Nation needs memorial to workers
One hundred and thirty-two years ago this October an explosion ripped through a mine in Bethelboro, some four miles from Uniontown.
Fourteen miners were killed, a half-dozen others were injured.
It was one in a series of mine explosions and accidents that claimed thousands of lives in 1884. Untold thousands of miners have died through the years.
They died due to slate-falls and collapsed roofs one and two at a time or in explosions that claimed dozens of lives in minutes, if not seconds.
They died in the course of leading ordinary lives of hard labor. In a larger sense, they died in the service of the country. Until relatively recently, coal was the principal source of energy for both homes and factories.
Without Fayette County coke, a coal derivative, Pittsburgh would not have been ringed with steel factories and would not have developed into the world’s iron and steel center.
During the age of rail, coal powered the giant locomotives that hauled both people and freight across the country.
One measure of the importance of coal to the nation’s essential well-being was the rise of the United Mine Workers; when its 500,000 or so members went on strike or were locked out of work, the nation practically shut down, throwing presidents and Congresses into fits of anxiety.
For all these reasons, for all of their deaths and injuries and hard labor, for their importance through the years, it would be entirely appropriate for the nation to honor generations of American coal miners.
It might even honor all laboring men and women; a national labor museum on the Mall in Washington would not be inappropriate, close-by perhaps the African-American history museum, which opened on the Mall last week.
What a magnificent tapestry to draw on: mine workers, steelworkers, the men (including Chinese immigrants) who built the railroads; the women and children who spun cotton and sewed clothing, shoemakers, glassworkers, candlemakers; the brave and skilled individuals (including many native Americans) who built the nation’s bridges and skyscrapers; dock workers, bricklayers, teamsters, autoworkers and on and on.
White, black and brown. European-, African-, Asian- and Latin-Americans. Men, women and children (It wasn’t easy prodding Congress into abolishing child labor) all would be represented.
Such a museum would tell of their heartache and triumphs. In short, it would tell their stories.
The story of the 1884 Bethelboro mine explosive is perhaps illustrative:
All hell broke loose inside the mine in the early afternoon on the 27th of October; the mine was engulfed in fire, dust, smoke, cave-ins. One of the survivors, a miner by the name of Jerry Ringer, was soon enveloped in a thick mixture of coal particles and other debris. He tried to run. He couldn’t. His lungs were clogged. He stumbled into a side room where, as he told a coroner’s jury, he “laid down to die.”
Members of the rescue crew waited two hours — until three in the afternoon — for the fire to subside and the dust to settle before commencing their grim task. It wasn’t until 9 at night that the first four victims were removed; by midnight a total of nine bodies had been placed on the ground outside the mine shaft.
It was raining hard by then, a gloomy, weepy night as families and friends of the victims stood beneath flickering, wind-blown lanterns.
By morning 14 bodies, including three sets of fathers and sons, had been removed to two small shanties near the company store.
Abe Wilson, brought out alive, was placed in a horse stall, where he lay unattended for hours. He died there of his injuries.
As the dead and injured were removed, their faces smeared “with the dust of honest toil,” it was possible to hear not just cries but anguished, angry voices. Many of those standing about regretted they ever had anything to do with coal mining. One young man vowed to buy a farm by “next spring.”
Of the grieving families a Uniontown newspaper editorialized, “Dark and towering are the clouds and thorny the path to the widow and children.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.