The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1931-11-05

shabby tenements such as make many
of the Pennsylvania mining towns
scene of misery, especially now that
the depression has slowed the
mines operation. In Garrett and AL
legany the towns have scattered
houses, mainly neat and almost al
ways with a garden patch about them
so that many a kitchen bill is kept
down by the produce which the fam
ily or the miner himself in non-mining
moments has grown within reaching
distance of the stove.
On a hillside near Kitzmiller was
encountered a little boy working in
the field with a Shetland pony. One
realized with a start that this was a
hard working pony on vacation" for
normally he is occupied at mining
himself. While electric motors pull
the trains of coal cars out of the
"main headings" the cars are pulled
along singly through the interior
cross-headings by horse or mule. And
in those tunnels where narrow veins
have necessitated low ceilings, too low
to admit a horse, the sturdy little
Shetland works, strange sight to city
men who think of the pony's proper
place as between the thills of child's
runabout.
In the town of Barton in the 1880
drought James Macdonald set about
boring a deeper well. To his aston
ishment up from a crevice alongside
his well-pipe came a flood not OF
water but of gas. He scrambled about
and got the flow checked, and then had
it led into pipe to his nearby house.
cellar. Thus confined, it obligingly
heated his house through the winter.
Through some oddity of atmospheric
pressure it ceased to flow in the
spring, but now with cold weather
back has most considerably resumed
it's steady flow.
Another and less welcome confa-
grafton exists in two or three spots
of that section, notably under the
mighty Vale Summit where, tradition
ally, one Tom Brown some forty years
ago wanted to ventilate his mine. So
he set up stove to start a current OF
air. It started more than that, for it
ignited the wild coal", as they call
the small veins of coal above the big
commercial veins, and Tom Browns
coal mine keeps on burning to this
day, melting the SHOWS even OF a
Frostburg winter, defying the floods
of water that exasperated coal opera
tors have diverted to it, defying even
concrete and stone walls built against
it-indeed converting them back to
their prehistoric lime-and blazing on
endlessly.
When will it end? Who knows?
Nothing seems to end in that country,
even the Big Vein which observers
said was exhausted twenty years ago.
1t was threatened, too, by the care
less methods then in use. But at
Sonny Mine, previously mentioned,
new methods were lately applied.
***
The old "pillars" were relocated,
and the cross-tunnelings through
them, and the "rooms" which in turn
were cut open. Then Louis Gerdetz,
the engineer who refused to believe
the vein was worked out, pinned up
all this roof with new-type timbers,
chemically treated, and with steel sup
ports. Then he bored new rooms"
through the old pillars, and so kept
reducing the size of the pillars, ex-
changing timber and steel for coal I'M
til every pillar was quite gone. At
the same time he pulled out all the
top coal and the bottom coal which the
pioneers had left.
When he got through with mine,
which he had found abandoned by a
reckless generation of men although
only SO per cent of the coal had been
removed from it, he had salvaged pill
lars, top and bottom as well as aban-
doned "breast" coal, getting yield
as high as 80 per cent where his pred
ecessors had been satisfied with 80. 1t
is one of the real marvels Of modern
mining.
The Big Vein of course will go
some day altogether. But smaller
veins are already producing 100000
tons a year, against the Big Veins
100000.
The biologists say there were orig
inally 8,OOO,OOO,OOO tons of coal in
Maryland. In 80 years perhaps 2 per
cent has been mined. There seems to
be plenty of work ahead for those
disposed to find it.
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