The Harrison County History of Coal Museum, also known as the Puskarich Coal Museum, is a non-profit educational museum featuring information about coal mining. It opened in May 1994 in Cadiz, Ohio in the lower level of the Puskarich Public Library. The museum is open during the libraries' normal business hours from Monday - Thursday 9:00-8:00, Friday 9:00-6:00, and Saturday 9:00-5:00. Tours can be arranged by appointment. Admission is free of charge. [1]
Different displays and photographs of various mining memorabilia inside the coal museum are available for viewing. The 99-seat theater offers film presentations of the coal industry and its history. Some of the topics featured are:
Coal's geological history, the history of coal mining in the United States, how mines were built, coal in the environment and products with items ranging from insecticides made from creosote coal tar to mothballs, a distillate of coal tar. Coal samples depicting anthracite (hard coal) are also displayed. Many of the displays were donated by area collectors as well as those associated with the mining industry. Elizabeth Reeb, a researcher-curator with the Ohio Historical Society, is responsible for many museum exhibits and photos.
The actual mining process with its machines and methods, a general history of the United Mine Workers of America and safety are included here. Miners' tools and equipment (hats, lunch buckets, safety devices) are acquired for displays. The safety device display covers the gamut from the old-fashioned birdcage - when the death of the bird meant the presence of deadly gases - to today's self-contained rescuer kits with a one-hour oxygen supply. The biggest display is a thirties-forty-era Watt Car located in the centerpiece of the lobby area. It was donated to the museum by the Cravat Coal Company. It stands in front of a huge photo of the entrance to a deep mine. The museum's walls and ceiling are set in black to give the underground feel of a deep mine.
Machines and equipment like the Silver Spade and Giant Earth Mover (GEM), reclamation, and a model of a surface mine operation are key components. Among the displayed pieces is a broken-off "tooth" from the gigantic bucket of Consolidation Coal Company's Silver Spade and a section of the three-inch-thick electrical cable used to switch it on.
Harrison County was a top coal-producing county in Ohio. The general history of mining in this county and Eastern Ohio is covered by Ida Mae Stull. She was nationally recognized as the country's first woman coal miner, [2] to the decline of the industry during the 1980s. Items from local mines are also on display. Other displays include several watch fobs, famous then and now, representing various coal equipment companies. The old "company store" is also featured with examples of merchandise and "scrip", both paper and metal.
Besides the many books offered at the Puskarich Public Library, the library and coal museum offer videos about coal mining. [3]
Mining is the extraction of valuable geological materials from the Earth and other astronomical objects. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a laboratory or factory. Ores recovered by mining include metals, coal, oil shale, gemstones, limestone, chalk, dimension stone, rock salt, potash, gravel, and clay. The ore must be a rock or mineral that contains valuable constituent, can be extracted or mined and sold for profit. Mining in a wider sense includes extraction of any non-renewable resource such as petroleum, natural gas, or even water.
Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine is called a 'pit', and the above-ground structures are a 'pit head'. In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine.
A mining accident is an accident that occurs during the process of mining minerals or metals. Thousands of miners die from mining accidents each year, especially from underground coal mining, although accidents also occur in hard rock mining. Coal mining is considered much more hazardous than hard rock mining due to flat-lying rock strata, generally incompetent rock, the presence of methane gas, and coal dust. Most of the deaths these days occur in developing countries, and rural parts of developed countries where safety measures are not practiced as fully. A mining disaster is an incident where there are five or more fatalities.
Moura is a small town and locality in the Shire of Banana in Central Queensland, Australia. It services the surrounding coal mining and rural activities. It is situated approximately 65 kilometres (40 mi) west of Biloela on the Dawson Highway, 186 kilometres (116 mi) west of the port city of Gladstone, and 171 kilometres (106 mi) south west of Rockhampton. As of the 2021 census, the locality of Moura had a population of 1,993 people.
The history of coal mining goes back thousands of years, with early mines documented in ancient China, the Roman Empire and other early historical economies. It became important in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was primarily used to power steam engines, heat buildings and generate electricity. Coal mining continues as an important economic activity today, but has begun to decline due to the strong contribution coal plays in global warming and environmental issues, which result in decreasing demand and in some geographies, peak coal.
Surface mining, including strip mining, open-pit mining and mountaintop removal mining, is a broad category of mining in which soil and rock overlying the mineral deposit are removed, in contrast to underground mining, in which the overlying rock is left in place, and the mineral is removed through shafts or tunnels.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is a large agency of the United States Department of Labor which administers the provisions of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 to enforce compliance with mandatory safety and health standards as a means to eliminate fatal accidents, to reduce the frequency and severity of nonfatal accidents, to minimize health hazards, and to promote improved safety and health conditions in the nation's mines. MSHA carries out the mandates of the Mine Act at all mining and mineral processing operations in the United States, regardless of size, number of employees, commodity mined, or method of extraction. David Zatezalo was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health, and head of MSHA, on November 30, 2017. He served until January 20, 2021. Jeannette Galanais served as Acting Assistant Secretary by President Joe Biden on February 1, 2021 until Christopher Williamson took office on April 11, 2022.
Big Brutus is the nickname of the Bucyrus-Erie model 1850-B electric shovel, which was the second largest of its type in operation in the 1960s and 1970s. Big Brutus is the centerpiece of a mining museum in West Mineral, Kansas, United States where it was used in coal strip mining operations. The shovel was designed to dig from 20 to 69 feet down to unearth relatively shallow coal seams, which would themselves be mined with smaller equipment.
Massey Energy Company was a coal extractor in the United States with substantial operations in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia. By revenue, it was the fourth largest producer of coal in the United States and the largest coal producer in Central Appalachia. By coal production weight, it was the sixth largest producer of coal in the United States.
Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline excavator owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company, weighing 13,500 short tons (12,200 t) and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It operated in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991.
Bucyrus-Erie was an American surface and underground mining equipment company. It was founded as Bucyrus Foundry and Manufacturing Company in Bucyrus, Ohio, in 1880. Bucyrus moved its headquarters to South Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1893. In 1927, Bucyrus merged with the Erie Steam Shovel Company to form Bucyrus-Erie.
The Moweaqua Coal Mine disaster happened on December 24, 1932, in Moweaqua, Illinois. The disaster was caused by a methane gas explosion killing 54 miners. The explosion occurred shortly after the day shift started, sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 Christmas Eve morning.
The National Mining Hall of Fame is a museum located in Leadville, Colorado, United States, dedicated to commemorating the work of miners and people who work with natural resources. The museum also participates in efforts to inform the public about the mining industry.
The Puskarich Public Library System (PPL) is a rural, public library serving Harrison County, Ohio. The library also houses the Harrison County History of Coal Museum.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to mining:
The history of coal mining in the United States starts with the first commercial use in 1701, within the Manakin-Sabot area of Richmond, Virginia. Coal was the dominant power source in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and although in rapid decline it remains a significant source of energy in 2023.
Two separate explosions in 1903 and 1908 at Hanna Mines, coal mines located in Carbon County, Wyoming, United States, caused a total of over 200 fatalities. The 1903 incident was Wyoming's worst coal mining disaster.
Joy Global Inc. was a company that manufactured and serviced heavy equipment used in the extraction and haulage of coal and minerals in both underground and surface mining. The company had manufacturing facilities in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, Australia, Canada, China, France, South Africa, Poland and the United Kingdom. In 2017, Joy Global was acquired by Komatsu Limited and was renamed Komatsu Mining Corp.
The GEM of Egypt was a power shovel used for strip mining. Built in 1966, the machine had worked in the Egypt Valley coalfield, GEM being an acronym for “Giant Earth Mover” or “Giant Excavating Machine”. It was one of only two Bucyrus-Erie 1950-B shovels built and one of two to use the knee action crowd, licensed from Marion Power Shovel in exchange to Marion's use of BE's cable crowd patent.
The Royce J. and Caroline B. Watts Museum is located in the Mineral Resources Building on the Evansdale campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia, and is “dedicated to preserving and promoting the social, cultural, and technological history of West Virginia’s coal and petroleum industries through the collection, preservation, research, and exhibition of historical objects and archival materials.” Originally named the COMER Museum for WVU's College of Mineral and Energy Resources, the Watts Museum was renamed in 2005 at the request of the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute (WVCMI).