Carbon

Did you know? By July 11, 1920, about three thousand bituminous coal miners in the Broad Top field were idle.

The Associated Press carried it out of Johnstown that day. The strike order came from the officers of District No. 2 and was approved by the international president of the United Mine Workers.

It was not a demand for a raise. It was a fight over money the men said they were already owed. Since early in 1917 the Broad Top had carried a rate ten cents a ton above the district base rate. Then the government agreement that ended the previous winter's general strike was settled, and a new district scale was signed after it. The operators held that the new scale wiped that ten cents out. The miners held that the government increase was meant to sit on top of what they were already being paid.

About three thousand men stopped work over ten cents a ton.

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A mile east of Coalmont, on the north side of Route 913, flat ground between Millers Run and Shoups Run holds what is left of a coal mine opened in 1857 and the coke works that grew up beside it, run off and on until 1925. The National Register nomination, written in November 1989 from a 1988 Historic American Engineering Record report by Nancy Shedd, calls the site the Minersville Coke Ovens.

The nomination says the Huntingdon and Broad Top Railroad Company opened the Prospect Mine in 1857, and that Robert Hare Powel bought it in 1863 and built a bank of Belgian coke ovens, which he ran only briefly before turning to his mines in Clearfield County and on the Youghiogheny River. J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history describes the set Powel had by then put up near the mouth of a new drift: one hundred and five ovens of the Belgian pattern, each eighteen feet long, built of fire-brick from Powel's own brick-yard in Clearfield County, to furnish coke for his furnace at Saxton.

Before 1900, the nomination says, Joseph Thropp purchased the Gordon Mine and the property, removed the Belgian ovens, built beehive ovens at an unknown date, and in 1924 and 1925 began Mitchell ovens, a type the nomination calls relatively unknown. James Gardner's 1913 state survey of the Broad Top field recorded Thropp making coke at Minersville for the Saxton furnace. Thropp held the site until the 1925 auction. A 1925 auction map listed 90 beehive ovens, 67 uncompleted Mitchell ovens, narrow and standard gauge rail lines, a supply house, an engine and power house, a substation and hoist house, a blacksmith and machine shop, a coal tipple, a coal pocket and the Gordon Mine.

What survives, on 13 acres, is two banks of beehive ovens at the east end, the concrete piers that run from the Gordon Mine to the tipple at the west end, low stone walls and foundations between them, and the raised trails where the rails once ran. No machinery remains. Housing once stood to the south; the survey behind the nomination found no trace of it. The nomination reached the National Park Service in February 1990 under Criteria A and D, for industry and for what the foundations might still reveal about how one coke producer arranged his ovens, mines and rails. The mine entrance is timber frame.

Several of the beehive ovens retain the stone facing which surrounded their doors, although the metal doors no longer remain. The brick and stone of the ovens has deteriorated with the weather and vegetation overgrowth but their original shape is still apparent.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Minersville Coke Ovens (reference 90000401), Section 7 page 3 (PDF page 5) · character 6,287 of the scanned text

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A line of ruined coke ovens at Minersville, looking west along them. Coke ovens baked coal into fuel for iron furnaces, and these are what is left. Photographed in September 2014.

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