Daily tobacco leaf-chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1890-1895, 1890-06-18

HllIJ Il eLLl0yt uldIIl6u.
Barney Moss.
Peter Egan, 81 years old.
Robert McGuill, single.
Martin Cavaner.
John Cope, married, and Andy Cope,
his son.
John McCleary, married.
Thomas McCleary, married.
Elmer Dewey, single.
Joseph Bigley, aged 80, leaves wife
and two children.
Pat. Develin, married.
John Debanney, married.
John JOY, married.
John Debanney, son.
David Davis, married.
Thomas Davis, son.
Pat. Cahill, married.
William Cahill, single.
Barney Maust.
Emanuel Maust, brother.
John Mitchell, 40 years, married.
Pat Courtney, married.
John Courtney, his son.
Jack Mitchell, married.
Dan South, married.
James Shearn, single.
Danny Shearn, single.
David Hayes and William Hayes, his
son.
DUNBAR, Pa, June 18.-Monday
morning, at l1I0, sullen, shivering
roar shook the miners dwellings on Hill
farm, in Fayette county, near this place,
and hundreds of affrighted persons, who
knew the sound too well, feared another
mine disaster, and they reasoned far too
well. In a moment the fearful news
had spread that the Hill farm mines,
owned by Philadelphia parties, had ex-
ploded. The low-browed hill, from
which the slope entered, shook from
mouth to pit, and the score of miners
houses lining the fatal hill shook for a
moment, and then poured out their
frenzied inmates by the hundreds.
A rush was made to the mouth of the
pit, but ingress was impossible, as
smoke in dense volumes was issuing
forth Fifty-two miners had gone to
work, and were in the slope when the
explosion occurred. OF these fifty-two,
eighteen were in the left heading and
thirty-two i'll the right heading. Those
in the left heading got out all right.
The retreat of the Others was cut Oft,
and not one escaped.
Cause of the Explosion.
At 7 o'clock in the morning the gang
turned in at the mines, the smaller
gang drifting off to the left, while the
larger, some thirty-fve in number,
drifted to the right and descended some
800 feet from the surface and at least
mile from the opening. These two
drifts are connected, but the connection
is from the main stem, some half mile
from the entrance. This mine, it seems,
had been somewhat troubled with water,
and an air shaft had been drilled from
the surface to the juncture of the right
and left shafts, where the water seemed
most abundant.
AS the miners branched off from this
point they knew that an air-hole had
been drilled there that had not yet been
broken into the mine, but they did not
know that the shaft was to be broken
into-this shaft. by the way, being
six-inch hole. A miner named Kerwin
had been left in the right drift, near
where that branch joined the mines
exit, and in the course of his labors
broke into the perpendicular shaft. The
moment this was broken into flood Of
water gushed ont, and Kerwin and a
man named Landy standing by yelled
out for some one to save the men in the
right drift, as the water poured down
the hill in a stream and he feared they
would drown.
Young David Hayes, who had seen
the affair, leaped forward at the call
and turned down the left drift, in
deluge of water, to warn his endan-
gered comrades below. Just as he
passed the air shaft that had been
broken into, the rush of water had
changed to the ugly roar of a flood,
which blanched the cheeks Of the men
who stood behind and towards the light.
The flow of water had changed to
deadly volume Of fire damp, and, as
young Hayes swung by the shaft, a
dash of blazing light slid through the
shaft from end to end, it seemed.
The daring youth carried an open
miners lamp burning in his hat and he
had hardly taken step beyond the
xoaring shaft when the spark ignited a
reservoir of the deadly fluid-fre damp
that had already accumulated, and he
sank a corpse ten feet toward the men
whom he had hoped to save and the
men whom he had certainly doomed, In
an instant an unquenchable fire sprang
up in the nine-foot vein just between
the main entrance ard on the right
drift, forever shutting in the thirty-two
men imprisoned there.
Poor old David Hayes. father of the
mistaken hero, driven mad by the fate
of his son, dashed into the sulphurous
smoke and strangling fire damp, only to
fall blindly beside his son, and to be
drawn out an hour later, with James
James Shearn, both recognized only by
their wives.
An Awful Conhagration.
The fire, famed by aid from the main
drift and from the fatal shaft itself,
soon spread into an awful confagration.
Pat Kelley, who was driving a mine
car near the place at the time, says the
explosion seemed nothing. but the blind
ing. strangling smoke and gas that fol-
lowed him like a fiend to the very door
or the shaft and poured out after hira,