Westmoreland Hamlet Rooted In Coal

(The following has been extracted from a story written by Dennis B. Roddy, Staff writer for the Tribune-Review, published in "Communities in Profile" in the Sunday Tribune-Review, Greensburg, PA, August 18, 1985.)

Bovard was the town above the ground, and the Crows Nest Mine tipple and its buildings were the entry to another town below ground.  Underground an army of men with pick axes and horse-drawn wagons chewed away endlessly at the reason the town existed.  Beneath the town it was the coal, a thickseam of black gold, a supply so large that a stable for the mine mules was placed underground.

Ed Haynackie worked there, during the Great Depression, for 20 cents an hour. He worked beside his father Walter Haynackie.

Walter Haynackie, Ed's father, had come as a child from Poland with his parents, to the anthracite coal mining region of eastern Pennsylvania.  His parents settled in Shamokin, Pennsylvaniain, where he went to work in the anthracite coal mines at age 12.  In 1913, looking to better himself, he moved to Lackawanna, New York, where he worked  in the steel industry there.  In 1918, after being laid off at Lackawanna, Walter Haynackie and his wife Helen Goretski Haynackie moved their family to the eight-year-old mining town of Bovard and was employed at the Crows Nest Mine.

Walter Haynackie had fathered 10 children to raise and with wages falling, not raising, he had to keep the tonnage he loaded up, day in and day out, just to make ends meet, for his large family.  After deductions for the company store and his mining tools, lamp oil and other charges against his pay, there wasn't much left in his pay envelope at the end of the week.

When he eldest son, Edward joined him in the mines, mining had become a third generation affair.

On December 17, 1938, Walter Haynackie and his son Ed traveled the three miles into the earth to their work room, where they began shoveling the coal that had been blasted down the previous day at a slope area into the mine wagons.  Ed was having a problem keeping up loading the coal with his father.  The spot in which he was working required that he shovel the coal over his right shoulder and Ed wasn't strong enough to keep going.

"He seen I couldn't shovel very well," Ed recalled.  Walter switched sides in the room with his son.  Ten minutes later, the roof slate fell  in crushing Walter Haynackie.  Walter Haynackie was buried under the slate, and killed instantly.

In the 12 months preceding his father's death, five other coal miners with killed in the Crows Nest Mine.  Walter Haynackie was the last recorded death in the Crows Nest Mine till 1941.

Seven of the Haynackie children were under 16 years of age when his father died.  Ed's mother received only $15.00 a week in compensation for the death of her husband, and faced being evicted from their company house.  Ed stayed off work for two weeks and returned as a helper on the tracks, outside of Crows Nest Mine.  At 22 years old, Ed Haynackie began helping his mother raise the remaining children.

"Saw them through high school and married them all off.  I never did marry,"  Ed said, in 1985, standing at the front porch of the duplex house along Third Street, the one in which he had lived since 1919.  The same house to which his father did not come home to, that December day in 1938. Ed's sister lived in the other half of the duplex house.

Ed left the Crows Nest Mine in 1942, when they began laying off and closing down the mine.  He took a job in the steel mill in Braddock.  Staying in Bovard was born of necessity and retained of habit. It is, after all, where he's from.

"After living all them years I have no intention of leaving Bovard," Ed said.  "I guess I'm going to stay in this house till I'm gone."

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