JAMISON NO. 20

Pleasant Unity Mine 20 — Image from a 1927 Keystone Coal Catalog This patch town was built circa 1917 to house the workers of Jamison Coal and Coke's No. 20 mine near Pleasant Unity, Pa.

Pleasant Unity Mine 20 — January 2019 image by author Some of those same Jamsion No. 20 company houses in the 21st Century.

Pleasant Unity Mine 20 — March 2020 image by author These shop buildings are remaining from the Jamsion 20 mine. There were no coke ovens at this site.

Pleasant Unity Mine 20 — March 2020 image by author This building has been identified as the coal mine office, though I also saw it labeled on an old mine map as a hoist house. Between 200 and 300 miners worked at Jamsion No. 20 mine during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. The mine closed in the 1960s.

Pleasant Unity Mine 20 — March 2020 image by author An old drag line bucket laying around the place. This is private property so I took these pictures while walking along Route 981.

mine check tags — Image courtesy of Beth Brass mine check tags from Jamison 20. The miners would hang one of these tags on the end of a coal car that they had just loaded. Then an underground locomotive pulled a "trip" of these cars to the weighman at the tipple. The tag identified who loaded the car, and thus who got paid for it.

Sources:

Edited by Raymond A. Washlaski, Virtual Museum of Coal Mining in Western Pennsylvania.

Fitzsimons, Gray, editor. Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania - An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites. National Park Service, 1994.