The men of Lucas County's Indiana No. 3 Mine

I enjoyed myself over the noon hour on Friday by presenting a program on Lucas County's coal mining history to Chariton's Rotarians and took along as an illustration this panoramic photograph from the historical society's collection of Consolidated Indiana No. 3 mine and its men. This morning, I've pulled it apart (digitally, not actually) to take a closer look. That's the left quarter of the photo, showing the tipple, above.

The result is far from perfect --- photographs were taken through the glass of the photo's frame. And the photograph itself has a few issues, including the fact that the emulsion that produced its original sharp blacks and whites has faded and browned from left to right. But you can get the idea and actually see the faces of most of the miners.

These men were for the most part skilled professional miners, many from families that had followed the trade for generations. A majority were immigrants, or the sons and grandsons of immigrant miners from continental Europe --- Croatia, Poland, Italy, France --- or the British Isles.

The photograph was taken on Oct. 19, 1939, by the Showers Photo Service, of Des Moines. It's actually kind of a poignant shot because this was the last of Lucas County's great mines --- and when opened in 1929, one of the state's largest and most technologically advanced. When operating fully, more than 400 miners were employed. 

Most of the miners lived in Williamson or Chariton. Some obviously drove to work. Others, however, rode the work train that left the Rock Island Depot in Chariton early every morning, then returned at night, passing through Williamson en route to and from the mine. You can see work train passenger cars to the far left in the photograph.

The mine offices were in a frame structure with a mountain of shale in the background and to its right was the mule barn. The traditional mining practice had been to leave mules, once taken down into the mines, there permanently. The management of the Indiana mine considered that inhumane, however, and so the mules were lowered into the mine every morning and brought to the surface every night.

Three years after this photograph was taken, during the fall of 1942, Consolidated Indiana --- a subsidiary of the Rock Island Railroad line --- closed the mine and most of the 200 remaining miners lost their jobs. It was sold to the Powell Coal Co., which continued small mining operations into the 1950s. But Indiana No. 3's closure marked the end of large-scale coal mining in Lucas County.

By that time, many of the men shown here had gone off to war and the labor market was tight. Diesel engines were replacing the coal-fired locomotives and boilers that previously had powered America. And strip-mined coal was far less expensive than coal produced in the traditional shaft mines always used in Lucas County.

There's a good deal of overlap in the photographs of the miners that follow. One way to follow the sequence is to locate a familiar face to the right in one photo, find it again in the next, then follow on from left to right in the original sequence. I'm betting that the faces of the fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of many current Lucas Countyans can be found here.