December 6, 1907 is a day that lives in infamy. It was coal mining’s Pearl Harbor.

362 miners lost their lives when two Monongah mines (Fairmont Coal Company’s #8 and #6 mines) exploded into an unspeakable horror at 10:30 a.m. when coal-car couplings broke loose, sending the cars crashing into a wall, cutting electrical cables that send sparks into a dust cloud from hell and a death trap for hundreds.

That meant that two-thirds of the families in Monongah lost their fathers. That included more than 1,000 children.

There were children in the mines that day, too, some as young as 10, because fathers brought them to work alongside them off the books with the dad credited with the tonnage loaded by the family.

Carl Meredith, a foreman on the Fairmont Mine, recalled:

“I was out on the loaded track and was looking toward the mouth of number 8 and the first thing I knew I saw timbers and everything flying through the air . . . followed by black smoke. It seemed to me the smoke was afire. It seemed to me it was a short distance in the air, maybe 50 or 60 feet.”

Even today the 1907 explosions are responsible for the most victims of any coal mining accident in American history.

Chaos about accurate information reigned in the following days. The Fairmont Times editions reported 400, 406 and 425 at various times. The Pittsburgh Press headline blared out 400. Father Everett Briggs, relying on reports from the gravediggers, put it at 500.

362 became the final, official total.

December 1907 was the deadliest month in American coal mining. Five mining disasters killed more than 700 men and boys in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Alabama and New Mexico.

Catholic miners who instead went to Mass to honor St. Nicholas Day were spared. Ironically, the Roman Catholics of Monongah celebrated St. Nicholas on December 6 but the Greek Orthodox miners celebrated St. Nicholas on December 19, which was the day that 239 miners at the Darr mine in western Pennsylvania died while the Greek miners were spared while in church.

St. Nicholas saved dozens of lives in Monongah and Darr on different days.

The national outrage led to the formation of the U.S. Bureau of Mines on May 16, 1910. The Bureau was closed by Congress in 1996 with some of its functions scattered to other federal agencies. West Virginia’s Senator Jay Rockefeller unsuccessfully tried to reestablish the Bureau of Mines in 2010.

To make sure that those dead fathers were not forgotten, Mrs. Grace Golden Clayton created the first Fathers Day in America, at her Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South, on July 5, 1908, because it was close to the birthday of her late father.

The idea didn’t gain traction, though. Spokane, Washington is credited with proclaiming the first Fathers Days, on June 19, 1910. But it wasn’t until 1972 before President Nixon made Fathers Day a national holiday.

The natonality with the most victims was Italian. On Friday, December 6, at 10:30 a.m., the time in which the mining disaster occurred, the town of Molise, Italy which had perhaps a dozen former residents among the 171 Italian-Americans who died in the explosions, will remember the 362 victims. The event wil be hosted by the G.A. Colozza Institute.

 

I have not been made aware of any observance in Monongah, which has a sign about the 1907 tragedy and a Heroine Statue in the center of town. Father Briggs led the campaign for erection of the statue. Father Briggs embraced Monongah’s coal miners, past and present, so passionately that the bridge crossing the West Fork River was renamed The Father Everett Briggs Bridge.

 

1907 has a tremendous impact on me. My father, John W. Olesky, Sr., survived two cave-ins. Rescuers had to dig through more than 4 feet of coal to get to his body both times. A mule that pulled the coal car saved his life the first time.

 

The mines got him in the end, though. He passed away from the Black Lung.