Gone were the small mules hauling coal cars out of the mine shafts, but men still used pick and shovel and carbide lights on their hats before the days of battery pack lights. If a man's supervisor gave him a good room of coal, he could make good money loading coal and being paid by the ton. A good mine supervisor would keep track of the men's locations and be sure to assign a better room to a man who had gotten a poor one the last time. During the hand loading days, men were paid by the number, putting a tag of each coal car they loaded. At the end of the shift, a man's tonnage would be tallied.
Some men remember loading as much as twelve of fifteen tons of coal a day.
In the early days they got less than sixty cents a ton for loading coal. By the fifties, some coal mining technology had changed at Blue Heron, and so had some policies. Blue Heron operations converted to machines that under-cut coal at the face of the mine. With the passing of hand loading, miners were no longer paid by the ton but by the shift, and where a man was assigned the mines no longer dictated how much money he could make. It was the age of the hourly or daily wage.