
oldest granddaughter of Jasper Newton & Eva Cox Tyler, Texas –
August 2012
~.~
The topographic maps below reflect the mining area at
Simmons, where my grandfather first worked at the Broadway Coal Mining Company
mines, and the area of Select and Cromwell, where my grandparents were born and
lived in Ohio County, Kentucky.
