Graceton coke ovens fuel many memories

By Jeff Himler, Staff Reporter, "The Dispatch"

First published in the "The Dispatch," August 10, 1997, Blairsville, PA

The Homer-Center Historical Society is hoping to restore a few surviving beehive coke ovens from Graceton's original complement of about 200 so future generations will have a physical reminder of the community's formative years. That project can't proceed without funding and an agreement with Rochester and Pittsburgh Coal Co., which controls the former coke site off Route 119 across from the largely residential community Graceton has become.

In the meantime, a study of the brick ovens and their history has been conducted, drawing upon such local resources as faculty and students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Latrobe resident Tom Doherty, whose father, Tom Sr., was a foreman in charge of Graceton's coke ovens from 1904 to 1932.

Doherty also is concerned about saving for posterity the story of Graceton's heyday as a coke town. "We need to preserve the history before it's lost forever," Doherty says. "It's important so we won't forget our past and our roots." Doherty has offered to donate to the historical society a "time book" his father kept that documented the work accomplished by employees of the Graceton Coal and Coke Co. and the wages they were paid. An Army veteran who retired from Latrobe's Forge and Spring company, Doherty was born in Graceton in 1913 and was the third generation of his family to work at the coal and coke opeations that were the town's lifeblood.

Doherty's father first worked for a coke operation in Connellsville before taking the foreman's job in Graceton. The Graceton operation at the time was owned by Youngstown Steel Co., which used all of the fuel produced at the site for its own steel mills.

In 1920, the operation again changed hands when it was purchased for a reported $750,000 by Warren Delano, an uncle of future U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who also developed several Vintondale coal mines and communities along Blacklick Creek.

BRIEF STINT
After graduating from the local high school in 1931, Doherty worked briefly as a general laborer in the Graceton coke yard and at the nearby tipple.

The last in three batteries of beehive ovens was located almost directly by the mouth of the mine that supplied them with raw coal. To meet the higher quality demands of the coking process, the coal had to be washed and sifted before being placed in the ovens.

When not cleaning up the coal car track or other similar duties, Doherty was usually stationed on the "picking tables" at the coal tipple. "We picked the bony and the slate - all the impurities - out of the coal," he recalled. "Sometimes a stick of dynamite would come through the tipple, which caused some excitement."

As a foreman, Doherty's father had as many as 100 men working under his direction when Graceton was still producing coke at a sizable rate.

Production was at a high of 93,420 tons in 1891 and afterward began to slide, falling to 67,303 tons by 1914.

Though Doherty never manned the ovens himself, he did gain firsthand knowledge of how hot they could get.

One wintry morning, he was given the task of hiking a mile from his family home on Boss' Row, now Neal Road, to deliver his father's lunch in his office in the coke yard. "It was so cold, after I dropped my dad's lunch pail off I ran to warm myself at one of the ovens they just watered down," he recalled. "Hot steams was coming off and I got scalded. It felt like millions of needles going into my skin."

Doherty can't recall any serious accidents in the mine or at the coke yard during his growing years in Graceton, noting that "my dad believed in safety first."

LIMITED TRANSPORTATION
During Doherty's childhood, the coke superintendent was the only person in Graceton who had an automobile to whisk him along the dirt road to Homer City, except in the winter and fall when the road would develop deep ruts. "He had a Packard," Doherty recalls. "In those days, it was beneath the superintendent's dignity to drive, so he had a driver who wore a uniform with leggings and a cap."

For others in Graceton, a car was an unheard luxury. If they didn't choose to walk or hitch up a team to a wagon, they might reach such distant destinations as Indiana by streetcar or train. A six-cent fare was charged for the shortest trip on the streetcar and 42 cents for the entire length from Indiana to Blairsville.

Pennsylvania Railroad trains also traveled on an adjacent track between the county's central and southern boroughs. One of the locomotives, known as the "goat," left the main track at Black Lick for a trip over the mountains to Altoona.

Trips to Indiana were made for entertainment, such as viewing a movie, that wasn't available in Graceton. Trips were also made to purchase items that couldn't be found in Graceton's company store.

GOOD TIMES
Though the work may have been hot and hard and some company policies were oppressive, like making workers patronize the company store even with its inflated prices, life in Graceton was mostly pleasant, recalled Doherty. "It was a pretty town with very proud people," he said. "The company built boardwalks and fences and paid the boys a dollar a day to whitewash them."

He also remembers that families had flower gardens and that the coal company gave away prizes for the best ones.

Graceton also offered plenty of activities for its youngsters when they weren't engaged in study, with baseball serving as the focal point for the community as well as other coal towns. "All the companies were proud of their teams and were always hunting good baseball players," Doherty recalled "If you were a good player, you got an easy job in the (coke) yard."

Located near the Doherty home were a playground and a bandstand, where Sunday night concerts were offered.

During the warm weather, school picnics would be followed by hikes through the woods to pick wildflowers and visit an "Indian" cave on a cliff above Two Lick Creek while winter activities would include ice skating and bob sledding. Throughout the year, Doherty and his friends would frequent a one-stop recreation center that combined a pool hall, bowling alley, barber shop and a confectionary store selling everything from ice cream to cigars.

It wasn't until late in his youth that Doherty's family home was lit by electricity instead of oil lamps.

Because of his father's status as a supervisor, the family enjoyed the modern covenience of running water inside the six-room home while most other workers hauled water from fire plugs along the streets.

Though separated from them in the company hierarchy, the elder Doherty was well liked by the rank and file at the coke yard, according to his son, who said his father "stuck up for the men and tried to do what he could to help them." For instance, he regularly took groups of workers - many of them Slovak or Polish immigrants - to the Indiana courthouse to apply for their citizenship papers.

GREAT DEPRESSION
The good times ended, however, with the advent of the Great Depression. By 1930, the coke-yard work force had shrunk to about 20, as did the paychecks. The coke ovens remaining in operation decreased to 70 and the men worked only one or two days a week. All extra amenities such as the garden prizes were eliminated and many jobs were consolidated.

Doherty's father took over the coal tipple before being laid off in 1932. Soonafter, he took his family to Indiana, where he initially found work building walls at what was then Indiana Normal School, now IUP, and then as a sanitary supervisor with the state public health department.

Back in Graceton, the operating coke ovens had dwindled to just eight by 1935, and the following year the company declared bankruptcy and was purchased in receivership by four partners, one of which was Abe Light of Punxsutawney.

The coke ovens enjoyed a brief resurgence during World War II before seeing their final blast in 1953.

A mobile home park is now located where the Graceton schools once stood, and the remaining coke ovens have been all but obscured by overgrowth and the ravaging effects of time.

On a return visit to his hometown several years ago, however, Doherty was still able to pick out several familiar landmarks, including the hosue where he grew up that has since been remodeled.

Most importantly, he noted that many of the same families still live in the Graceton area, comprising the most enduring legacy of the town's coke era.

(Article courtesy of "The Dispatch," Blairsville, PA)

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