Overview

Nothing says manufacturing and industry in the Midwest like coal. Steel plants used coal to fire blast furnaces. Trains fired their steam engines with coal. In fact, nearly all steam engines in the United States were powered by coal in the nineteenth century. And Ohio, along with other Appalachian states, had thick rivers of coal running underneath them. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, miners dug hundreds of miles of mines under the ground to extract coal. The names we often associate with the industrialization—James Hill, Jay and George Gould, and Cornelius Vanderbilt—built vast fortunes on railroads built, in part, to move coal from underground mines to faraway mills. Coal drove the economy and it drove the country at home and abroad. We can still see the mark coal left on our societies and communities. If students would take a walk down to the Old Stone Church, you can see the black dust left behind by coal mined in the southern part of the state and burned in the blast furnaces of US Steel that ran along the Cuyahoga River.

Ohioans started mining coal before the Civil War. Most of those early mines were dug in the eastern and southern parts of the state, and the coal that came out of them powered the steamboats that went up and down the Ohio River. But coal production skyrocketed in the fifty years after the Civil War. Just a few years after the War, in the early 1870s, Ohio mines produced roughly five million tons of coal per year. In a decade, the number doubled to ten million tons and shot to 20 million tons by the end of the century. Despite the rise of oil and natural gas, which were both more efficient, coal remained a constant in manufacturing.

Mining was dangerous for the people in the mine.  Instead, most died of silicosis, a disease that ravaged, and ravages, miners and leaves them dead inside a year. Silicosis is caused by the accumulation of coal dust in miners’ lungs, which is why it is often called black lung disease. The dust makes it hard for miners to breath and their lungs react by producing fluid. As much as miners feared silicosis, they feared the collapse of the mines too. Mine owners rarely provided the necessary safety equipment to make mines as safe as possible, a choice that cost hundreds of miners their lives.

For such a job, miners usually received low pay. They worked long hours, usually ten to twelve hours per shift, they worked in exceptionally dangerous conditions. Pay was low enough that while one person could survive on what they earned, no miner could realistically support a family on what they earned. As a result, entire families—husbands, wives, and children—worked in mines to earn enough money so they might all eat and have a roof over their heads. In that regard, however, miners lived like nearly all industrial laborers, who barely earned enough to feed and house themselves. At the same time, mine owners grew rich. When workers could take the dangerous work and low pay no longer, they went on strike. And when workers struck, mine owners reacted harshly. Where some owners used violence to crush strikes, others hired immigrants of people of color to work in the mines because members of those groups, desperate for work, often worked for lower wages. Students will read about both.

Readings

1. Paul LaRue, “Digging Coal in Rendville, Ohio,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/24759600.
2. https://www.ohgen.net/ohathens/coalhistory.htm
3. George B. Cotkin, “Strikebreakers, Evictions, and Violence: Industrial Conflict in the Hocking Valley, 1884-1885,” The Scholarly Journal of the Ohio Historical Society, http://publications.ohiohistory.org/ohstemplate.cfm?action=intro.