The surviving mine buildings ca.1993 included a blacksmith shop, a mule barn for the mules used in the mine, and a partially ruined dynamite storage house.  Other building ruins at the site of the Tearing Run Mine complex include those of an stationary engine house, the engines were used to haul the loaded mine cars out of the mine, and of a tipple which loaded the coal into railroad hopper cars on the Tearing Run Spur line.

The blacksmith shop building is a one-story structure of reinforced-concrete construction, measuring roughly 45 feet x 22 feet.  It is banked somewhat into the hill, and has double-leaf wooden batten loading doors at the left side of the northeast or main facade.  The structure is topped by a side-gable composition shingle roof, and a weatherboarded tractor shed is joined to the southeast end.  Windows are double-hung sash with 6/6 lights.

Thirty yards east is a one-and-a-half-story reinforced concrete bank barn used to house the mules that were used in the mining operations.  The barn has entrances on both levels, and is topped by a front-gable roof with shingled gable.  At the rear is a cylindrical precast-concrete slab silo resting on a concrete base and reinforced with iron-strap banding.  On the east side of the barn is a small wooden slat corn crib, also a survivor from the mining period.  In the brush at the top of the bluff behind the mule barn are concrete footings that once formed the base for an engine house containing stationary engines that powered a rope haulage system that pulled the coal mine cars of the mines and to a sorting and loading tipple.  The tipple itself was of wooden timber construction but stood on a concrete base;  the tipple has been dismantled, but the foundations are visible amid the accompanying boney waste pile.

Up the creek a quarter of a mile from the main mine complex are the remains of a small structure which stored the dynamite used by the miners in their work.  The small brick structure was square, 6 feet on a side.  The roof has been torn-off, or blown off, and the structure is in ruins.  Other mining structures were present as well;  A concrete wash house for the miners was torn down in the early 1990's.  All the mine portals have been sealed, and the railroad trackage which served the mine up Tearing Run has been removed.

A number of coal company owned houses were provided for the miners and their families in the Tearing Run area, but the superintendent lived in Homer City.   In ca.1914, 107 men and boys were employed in the mine.

By ca.1915 the Homer Coal Company was conducting operation at the mine with ninety-nine men and boys.

The Tearing Run Mines closed after they were inundated by the St. Patrick's Day Floods in 1936.

The Tearing Run Mines were an independent mining company, not affiliated with the Rochester & Pitsburgh Coal & Iron Company's nearby subsidiary mines, at Coy, Waterman and Snyder.  However, much of the land, including the mine building complex, was later owned or leased by the Rochester & Pittsburgh Coal Company.

The Interstate Commerce Commission report about the abandonment of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Tearing Run Branch. The report says that the branch was built in 1892 to serve a coal mine. This mine is not named, but the 1900 edition of the Pennsylvania Railroad CT1000 station listing shows a J.M. Guthrie (Agent) at the end of the Tearing Run Branch - and Mr. Guthrie just happens to be have been the General Superintendent of the Tearing Run Mine at that time. The report goes on to say that the mine was flooded in March of 1938, and subsequently abandoned. The Pennsylvania Railroad received permission to abandon their branch line in February of 1941.
(From the "Interstate Commerce Commission Report, Finance Docket No. 13091, Pennsylvania Railroad Company Abandonment.  Submitted January 25, 1941.  Decided February 7, 1941."  the report is courtesy of  Nick  Puzak, Penn State University.)

(History and description of the Tearing Run Mines, adapted with additional data  from "Indiana County, Pennsylvania: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 1993,"  America's Industrial Heitage Project, National Park Service, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, U.S. Department of the Interior, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

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