The Bones of Coal
Read here about the Coal and Coke industry in the late 1800s in this newpaper article discovered among local clippings housed in the Uniontown Library. The article was published November 1, 1885 (source unknown).
Graphic Sketches of Life and Labor in the Mines and Before the Ovens
ON THE BUSY LITTLE BLACK STREAK
Which Makes Twice as Much Coke as All the Rest of the United States Together.
THE LUCKLESS BEGINNING OF THE INDUSTRY.
Suppose we fork
together the coke
made during the last
twelve months in the
Connellsville region,
the popular name for
the black stripe of
country about 40
miles long by three
miles wide, which
lies northeast and
southwest across
Westmoreland county
and part of Fayette.
Load it on cars and hitch them together in a
continuous train. Start the train going at the
rate of 12 miles an hour, which is about a
fair average for freight trains, and run it day
and night, without a moment’s stop to cool
hot boxes, or the slightest slacking up on the
stiff grades. Stand beside the track and
watch the train roll by, day after day, hour
after hour. Night after night listen to the
clank, clank of the wheels over the jointed
rails as every hour sees 18,000 tons of coke
whirled past you. Toward morning of the
ninth day the signal lamps on the last car
will mark the end of the train, and you will
begin to have a dreamy sort of notion of the magnitude of the coke industry that is
blazing and smoking within an hour’s ride of
the city. The headlight of the train will be
about 2,400 miles away. I handle the
product in this way, not that it is either novel
or original, but because one can give a better
notion of bulk this way than by any quantity
of figures standing by themselves.
Coke is the bones of coal. In such yards as
the foregoing sketch illustrates in a general
way, the sulphur and other matter which
would impair the quality of iron smelted
with it are roasted out. The remainder, as
near a pure carbon as may be had, as near an
uncrystalized diamond as can be made, is
coke. An equally important change that is
wrought by the oven, however, is the
transformation of the soft, crumbling
bituminous coal into a hard, porous
substance, which will stand up stiff-backed
under a ponderous load of iron ore and
limestone in the blast furnace, where coke is
chiefly used. Anthracite will do the same in
a measure without coking, but it does not
burn so evenly nor bear the burden so well.
Block coal, also which is mined to some
extent in the northern part of this State, is
sometimes called a natural coke, on account
of a resemblance in many of their qualities.
Coke making was known in England as far back as the sixteenth century. Mention is made of the patent granted to Thomas Proctor and William Peterson, in 1589, of the preparatory “cooking” of coa1, and in the following year a patent was issued to the Dean of York “to purify pit coal and free it from offensive smell.” In this country it is an industry of the last half century, and had its growth chiefly in the last two decades.
Of the three men, John Taylor, James
Campbell, and Provance McCormick, who,
in 1841, made the first oven coke in
Pennsylvania, the last is still living at the
good old age of 89 years, the oldest citizen
of Connellsville. Campbell and McCormick
were plain house carpenters, but with a
shrewd, Scotch-Irish bent for money-getting,
they were ready to turn an honest penny into
an equally honest sixpence at anything that
promised fair. They knew how to burn
charcoal, and when a strolling Englishman
explained to them that a fuel called coak, as
it used to be spelled, was made out of such
coal as was plenty in the hills about them,
and used in the blast furnaces of his country,
they were quick to see that there might be
money in it for them.
So they explained their scheme to Taylor and took him into partnership with them to burn a cargo of coke and flatboat it to Cincinnati. Taylor was a stonemason and owned a farm beside the Yough at the edge of Connellsville, upon which part of the Fayette coke works now stand. He had then a coal mine open upon it and mined the coal in a small way. Previous to this, Colonal Meason had made some coke at Plumsock in an open rick after the rashion of charcoal burning, and some had been made in the same way at Oliphants and used in the furnaces there, but the first of the 10,000 “beehives” that now dot the counties of Fayette and Westmoreland was yet to be built.
