Coal in Our Veins

Coal in Our Veins Coal in Our Veins A Personal Journey Erin Ann Thomas Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 2012 © 2012 by the University Press of Colorado Published by Utah State University Press An imprint of University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of The Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State College of Colorado. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on recycled, acid-free paper Cover design by Jeanne Goldberg ISBN: 978-0-87421-863-3 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-87421-865-7 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Erin Ann. Coal in our veins : a personal journey / Erin Ann Thomas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-87421-863-3 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-87421-865-7 (e-book) 1. Thomas, Erin Ann—Family. 2. Coal miners—Utah—Biography. 3. Coal miners—Wales—Biography. 4. Welsh Americans—Utah—Biography. 5. Thomas, Erin Ann—Travel. 6. Coal mines and mining—Utah—History. 7. Coal mines and mining— Wales—History. 8. Coal—Environmental aspects—United States. 9. Coal—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. HD8039.M62U669417 2012 622’.3340922—dc23 2012012249 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978·1·60732·707·3. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org Dedicated to Robert K. Thomas, my grandfather, coal miner, and educator We all know that we must have coal, but we seldom or never remember what coal getting involves.… We are capable of forgetting … as we forget the blood in our veins. —George Orwell Contents Introduction 1 A Miner’s Lamp 1 Cymyru 2 A Welsh Coal Miner 13 3 The First Loco to Run on Rails 21 4 Two Miners’ Sons 36 5 The Paths of Blind Horses 42 Carbon County 6 The Rattle of Dead Men’s Skin 55 7 Zeph and Maud 69 8 The Castle Gate 74 9 The Striking Years 81 10 Get the Men Out 89 11 Leaving Carbon 98 12 Ghost Towns 105 Bridge 13 A Historical Gap 119 West Virginia 14 The Little White Chapel 133 15 One Who Escaped 143 16 A Memorial 147 17 Mountains Made Low 156 18 String-Town Appalachia 164 19 Squatter on a Gold Mine 177 Washington, D.C. 20 The Energy Future of America 187 21 A Drop in the Bucket 201 22 Yes to Electric Reliability 207 Coda 23 In the Bowels of the Earth 223 24 The Last Deep Coal Mine in Wales 237 25 The Winds of Change 245 Afterword 255 Acknowledgements 262 Sources 263 Introduction ❧ ❧ Erin Thomas 2012 A carbide miner’s lamp. 1 A Miner’s Lamp carbide lamp, no longer used as a functional object, sits on my book- A shelf in the living room next to other mementos, relics, and souvenirs from around the world. These objects remind me of the experiences I had in the cities where I purchased them, but displayed in my living room, they bring more attention to me than they do to the location of their origin. For my living room visitors, the carbide miner’s lamp is a visual affirmation of my physical and literary journey into coal. Sometime between the years 1900 and 1930, a miner used this lamp to illuminate his way through the tunnels of a mine. Carbide lamps were developed after candles and oil lamps, each an attempt to provide light for mining by a more efficient and safer means. My carbide lamp is about four inches tall and cylindrical—approximately two inches in diameter. It has two chambers: one that can be filled from the top with water and a lower chamber for carbide. This lamp is designed so that water from the upper chamber drips down into the lower, creating acetylene gas when it comes into contact with the whitish carbon “salt.” These two chambers screw together like a light bulb into a socket. When I unscrew my carbide lamp it squeaks slightly; in the chamber below a few crumbs of carbide remain—ashes left by somebody who passed on long ago. After placing the carbide in the lamp and screwing it shut, this miner would have opened a small spout in the middle of a metal disk-reflector in the front. This released the acetylene, which he would have ignited by sparking flint. He would then have turned the spout until the flame was about an inch tall, the reflector casting the light of the flame forward ten feet in a thick beam. This model, made by one of the most popular suppliers of the day, Justrite, has a rubber grip at the bottom of the brass body. The miner might have held it in his hand or hooked it to the top of his cloth hat. But the crumbs of carbide left in my lamp give 1 2 Coal in Our Veins no indication of the particulars of this miner’s life or how the lamp made its way from his possession as much as a hundred years ago to an online antique store where my father purchased it for my twenty-ninth birthday. In the United States, miners no longer used this sort of lamp by the time my grandpa, Robert Thomas, began mining coal alongside his father in the 1930s. He would have been called “Bobby” then and used a battery- powered light that provided less of a fire hazard in a gaseous mine. Bobby is my primary connection to coal, and growing up I was always conscious that my surname had been passed down through generations of strong- backed and rough-handed men. I have always been proud of this fact, preferring my ancestry of Welsh coal miners over a lineage of kings. Despite this, the coal-mining stories my grandparents and parents told me were like relics or souvenirs. Through them, the memories of my grandfather, his parents, and those before them were preserved, but ulti- mately I regarded these stories as something that made me more interest- ing, rather than linking me to the reality of my ancestors’ lives or even the reality of my grandfather’s life. During the years I knew him, he was a respected educator in the world I lived in. As a former academic vice president at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the founder of its Honors Program, Bob Thomas was still quoted when I started school there in 1996. This, rather than coal, was the tradition that he passed down to my father, Ryan, who is also a college administrator. My grandfather’s choice to leave mining redefined what it meant to be a Thomas. And as a Thomas and my father’s daughter, I have also found my place in education, carving out my niche in teaching ESL and English, my occupation now in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Until very recently, Bobby, a teenager in overalls with a blackened countenance, felt as distant as he was different. This changed early in 2006 when I was walking through O’Hare Airport during a layover on my flight to D.C., returning from Christmas vaca- tion. Hours before, I had been dropped off at the Salt Lake airport by my parents, who, after hugging me and placing my luggage on the side- walk, traveled back to central Utah. They headed through the valleys and up a canyon to their home in Price, a former mining community of ten thousand residents, where my father was the president of the College of Eastern Utah. When he accepted the job five years previously, leaving his position at Utah Valley State College, I joked with my friends that he and my mother were moving south so he could become a coal miner. Price is near Castle Gate, where my grandfather grew up and my great-grandfather mined. This connection to our family history heavily influenced my father’s decision to take the position. My journey to D.C. symbolically leaped in tandem with my parent’s journey back to Carbon County and its abandoned coal mines when the voice of a television reporter reached me over the noise of the terminal. A Miner’s Lamp 3 I peered up at a screen rigged over the departure gate ahead. The cam- era shifted from a newsroom to groups of people in T-shirts and jeans with strained looks on their faces in front of the backdrop of a little white church: thirteen miners had been trapped in a West Virginian coal mine. In my almost thirty years there had been a number of mining accidents. During this time, if I had read a newspaper article or watched a news brief- ing of a mining explosion, I had never taken note of it. For most of my life, coal-mining stories had been exclusively family stories. But on this day these people in the small town of Sago, West Virginia, brought the past of my family jarringly to my present.

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