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Inside the Hoffman Mines

Maryland Historical Society

From the 1840s to the 1920s, the coal industry flourished in Western Maryland. From the Georges Creek region of Allegany County into the southeastern corner of Garrett County, thousands of miners dug millions of tons of coal to help fuel the industrial growth of America.

The Coal
In western Allegany County and southeastern Garrett County lay land that contained some of the richest semi-bituminous (soft coal) coal deposits in the country. The two principal veins were (1) the Pittsburgh or Big Vein deposit that was 14' high and 200 ' below the surface and (2) the Tyson or Small Vein deposit that was up to 6' high and 100 feet below the surface.

The coal of the area was used in homes, locomotive engines, factories, and furnaces. Also, it was the coal of choice for U.S. Naval ships and many other ocean going vessels because of its “smokeless” qualities. At the turn of the twentieth century, western Maryland coal warmed most of the government buildings in Washington D.C.

The Mines
Depending on how the coal is positioned underground, coal mines can be created in one of three different ways. A drift mine is used when the coal seam is close to the surface of the ground. In it, an entryway, at about the level of the seam, is cut for the mine. A shaft mine, also known as a deep mine, is used when the coal is far below the surface. A deep shaft is drilled down to the level of the coal, and the shaft permits people, equipment, and coal to move in and out of the mine. A slope mine is for coal seams too deep for a drift mine, but too shallow for a shaft mine. Its entrance is a tunnel which slopes down from the surface.

Because most coal was near the surface, the mines in Western Maryland were typically drift or slope mines, cut into the hillsides. The only shaft mine in the Georges Creek area was located, appropriately enough, in the town of Shaft.

The intricate web of passageways, work rooms and track sometimes tied different mines together allowing miners to enter one mine and walk underground to work in another mine several miles away.

In the early twentieth century, the Hoffman Drainage Tunnel was built to allow excess underground water to drain naturally from many of the Georges Creek mines. In Garrett County, drift and several shaft mines dotted the landscape, operated by a variety of coal companies.

The Coal Companies
Most of the early mines of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were small, owner-operated affairs with coal dug mainly for use by local residents and industries. For example, the iron industry in Mount Savage and Lonaconing tapped into the veins of coal for their furnaces.

Some coal was loaded onto barges and floated down the Potomac River during high water, but the mines remained a regional resource until more reliable transportation east was available. With the arrival of the B&O railroad and the C&O Canal to Cumberland by 1850, the coal regions of Allegany and Garrett Counties witnessed tremendous growth.

In 1828, the Maryland Mining Company was one of several firms to win legislative approval to mine coal in the Eckhart Mines area of Georges Creek, and by the 1840s had several mining operations as well as an extensive rail line.

During the 1860s, many of the smaller mining operations were combined into the Consolidation Coal Company, which became the largest coal operator in the area and one of the largest in the nation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Western Maryland Mining Company, Davis Coal & Coke Company, Hamill Coal & Coke Company and Grafton Mining were just several of the companies that operated mines in Garrett County.

The Miners
Many of the early miners were often immigrants of Scotland, Wales, and Germany, carrying their craft and culture with them from Europe. By the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, as the nature of coal mining changed from craft to more mechanized production, less skilled workers took to the mines. Many Italian and Eastern European immigrant groups were brought in, often as strikebreakers. Black workers from the southern United States were recruited, but not as predominately as in other coal mining areas.

Education was very important to the miners. In 1898, miners of the Frostburg area collected money to buy the land to establish the Frostburg Normal School (now Frostburg State University) to train teachers for area schools.

As more companies established mining operations, many companies developed their own communities, providing miners with homes and other amenities into the twentieth century. But even with “company towns,” as many as one-third of the miners of Georges Creek owned their own homes during the late nineteenth century, a rather significant number when compared to coal regions of other areas.

The miners of Georges Creek have been called “The Best Dressed Miners.” The early miners were not the stereotype coal-town workers. They were skilled craftsmen who took their craft seriously. Many owned their own homes, had small gardens, grew crops, and raised livestock. Several thousands of coal miners worked the Garrett County mines from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century, living in company towns such as Vindex, Kempton and Shallmar.

Miners

Maryland Historical Society

The Towns
Dozens of towns sprung up near coal mines in the Georges Creek valley and in southeastern Garrett County. Frostburg, founded as a stagecoach stop along the National Pike, was the largest of the communities in the Georges Creek region. Eckhart Mines, to the east of Frostburg, was one of the earliest mining towns with houses built by the Maryland Coal Company still serving as residences along the Old National Pike.

Local miners founded the community of Vale Summit in the mid-nineteenth century. The area had been previously known as “Pompey Smash,” the origin of which is commonly believed to have come from a slave named Pompey crashing his wagonload of coal.

Lonaconing, a mining and service town along Georges Creek, was the center of the early iron industry. Midland, between Frostburg and Lonaconing, was the site of the Ocean Mines, so called because the coal mined there often found its way into the holds of ocean going ships. Barton, Moscow and Pekin (also known as Nikep), on the lower end of Georges Creek, were towns created expressly for coal miners.

In Garrett County, Kitzmiller, Vindex, Shallmar, and Gorman were just some of the thriving coal towns in Garrett County. Kempton, a coal town with the Davis Coal and Coke Company, housed workers and offered many amenities during the 38 years of the local mines operation.

Unions and Strikes
The miners undertook several attempts at union organization over the years. The Knights of Labor, the American Miners’ Association, Miners and Laborers’ Protective and Benevolent Association and the United Mine Workers of America all had significant activity in the Western Maryland coalfields. Company opposition was equally as significant. Strikes and other labor unrest were common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The violence and sabotage by miners during a strike in1894 brought the Maryland National Guard to Eckhart Mines to restore order. In the midst of a major strike in 1922-23, strikebreakers were brought in to man the mines and housed in fortified camps outside of Frostburg.

Decline of the Industry
When Consolidation Coal Company began to move its operations to West Virginia and Kentucky, many smaller coal companies tried to keep the industry going. But the post-World War I decline in the coal industry and the subsequent Great Depression forced many coal companies out of business. By World War II, many operations were beginning to turn to strip mining as a more cost-effective way to extract the remaining deposits of coal.

Currently the Mettiki Coal Company operates a major underground mining operation in Garrett County, while several smaller firms operate strip-mining operations in Allegany County.

 

—Thomas Robertson

Community College of Baltimore County--Essex