Mammoth No. 2 Mine & Coke Works
(Mammoth Slope Mine) (ca.1885-1946),
Located on Poker Road, Mammoth, Mt. Pleasant Twp., Westmoreland Co., PA
Owners: (ca.1879-1889), Colonel J.W. Moore Coke Company, Greensburg, PA
              (ca.1889-1927), H.C. Frick Coke Company, Scottdale, PA
                                        Company Store: Union Supply Company
              (ca.1930's-1946), John Dent & Gus Kelly leased coke works.

Only a few remnants of this once-large mining and coking operation stand today.  The only extant mine structure is the former boiler house and lamp house building.  Built in the 1890's, this one story structure is L-shaped and contains a riveted steel roof truss, common-bond red-brick walls, a gable roof, and a stone foundation.  It serves as the Mount Pleasant Township office.  Until ca. 1993, a large part of Mammoth No. 1 Mine Coke Works survived; however, this land was recently strip mined and reclaimed and all the coke ovens were demolished.  Nothing survives from the Mammoth No. 2 Mine Coke Works.

By 1886 Moore's Mammoth Mines employed 176 men and boys, and the both coke works employed 110 men and boys.  The two coke works had 377 beehive coke ovens and produced over 95,000 tons of coke.  The Mammoth Mines produced over 154,000 tons of coal, most of which was used in Moore's Mammoth Coke Works.  Both the mines and coke works were served by the Sewickley Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which ran from Youngwood east to Mammoth.

On August 29, 1889, the H.C. Frick Coke Company purchased the Mammoth Mines property from Colonel Moore for a sum well over $1,000,000.00.  The H.C. Frick Coke Company operated the mines for a little over a year before a horrific disaster occurred, on July 27, 1891, an explosion caused by the igniting of fire-damp gas killed 116 miners, in the Mammoth Shaft Mine.

State mining inspectors declared that the H.C. Frick Coke Company was not at fault in the Mammoth Mine disaster, as was usually the case, claiming that the mine had been adequately ventilated, but that a sudden concentration of gas in one part of the shaft entry mine sparked the explosion.  One mine inspector testified that while a number of miners appeared to have been killed by the force of the explosion, "a great majority of the bodies showed clearly that they died from the effects of after-damp."  The Pennsylvania State Mine Inspectors, as they usually did after most mining disasters, sided with the coal company in declaring the company "not-at-fault."

In the wake of one of the county's worst mining disasters, the Frick Coke Company, led by General Manager Thomas Lynch, urged its miners to exercise greater vigilance in the detection of methane gas in the mines. (An examination of the testimony of the coal miners who survived the Mammoth Disaster undoubtedly would reveal a response different to that of the coal company and the state inspectors concerning their attitudes about safety at the Mammoth Mine.)

Despite the explosion, however, the company repaired part of the underground works and reopened the Mammoth Shaft Mine about one year later.

During the bitter coal miners strike of 1894, trouble occurred at Mammoth Mine, near Mt. Pleasant, between miners and deputies, a striker's woman hurled a stone which struck Mammoth Mine Superintendent Charles Frank, causing an ugly and painful wound.

The coke works at the Mammoth Shaft Mine (called Mammoth No. 1 Mine) was the larger of the two bee-hive coking operations;  by the 1910's Mammoth No. 1 Mine had 311 bee-hive coke ovens.  The coke works associated with the Mammoth Slope Mine (called Mammoth No. 2 Mine) had 199 bee-hive coke ovens.

Just as the coal and coke operation was expanding, so was the town of Mammoth. By 1910 over 1,000 persons lived in Mammoth. The H.C. Frick Coke Company operated the Mammoth Mines and Coke Works through the 1920's.

By 1926 the H.C. Frick Coke Company was operating only 174 coke ovens at Mammoth, producing about 107,000 tons of coke. The Mammoth Mines produced over 181,000 tons of coal ca.1926, and both the mines and coke works employed 350 men and boys.

The H. C. Frick Coke Company closed and abandoned the Mammoth Mines and Coke Works in 1927 and soon afterwards offered the coal company-owned houses for sell.

The H.C. Frick Coke Company leased the Mammoth Coke Works in the 1930's to John Dent and Gus Kelly of Greensburg, PA.  The coke ovens near the former shaft mine (Mammoth No. 1 Mine) were operated until about 1946.   M & A Suggerman subsequently took over the coal property and strip mined the remaining coal pillers and in recent years the coal has been reclaimed from the slate dump (boney dump) near the site of the shaft mine.

(History and description of the Mammoth Mines & Coke Works, with additional data and pictures adapted from "Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 1994,"  America's Industrial Heitage Project, National Park Service, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, U.S. Department of the Interior, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

118 killed in 1891 Frick massacre and mine explosion to get markers.
Sunday, September 24, 2000

By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

They were slurred in life and forgotten in death.  Now the mass grave dedicated to 118 immigrant laborers killed in 1891 in Westmoreland County will be marked. Two Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission markers will be placed on the site Friday. A pair of personalized headstones also will be added to the grave, which has never been graced with anything so elaborate.

The recognition is for men and boys who were part of Pennsylvania's struggle for safe and fair working conditions, though most of them never knew they were part of any labor cause.

Of those killed, 109 were coal miners from Eastern Europe. They died Jan. 27, 1891, in the explosion of Mammoth Mine No. 1, near Mount Pleasant. After their deaths, mine safety reforms became a political cause.

The other nine laborers were striking coke oven workers who were shot to death April 2, 1891. Their early morning clash with deputized agents of Frick Coke Co. began with words and escalated to bullets as the deputies fired at their adversaries.  In labor lore, the strikers' deaths became known as the Morewood Massacre, for the men had been employed at Morewood Mines of the Frick coke works.

Most of the bodies from both events ended up in a common trench in St. John's Cemetery in Mount Pleasant. The Pennsylvania Labor History Society believes 79 of the miners and seven of the strikers were buried there.

Many miners were mangled so badly in the explosion that there was little left to bury.
Like the coke workers, they were employed by Henry Clay Frick, the industrialist who was born only minutes away from the spots where the 1891 deaths occurred.

Frick, a millionaire before he was 30, was a legend while he lived. A certain animosity hung over his laborers. Mostly Poles and Slavs, they struggled with English and with the customs of a strange, new world.  They were welcome to pick up a coal shovel and go to work. But if they dared to ask about pay or safety, they were quickly reminded that plenty of other foreigners with strong backs could replace them.  By word of mouth and in the newspapers, they were often referred to as "Hunkies," a generic slur for Eastern Europeans who were considered dim and unimportant.  Only in death did the miners get a bit of empathy. The Mount Pleasant Journal wrote these sentences about the gas explosion that killed them:
Of the 109 who went to work that day, "not one escaped to tell the awful tale of how death came. Even the fire boss, William Snaith, who had made out his report at an early hour, showing that the mine was safe, met the same fate that befell those who were permitted to enter the mine only by his order.

"It was about 9 o'clock that the explosion occurred, and soon a black vapor poured out of the top of the 107-foot shaft, telling those above ground plainer than words could do that death lurked in the depths."

Thirty-one men left families behind. The other 78 were single or mere boys.
Though they remained anonymous in their mass grave at St. John's Cemetery, the miners played a role in Pennsylvania politics. The Mammoth disaster prompted state legislation that strengthened mine safety inspections.

The strikers shot dead were far less sympathetic to the public and the press. They were among 16,000 who walked out for higher wages in the coke region.
A march and rally put them in the path of the company's militia. After the bloodshed, the shooting deaths went largely unquestioned by the citizenry and the newspapers, whose natural sympathies were with Frick.

The seven strikers who died immediately were buried in the same mass grave with the miners.

"These were people who had nothing," said Russell Gibbons, a labor historian. "It's amazing that they didn't end up in a pauper's cemetery."

The coke workers' strike collapsed a month after the shootings.

For more than a century, the stories of these miners and strikers have been largely overlooked. But the state has decided that both are compelling enough to be noted by the historical marker program.

"The events must have statewide or national significance for that to happen," said Marilyn Levin of the state Division of History.

Along with the formal markings of the grave, the Pennsylvania Labor History Society will make both events part of its 27th annual conference Friday and Saturday.
Its theme is the struggle for worker organization and safety -- both centerpieces of Mammoth Mine and Morewood Massacre stories.

The Mammoth Mine Disaster, January, 1891,
Mammoth, Mt. Pleasant Twp., Westmoreland Co., PA

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