Historical society plans bus tour of coal mines

The Washington County Historical Society has organized a tour of the state?s coal mines. The tour spans two days and begins Monday. The bus will pick up people in several towns in southeast Iowa before finally departing on the tour from Coralville.

Local historian Mike Zahs will be one of the tour guides on the trip. Zahs said the tour will make stops at mines in Keokuk, Mahaska and Monroe counties. Zahs said there are no longer any active mines in Iowa. Not only that, he said that in many places, it is difficult to tell a mine was there at all.

?It is almost impossible in the entire state to look at a site and say, ?This was a mine,?? Zahs said. ?There are no longer any mines you can go into. They have all been closed. If any mines have survived, they would be surface mines. In some places in Iowa, the coal was close to the surface, but most mines in the state were not surface mines. You see more surface mining in states such as West Virginia.?

Washington County was host to three mines at one point in time. Zahs said one mine was located just north of Wellman in Wassonville.

?That was different from a coal camp,? Zahs said. ?There was no influx of people who lived there.?

Zahs explained that a coal camp was a collection of homes that were built for those who worked in the coal mines. He said the homes were built with the understanding they would only be used for a few decades while the coal was excavated. These coal camps were often built by the coal companies themselves, which then made money by renting the homes to the workers.  

?In some of the camps, there was no electricity or plumbing,? Zahs said. ?That made the homes easier to move, since you didn?t have to worry about the pipes. The workers didn?t have huge houses, even if they had huge families. The houses were often 24 feet by 24 feet or sometimes 20 feet by 20 feet.?

As a way to make extra money, some families rented a portion of their humble abodes.

?The family might have two bedrooms, six kids and still take in boarders,? Zahs said.

Zahs said one of the most interesting aspects of coal camps is how thoroughly they vanished once the mines closed.

?A mining town called Perlee in Jefferson County once had 3,000 people and now it has three,? Zahs said. ?From a historical perspective, that dynamic is interesting. One site in Monroe County may have had as many as 10,000 people. Now all that remains is just a part one building. Can you imagine a town quite a bit larger than Washington just disappearing??

Another mine in the county was called Verdi and was halfway between Washington and Brighton. A third was north of Haskins. Zahs said the opening of that mine was still visible for many years even after it had been abandoned. That opening has since been covered.

Zahs said the tour is one of many tours done in memory of long time county historian Kathy Fisher, who wrote a book about the county in 1978 called ?In the Beginning There Was Land.?

Zahs expects about 35 people to go on the tour, which he said is a good number for a tour. Zahs will talk about how coal affected Iowa?s culture, such as its entertainment and religion.

?There were religious missions into the coal camps,? Zahs said. ?The Salvation Army did a lot of work in the camps. And there was organized labor. A big thrust for labor in our country started in Iowa. The United Mine Workers were strong in Iowa. We don?t usually think of those things as Iowa things, but Iowa has played an important part in those issues. I like to show how Iowa has been important even though we don?t think we are.?

Janice Twinam of Washington is also going on the tour. She will speak about her personal experience growing up near a coal mine in Lucas County in south central Iowa. Her father, John Braida, lived in a coal camp when he was young and he continued to work in the mines until Twinam was 5 years old. Twinam said that by the 1940s most mines in the state had closed because coal had been replaced by other fuels such as diesel.

Twinam said her father worked for the mining company but performed mostly tasks other than digging coal.

?He had to keep the water pumped out of the mines and he moved the coal cars so they could be taken above ground and then brought back down to the miners after they were emptied,? she said. ?It was a dangerous job. A piece of slate once fell on him and broke his leg. A lot of people were killed by falling slate off of the roofs in the mines, or in his case it fell out of a cart that was being pulled to the surface.?

Washington native Chris Bauer will provide commentary on the modern-day environmental impact of coal mines. Bauer works as a project manager for Shive-Hattery in West Des Moines. One of his duties is to reclaim former coal mines and make them safe for other uses.       

?There are hundreds of mines in the state, and you can?t even tell they were mines,? Bauer said. ?Now grass and timber have grown over them. But some of the mines are more evident. You can see big black hills where no vegetation grows.?

Bauer said those big black hills are deposits of shale, clay and other minerals that had to be excavated in order for the miners to reach the coal. He said those hills are high in sulfur and other harmful, acidic metals. When it rains, the minerals flow into ponds, which hurts the vegetation.

?The majority of mine sites are used for livestock today because the soil is not good for growing crops,? Bauer said. ?Even after we reclaim them, the soil is still fragile and it can?t support row crops. We try to get it to the point where it can be used as pasture. We also partner with Pheasants Forever to create wildlife habitat on the mine sites.?