Pittsburgh is the largest American city to have coal mining occur within the municipal boundaries of the city. As late as 2003 someone was trying to obtain a permit to strip coal in the Hays section of Pittsburgh.
There are only a few surviving coal patch houses at Hazel Kirk, PA. Maple Creek Coal Company retains a large supply yard there, and that is their conveyor
crossing the road beyond the houses. The Hazel Kirk Coal Company was the operator of the original mines here, and here is a webpage about the mine disaster that occured in Hazel Kirk No. 2.
The Mathies mine near New Eagle, PA, which opened in 1944, was said to be the last bituminous coal mine in Pennsylvania to use rail haulage to bring the coal out of the mine. The mine cars are shown here shortly after the mine's closing in 2002.
The mine's closing was sudden and resulted in the unemployement of 150 employees. (Thanks Ray M. for the photo.)
Mon Valley Mining's Mathies mine portal. A fire in the mine in 1990 closed it down for a few years.(Thanks to Ray M.)
A closer look at the underground locamotive cars used to haul the coal out of the Mathies mine, with the coal unloading building in the background.
The Mathies Mine preparation plant in January 2003. It looks much worse than this now.
Mathies Mine's barge loadout on the Monongahela River
Overall view of the idled coal preparation facility of the Mathies Mine. The smoke is from the powerplant next door. There was no company built housing that I am aware of for the workers of the Mathies mine.
Mon-View Mining purchased the Mathies mine in 1994 from National Steel. The big steel companies - National, US Steel, Republic, J&L, Weirton, Crucible, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube - all owned coal mines up and down the Monongahela River, and it was a way of life in the Mon Valley to see barges of coal from their captive mines going down the river to the mills and coke ovens. (Bethlehem Steel didn't own mines in the Monongahela valley; Wheeling Steel's mines were in the Allegheny River valley.) This way of life that some probaby thought would go on forever lasted from the 1920s until the 1990s. Although coal
barges can still be spotted on the river, what's left of big steel no longer owns coal properties. (US Steel sold their final coal mine in Wyoming County, West Virginia in 2003.)
A picture of the Mathies mine preparation plant when it was new and owned by the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
This portal for the Mathies mine is up the hollow from New Eagle. It is shown here as it looked in October 2003.
Company built housing for the miners of the Pittsburgh Coal Company's Montour No. 2 mine, in Cecil Township.
This tipple was in Venetia, PA many years ago. Could this have been the
Eclipse mine?(Courtesy McClure Sales, Inc.)
One can still find the Blaine patch and gob pile on the hill above Elizabeth, PA, Allegheny County. The operator of the Blaine mine was, surprise, the Blaine Coal Company.
This sealed mine entry on the Monongahela River in Forward Township, Allegheny County was an entry into the Bakewell mine, opened in 1874.
The coal mining town of Jacobs Creek sits on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, and these miner's houses and company store are still there today. These structures were built in the 1870s, and that makes them some of the oldest coal company housing in Western Pennsylvania. Coal
companies to operate the mines at Jacobs Creek included Fox Kifer & Aspey Coal Co., Waverly Coal and Coke, and the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company, who finally closed the mines in the early 1960s.
Saturday evening at U.S. Steel's Clairton coke works, which has baked umpteen million tons of coal into coke since 1918.
a vintage scene at the Pittsburgh Coal Company's Champion coal washing plant near Imperial, PA.
This antique picture shows the picking table at the Champion plant. This means of cleaning coal with
human hands is now obsolete.
Here is part of the Francis coal patch, which was built around 1900 by the Pittsburgh Buffalo Coal Co., the same concern that constructed
Marianna, PA in the Klondike Field. Like most of the coal mines in the Burgettstown area, not much survives from the mining structures, though large refuse piles radiate out in all directions from Burgettstown.
There are a few patch houses left at Cherry Valley, which was a mining town for the workers of
Pittsburgh & Eastern Coal Company's No. 1 mine.