Scott's Run Voices
Interview with: SR 3 (Lewis Loretta)
Interviewed by: Kirk Hazen
Transcribed by: Erica Flowers
Edited by: Laura Brady

Monongah Mine Explosion

I want to go up to Monongah where they had that big explosion up there. You know, Monongah Mine on Route 19. See, that’s where three hundred and seven men got killed. They don’t even know how many boys, because they wasn’t on the payroll.

Bumping Coal off the Stone

This here is what they call bumping coal off the stone [refers to photo]. You had to undermine this about four feet deep--you know, get it in there about four feet deep. You see when they get that undermine, then someone would drill a hole there for the coal.

You lived in a coal camp. If you had a boy that was big enough where he could carry a dinner bucket and it wouldn’t drag the ground, then he was big enough to go in the mines. This is a boy here.

Hand Auger

After they get this cut around here, this boy would drill a hole with this hand auger here for when they get ready to tap it. A hand auger like this, see, you had to have. You use to get up on the bench and drill down. If you go in deeper, you can move your bench up see. But then they’d each tap that up, then they’d shoot it, they'd shoot the coal.

Tamping the Hole

[Now for the tamping, what would they actually put in the hole?]

One was dynamite and clay. They use to put clay at the mouth of your place where you would work. You got clay and wrapped it up in paper and you stuck it in a hole and you would tap it in there, see. See I don’t have none of that. Paulette Shine from that museum, the Coal Museum, we’ve got all that down there.

Shooting the Coal

[Shooting the coal means what?]

They’d hook a cable to it and years back they use to call what they have a fuse. They’d light the fuse, then run. Run away, and it would go off. Nowadays they have a cap, what they call a cap. They stick in a stick of dynamite with about a seven foot cord on it, and you’d put it in there and then you’d get your cable and you’d tie it on to this cord. Then you’d stretch it out for about a hundred feet until you’d get around a corner. Then you'd have a little battery. You’d put it on there, and just, you know, pull the wire, and it would go off. Just charge it up and set it off. See here, now they shot the coal down and here’s where they’re loading it in the car--putting it in there and hand loading it with a shovel.

Shovels

You see they’d have a shovel. They had what they called a number three shovel. Number three shovel is the size down here. And number four shovel was a little bit bigger, number five shovel was bigger yet. You had guys working in mines called steam shovels. We’d call them steam shovel because they could load like a steam shovel. See, they’d load this car up after this coal was shot down; they’d load the car.

Dog Holes

I don’t know if you know where Scott’s Run is or not? Granville right down here? Go past and there was sixty nine mines, sixty-nine mines from here to Granville to up at Cassville. Nineteen of them these mines and the rest of them were called dog holes. Go in there with and shoot the coal out and sell it.

Nobody had to pay for them. Like you wanted to start a place like that? Well you started with crops out along the river. You’d go up and clean the dirt away and you could start undermining the coal, shoot it and load it up. Yeah, they use to be a lot of dog holes

Cutting Machine

Then they got a machine--what they call a cutting machine. Cut coal on the bottom you know. Cut about seven feet deep. They had anywhere from twelve to fourteen feet wide. Then you didn’t have to undermine it or nothing. You would just clean it, you’d clean that dust from underneath that coal out, where the cut coal was underneath. Clean all that dust out, then you’d shoot it.

Each cut of coal sold about eight cars. That’s about twenty to twenty-two tons of coal. Then you’d clean that some places. You had a cleanup, a cleanup system. You have to clean that whole cut of coal up, regardless of what kind of condition and whether they had a wreck or something and something leaked.

Relay Motor

They had what they called a relay motor. They’d bring end pieces in and put it in the side track and then the horse would get it and bring it to your work place.

Steel Hoppers

That Cassville Mine use to load a hundred steel hoppers a day. That's hand loading. That’s how big it was.

Steel hoppers were what you loaded the coal into, what you see on the road now. They had fifty ton cars and seventy-five ton cars. Cassville was a big coal company. It was owned by some company in Pittsburgh. But we had a coal mine here had a tipple on the other side of the river.

[What’s a tipple?]

Well, see on this hill side? In here they had a mine and a real tipple and they’d load the coal in a bucket and transfer across the river occasionally. That’s where Star City comes in. But then when a cable broke, that would change the mine.

Mine Timbers

See, timbers like that [in a picture] was your warning. If the place was getting bad, going to fall in, them timbers would crack. They would crack and that’s how you got your warning. Then as more weight come down, them posts would just bend and break and fall.

Timbering

Well, [to timber something] you had a saw and an ax. You’d measure, you’d have a little piece of stick, two pieces of stick and slide you know and you made the lintel, then you’d cut that post there and let it leave enough space for that cap piece up there you see. You made it sometimes on what from was left over from the posts. Split the post to make the cap pieces. See here’s where they are doing more timbering, that’s where the place probably got real bad.

Once them posts took weight, you knew it. You could feel the difference. You could tell the difference when you’d come into work the next morning you could tell the difference by looking at the posts.

Now some company’s had what they called timber men. They work separate. You had a real bad place, they’d come in and timber it out.

Coal Loader

See these guys, you see a coal loader. He didn’t make no money unless he loaded coal. What coal you load, that’s what you got paid for.

The coal loader all he would do is load coal and stuff like that. That’s what it looks like here.

Carbide Lights

I started in the mines in the thirties, but this photo was way before the thirties [refers to photo]. See, the miner has a carbide light on. You bought carbide to put in the bottom of the lamp. And the top of the lamp had a little place where you would put water. Then when you want a bigger flame, you’d just flip that water on it and it give you more steam and that flame would come out, see. If was down at the museum, I could show you a carbide light.

Testing for Bad Conditions

See here’s this guy is testing for bad coal. You know you could tell if you heard somebody talking or by the sound of it. If it sounded solid it was all right, but if it boom or something to it, we knew it was bad. We had a regular tapping signal.

A lot of times, your carbide light would tell you if you had air in a mine or not.

It would go dim. It wouldn’t go out. If you didn’t have enough ventilation up in your work place that flame wouldn’t get big at all, then you’d go out there in the fresh air and pop up.

I mean this picture was taken back in the twenties when they tested for gas with canaries.

Horses in the Mines

See I can remember the horses working in the mines. A lot of the times, they’d break a new horse in, I had to go up there and coax the horse. They’d pull a car up and when they was coming back down they didn’t know where to turn off at and I had hell of a time trying to get it to turn off. After all they learned, they were smarter than what the men was driving.

Children in the Mines

A lot of them kids wasn’t over twelve years old. They had them on the tipple picking slate. That was bindering the coal, separating the coal.

You see this little boy that what I was telling you about a while ago wasn’t big enough to carry a bucket. There he is right there. There’s his horse. See, probably that’s a family. They went in there and loaded the coal and pulled it out and dumped it and car back in there. There was a lot of them in the mines around here.

Factory Train

See I can remember when they had a factory train coming through Osage any time of the day. It came from Pennsylvania to Jimtown, then from Jimtown they could catch a train anywhere. East or West, North or South anywhere they wanted to go. They could catch a train.

The only transportation you had was you had to walk from here to Jimtown, hit the train, go to Morgantown, catch the train coming back. They run about every hour or so. Then there was a lot of car hopping too because that freight train ran all the time up in the hollow and Jimtown. I would jump on it and take a ride to Jimtown and wait and ride it back.

Coal Camp

[You grew up in Coal Camp. What was that like? ]

Well, a lot different than what it is today because everybody knew everybody and if something went wrong in the camp, everybody was there to help you. I can remember when somebody had a baby or something, everybody come up there with chicken. People were more friendly, you know what I mean? They were closer together.

Coal camp is like a big city. It’s got everything coal.

A Burnside stove is a favorite. You’d put that in one room and it would heat the whole house. About four room houses about all they had. Coal stove, yeah. You lived in the coal camp they had a team of washers and a wagon and a guy with all that. If we needed coal, he would go get it and bring it up to your house. Wouldn’t charge a penny for it. I can remember them days real good. You ever see that picture in that museum down there about Liberty? If you ever go down, look at that picture. Liberty’s a little town down there.

Union Busting and Yellow Dogs

When they started breaking the union, see they throwed the people they call scabs-- we call them scabs-- they took their furniture and throwed it out. And them people, their streets was all full of furniture. [The companies] owned everything.

Now I can remember up here at Osage in Chaplain. Osage had a coal mine there, and Chaplain did on the side of the road. That’s all the water there was. You couldn’t even tell when it was dark here because they had so damn many floodlights shining back and forth, you couldn’t even tell when it was dark. And nobody, let’s see they had a lot of guards. But the trouble didn’t start till they started fooling around with [company guards]. And then that’s when the trouble started, that’s when the trouble started. It was knowed all over the place. It was knowed all over the country.

We use to call [the company guards] yellow dogs. They carried guns and they thought they owned everything. They found out different.

Them old union men that we had are now gone. Yeah they’re all dead. I’m the only one around here. I’m the only one around here knows this stuff. And I try to tell them

Shifts

[They ran] three shifts. One day shift, afternoon and night. See here, this is Uncle Loyd right there [refers to photo]. That’s me when I was a kid. All these people are dead here. All of them. Let’s see. This guy lives up in Granville. All these guys here I was raised with in Granville. They’re all gone Second shift. 1940 picture was taken. It shows up good don’t it? Most of them was from around here, not too far. Around Granville, well Granville that’s where the tipple was at. Star City, Evansdale, Brier Hill, just right around here.

This here’s beginning of a shift there everybody’s waiting to go in. You know in them days you had to walk every place. There’s no trips, no nothing. Then in 1945 or something they started bringing loading machines. There use to be a mine here called Hell Creek brought them in earlier than that. That’s when we were working seven hours a day then, too.

After a shift when we got ready to come home, they’d side-track us or something to bring a load of coal out. That’s when we struck. We got paid for the time we went in till the time we went out. No trouble getting you in there, but getting you out.

River Ferry from Star City and Brier Hill

I can remember a lot of people here worked there from Star City and Brier Hill. They went together and bought themselves a room so they wouldn’t have to pay a nickel to ride the ferry. That ferry, they had a ferry down there you know. High water, low water or not, they’d do it. They’d load that boat on high water up the river a long ways then they’d start across by the time they’d got across they’d be close to the tipple.

Just think. There was everything floating in that river when it was high. Logs, trees and everything. And the river wasn’t very deep then because they didn’t have the locks. The only locks they had was up here. Cause in 1932 I can remember whenever it went dry.

Seasonal Work

We’d set down there on the company store on the porch down there store down there, and then that girl would call us up whether or not we worked tomorrow. If she said there was no work, we’d take off and go off somewheres. Sat around all damn day just to hear whether we worked or not.

CC Camp

I was in the CC Camp. Went and worked out in the woods, building farm lands out of the woods. You know we’d go and we’d clear out a path, oh maybe twenty-four feet wide or maybe wider you know, fire would burn up to that. But our biggest trouble down there were the moonshiners. They’d start a fire with their still so it would burn away from us. One time, I don’t know, there was about fifty of us working up there and we run on green nash. I never seen such a bunch of sick guys in my life. We had to get the whole camp to come and haul us out of there with the truck. Boone County.