#31 Coal - The
Mouth of Evil
In the previous post we met those Drum Family Tree
Members we are aware of that made a living working in the coal mining industry.
I suppose doing that work made life; if not their own, that of their families’;
easier; helped pay the bills, at least. In
this post, we’ll have a look at how coal made life, for everyone, harder.
One method of getting to the deep coal veins was to dig a
tunnel down to it and drag it back to the surface. Another method, one that was
later deemed cheaper and easier than digging a tunnel, was to just strip away
whatever was over the coal veins and get at it that way. Either way, digging
for coal produced great quantities of material that was piled off to the side.
As more material was removed from either type of mine, the piles grew higher.
Known as “culm banks”, these piles literally became mountains of their own.
Streams and rivers were diverted, ground water changed
its flow. The natural ground water filtration was impaired allowing acids and
toxins to flow into streams and wells.
Where the strip mines were working, huge craters surrounded by mountains
of rock and soil soon dotted the landscape. Life became a grey and earth-tone
existence where once purple violets, white daisies and yellow dandelions
bloomed against a sea of green grass.
However, down in the valley of Drums, just north of the
mines and the strippings of Harleigh, Milnesville, Jeddo, and Ebervale, the
people lived lives untouched by the environmental disaster happening just on
the other side of the mountain to the south – or so they thought. They didn’t
know it then, in the early 1890’s, but their world was about to change.
This is an aerial photo of the area that I believe was
taken in 1938. In it we can see the Milnesville Strippings in the photo’s lower
right corner, Butler Mountain cutting across the middle of the bottom half of
the photo and the Drums Valley on the top two-thirds of the photo.
It started on June 20, 1885. One thing led to another,
you might say, when approximately 28 acres of land over the Harleigh mine caved
in creating an open pit where water quickly began to collect. The strippings in
the photo are not the mining operations that were involved in the Jeddo Tunnel.
Those were operations at Harleigh, which is a little South and East of the area
included in this photo. Mining engineers feared that the weight of the water
would grow so great that it would break into the near-by Ebervale Mine, also
not in this photo but closer.
What to do? Ebervale Mine officials thought that if they
could control the flow of the water, they might be able to use Ebervale’s
existing mine pumps to pump the Harleigh pit water away. So, holes were drilled
between the Harleigh works and the Ebervale works allowing the water to drain
into the Ebervale mine in a controlled manner. The Ebervale mine pumps were
able to handle the additional water. The gamble paid off, for a while.
To every problem there is always at least one solution
and this problem appeared to be solved.
And it was solved, until January of 1886. That’s when it
started to rain. It rained a lot. It rained so much that mines throughout the
area began to flood, their pumps were unable to handle the large quantity of
water they were now being asked to handle. The Ebervale Mine was in the gravest
danger, already close to capacity due to the Harleigh run-off and now this.
Then things changed for the worse, much worse.
To every solution there are always more problems.
The wall between the Harleigh works and the Ebervale
works, weakened by the drain holes, gave way. The already over-worked Ebervale
Mine pumps, now suddenly under 40 feet of water, stopped working. There was
nothing to do. The mine was closed. The coal, and the jobs, were lost.
However, to every problem, we recall, there are always
solutions, at least one. George Markle’s son John, unwilling to give up, found
that solution. Working with engineer Thomas S. McNair, they hit upon the idea
of draining this mine too! How? They would drive a tunnel - an 8’ x 8’,
three-mile-long, 700 feet deep, tunnel from the bottom of the Ebervale Mine to
the Little Nescopeck Creek down in Drums. And while they were at it, why not
solve a number of the other mine water problems in the area by draining the
other mines as well? So, they decided to run a second tunnel from the Ebervale
mine over to the Jeddo Mine. That’s how the Hazleton Standard-Speaker
told the story in 1991. [1]
The story is told slightly differently in 1984 by the
Drums Lions Club.[2]
Their version says that a series of rain storms December 9 and 10, 1885 caused the
Black Creek to overflow its banks, break through a diverting dam and flood both
the Harleigh and Ebervale Mines. They say the tunnel is 7’ x 9’ but generally
agree with the rest of the story as was told by the Hazleton
Standard-Speaker.
Work began on the tunnel in 1891 and five years later, in
1895[3]
(the year Elmer was born), the $500,000 tunnel ($15M in 2018 dollars[4])
built by King & Scott Company, was finished. The solution worked! The water
drained. The coal was available for mining once again.[5]
To every Solution, however, there are always additional
problems. It turns out that mine water runs somewhat acidic. It dissolves
metals, Sulphur, and other toxins from the ground. Miners would refer to the
water pumped out of mines as a “Sulphur creek”.[6]
Down through the tunnel poured this “Sulphur creek”; 40
million gallons a day if you believe the Hazleton Standard-Speaker or
just 50,000 gallons a day according to the Drums Lions Club. Either way, it’s a
lot. Out into the Little Nescopeck it splashed, just
to the east of the road that crosses the Little Nescopeck, the South Old
Turnpike Road, the same road that the Stage Coaches used to travel as they came
down the mountain, past Grammy’s house, through Fritzingertown, and up into
Drums (see Post #10 – The Stage Coach).
Actually, the tunnel exit is not directly at the Little
Nescopeck Creek. The tunnel exit is approximately 1,500 feet south of the creek
and empties into what was once a feeder stream for the creek. That feeder
stream then empties into the Little Nescopeck Creek approximately 700 feet east
of the South Old Turnpike Road where it crosses the Little Nescopeck.
In the following photo, I’ve zoomed-in on the lower right
corner of the photo above to show greater details. We now see the strippings on
the bottom half of the photo and again see Butler Mountain cutting across,
dividing the coal fields from Drums. In the top half of the photo one can
easily see the curve of the Wilkes-Barre & Hazleton (WB&H) Rail Line as
it comes off Butler Mountain and curves past Kis-Lyn, across the Little
Nescopeck Creek and on toward Beisel’s Corner. Beisel’s Corner can be seen in
the larger photo above.
In the photo below, I’ve marked the location of the Drums
WB&H Station. Next to it is the point where Old Turnpike Road, the Little
Nescopeck Creek, and the WB&H Rail Line crossed each other at
Fritzingertown. The next arrow to the right marks the Kis-Lyn WB&H Station.
The fourth arrow on the photo that is pointing down marks Elmer’s Farm in
Fritzingertown. Last, we see the opening of the Jeddo Tunnel, a.k.a. the “Mouth
of Evil”.
For more information about the WB&H Rail line, visit
the post They
call it Progress.
Life-long Drums Resident Pete Medvecky took me on a hike
back to the tunnel entrance on April 9, 2018.[7]
It was the perfect day for a hike in the Pennsylvania woods. The buds on the
undergrowth and hardwoods had not yet burst open in their spring-green spender
but the snows of winter had all melted away. The air was a cool mid-40’s
allowing us to make our way on a hike some might call slightly challenging
without becoming overheated or overly tired.
Of course, we were surrounded by the sounds of rushing
water since the creek is so near but as we approached the tunnel exit the sound
of rushing water increased. Then suddenly it appeared, the grey-green Sulphur
creek seemingly appearing from out of the ground.
 |
| I decided to go ahead and use this photo even though it does include the tip of my finger (top right corner). That just goes to prove that I ain't no professional photographer! |
Upon closer examination, you realize that sunk down into
a man-made crevasse is a hole with a metal gate that resembles the gates of a
prison through which this grey-green water is rushing. And you realize this
gate is meant to keep people out, not in. It’s the water that rushes out
through the bars of the gate, as it makes its way down to the Little Nescopeck. 
Even here at what many have
called “The Mouth of Evil”, was a sign of hope.
Pete pointed it out to me. A horseshoe was embedded in the concrete wall just
outside the gate. “Look at that!” he said pointing at the wall across the
“creek” from us. “I’ve been here plenty of
times before but that’s the first I noticed that horseshoe! One of the workers
must have put that there when they made this wall back in 1891 or 1892!” 
Sure enough, there in the side of the wall, just above
the water-line, was a horse shoe embedded in the wall. My first thought was the
builder must have been Pennsylvania German. The prongs were pointed down. My
guess is that, knowing all the evil that tunnel would bring each moment of its
existence to the world around it, some Pennsylvania German worker, thinking
this may be the perfect place to pour out a bit of good luck as well as
the coming bad, encased it there forever (see post
25 Faith – In God for more on horseshoes).
Having seen the mouth of evil, we turned to retrace our
steps back to Pete’s car. However, I wanted to see where the Sulphur creek
actually entered the main stream of the Little Nescopeck Creek. Near-by that
spot, if the family stories I’d been told were true, one of Philip’s mills had
been located, as well as his house. So, we headed to that spot along the creek.
As we stood beside the clean portion of the Little
Nescopeck, east of, but within sight of, the place where the Sulphur creek
joined the main stream, the Spring Peepers (small frogs that are a harbinger of
Spring), began singing their high-pitched Spring song around a small pond
untouched by the poisons pouring past it just a stone’s throw to the west.
The clean Little Nescopeck is at our feet in this photo, flowing west, away
from us. That greenish-gray water in the distance is the Sulphur creek joining
the main stream of the Little Nescopeck from the South. The “Peeper’s Pond” is
just off the photo to the left.
I looked down at the clear, clean, swirling creek water
at my feet and thought of my father, Harry, telling me how his grandfather,
Nathan A., had told him about the day the tunnel opened and this clear, clean Little Nescopeck Creek changed almost
instantly into a grey-green cloudy stream of poison. It was said that Nathan lamented
that day; the day the creek he had so often enjoyed spending an hour or two
alongside fishing, died, almost instantly.
It’s been that way ever since.
[1]
Christopher, Carl, “John Markle’s Brainchild: Jeddo Tunnel an enduring
engineering masterpiece”, Pages From the Past Special Edition, Hazleton
Standard-Speaker, Friday, Sept. 6, 1991, p B 13.
[2] Two
Hundred Years of Progress: Butler Township, 1784-1984 (Drums, PA: The Drums
Lions Club, May, 1984) pp 22-23.
[3] Two
Hundred Years of Progress
[4] Conversion
calculator located at: https://www.officialdata.org/
[5]
Christopher
[6]
Jackson, Kent, “Mining a rich vein: Old-timers remember life and death in deep
mines”, Pages From the Past Special Edition, Hazleton Standard-Speaker,
Friday, Sept. 6, 1991, p B13
[7] Pete
Medvecky interview and hike conducted April 9, 2018.
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