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| Mammoth No. 1 Mine & Coke Works (Mammoth Shaft Mine) (ca.1886-1946), Located on the hill west of Poker Road and PA Rt. 982, Mammoth, Mt. Pleasant Twp., Westmoreland Co., PA Owners: (ca.1879-1889), Colonel J.W. Moore Coke Company, Greensburg, PA (ca.1889-1927), H.C. Frick Coke Company, Scottdale, PA Company Store: Union Supply Company (ca.1930's-1946), John Dent & Gus Kelly leased coke works.
Mammoth No. 2 Mine & Coke Works |
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| Mammoth Coke Works, showing the many rebuilding and repair
of the coke ovens. (photo courtesy of the Coal & Coke Heritage Center, Penn State University, Fayette Campus, Uniontown, PA) |
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| H.C. Frick Coke Company Plat Map of Mammoth No. 1 &
No. 2 H.C. Frick Coke Company Plat Map (ca.1959) of the Village of Mammoth showing standing buildings (in solid), and demolished structures (in white) company store, mine buildings, and coke oven batteries. (Map courtesy of USX Corporation Resource Management, Uniontown, PA & The Coal & Coke Heritage Center, Penn State University, Fayette Campus, Uniontown, PA) |
| DESCRIPTION: The Mammoth Mines complex included Mammoth No. 1 Mine (Mammoth Shaft Mine) & Coke Works, a shaft-entry mine, located to the west of the town, along a tributary to Sewickley Creek, and Mammoth No. 2 Mine (Mammoth Slope Mine) & Coke Works, a slope-entry mine, located near the town. Each of these mines contained its own coke-works. Only a few remnants of this once-large mining and coking operation stand today. The only extant mine structure is the former boiler house and lamp house building. Built in the 1890's, this one story structure is L-shaped and contains a riveted steel roof truss, common-bond red-brick walls, a gable roof, and a stone foundation. It serves as the Mount Pleasant Township office. Until ca. 1993, a large part of Mammoth No. 1 Mine Coke Works survived; however, this land was recently strip mined and reclaimed and all the coke ovens were demolished. Nothing survives from the Mammoth No. 2 Mine Coke Works. |
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Mammoth Mine Boiler House Mammoth Mine Boiler House and lamp house building, ca.1993. The altered building serves as the Mt. Pleasant Township office building. (Photo by Ken Rose, courtesy of H.A.B.S./H.A.E.R., National Park Service, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) |
 Mammoth
Mine Boiler House & Lamp House. ca.2000(Photo by Ray Washlaski, captured from a video tape taken Nov. 2000) |
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| Just north of Mammoth, in Westmoreland County's Mammoth County Park, six beehive coke ovens have been rebuilt near the site of the former Magee Coke Works. A coal mining interpretive area, completed by the Westmoreland County Parks System, now surrounds the restored coke ovens. Some Magee Coke Works company-built houses once stood near here in an unincorporated town known by local residents as Peanut. |
| The town of Mammoth straddles PA Route 982, east of the slope and shaft mines. A few post-1940s houses are located along PA Rt. 982 to the north. To the south on this route stand about twenty-five coal company-built miners residences. These were originally double houses but most have been converted into single-family houses. They are two-story buildings with saltbox roofs and stone foundations. Originally they had a single brick chimney located in the middle of the building, and clapboard siding. Most of the chimneys have been removed and the siding on virtually all of the buildings has been replaced with aluminum or asphalt siding. Several of the houses have been bricked. The main facades are parallel to the ridge of the roof and the fronts of the houses are extremely close to the road, a result of the more recent widening of PA Rt. 982. |
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| H.C. Frick Coke Company Union Supply Company The Mammoth Mines Union Supply Company Store, the building stood along Poker Road. The store building burned down a number of years ago. (photo courtesy of the Coal & Coke Heritage Center, Penn State University, Fayette Campus, Uniontown, PA) |
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| Interior of the Union Supply Company Store
in Mammoth, PA (photo courtesy of the Coal & Coke Heritage Center, Penn State University, Fayette Campus, Uniontown, PA) |
| The coal company-built miners houses on Poker Road, the westernmost street in Mammoth, are the most intact within the town. A single row of ten double stands alongside the road as it rises to the south. These two-story buildings are of the standard double-house construction: wood frame, clapboard siding (though most of the original siding has been replaced with asphaltic or aluminum siding), gable roofs, main entrances parallel to the gable ridge, two brick chimneys, stone foundations, and full-length front porches (though many of these have been altered). |
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Mine Workers Houses Mammoth Mines, double -family coal company houses, build to house the miners, ca.1993. (Photo by Jet Lowe, courtesy of H.A.B.S./H.A.E.R., National Park Service, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) |
| Boss's Row, on the northern half of Poker Road, contains six large single-family houses. These two-and-a- half-story wood-frame buildings are T-shaped with intersecting gable roofs. Each has two brick chimneys, full-length front porches with decorative brackets, and rubble stone foundations. The siding was originally clapboard; however, a number of these houses now have asphaltic siding. |
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Bosses Row Bosses Row, Poker Road, Mammoth Mines, Mammoth, PA These were the houses in which the mine bosses lived. (Photo by Jet Lowe, courtesy of H.A.B.S./H.A.E.R., National Park Service, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) |
| The town's former grade school is a one-story
building with stretcher-bond yellow-brick walls and a hipped roof. It no
longer serves as a school and has been remodeled for commercial use.
A Protestant Church on Poker Road stands between the workers' houses and manager's row. It is a small wood-frame building with clapboard siding, a gable roof, and a modest bell tower. |
| HISTORY: In 1879 Colonel J.W. Moore of Greensburg purchased 2,000 acres of coal property in northern Mount Pleasant Township, and in 1885 his company opened the slope-entry Mammoth Mine, exploiting the 84" to 90" thick Pittsburgh Coal Seam. The following year, ca.1986, a second Mammoth Mine, containing a shaft entry, was sunk west of the slope entry mine. A coke works was built at each of the mines. By 1886 Moore's Mammoth Mines employed 176 men and boys, and the both coke works employed 110 men and boys. The two coke works had 377 beehive coke ovens and produced over 95,000 tons of coke. The Mammoth Mines produced over 154,000 tons of coal, most of which was used in Moore's Mammoth Coke Works. Both the mines and coke works were served by the Sewickley Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which ran from Youngwood east to Mammoth. On August 29, 1889, the H.C. Frick Coke Company purchased the Mammoth Mines property from Colonel Moore for a sum well over $1,000,000.00. The H.C. Frick Coke Company operated the mines for a little over a year before a horrific disaster occurred, on July 27, 1891, an explosion caused by the igniting of fire-damp gas killed 116 miners, in the Mammoth Shaft Mine. State mining inspectors declared that the H.C. Frick Coke Company was not at fault in the Mammoth Mine disaster, as was usually the case, claiming that the mine had been adequately ventilated, but that a sudden concentration of gas in one part of the shaft entry mine sparked the explosion. One mine inspector testified that while a number of miners appeared to have been killed by the force of the explosion, "a great majority of the bodies showed clearly that they died from the effects of after-damp." The Pennsylvania State Mine Inspectors, as they usually did after most mining disasters, sided with the coal company in declaring the company "not-at-fault." In the wake of one of the county's worst mining disasters, the Frick Coke Company, led by General Manager Thomas Lynch, urged its miners to exercise greater vigilance in the detection of methane gas in the mines. (An examination of the testimony of the coal miners who survived the Mammoth Disaster undoubtedly would reveal a response different to that of the coal company and the state inspectors concerning their attitudes about safety at the Mammoth Mine.) Despite the explosion, however, the company repaired part of the underground works and reopened the Mammoth Shaft Mine about one year later. During the bitter coal miners strike of 1894, trouble occurred at Mammoth Mine, near Mt. Pleasant, between miners and deputies, a striker's woman hurled a stone which struck Mammoth Mine Superintendent Charles Frank, causing an ugly and painful wound. The coke works at the Mammoth Shaft Mine (called Mammoth No. 1 Mine) was the larger of the two bee-hive coking operations; by the 1910's Mammoth No. 1 Mine had 311 bee-hive coke ovens. The coke works associated with the Mammoth Slope Mine (called Mammoth No. 2 Mine) had 199 bee-hive coke ovens. Just as the coal and coke operation was expanding, so was the town of Mammoth. By 1910 over 1,000 persons lived in Mammoth. The H.C. Frick Coke Company operated the Mammoth Mines and Coke Works through the 1920's. By 1926 the H.C. Frick Coke Company was operating only 174 coke ovens at Mammoth, producing about 107,000 tons of coke. The Mammoth Mines produced over 181,000 tons of coal ca.1926, and both the mines and coke works employed 350 men and boys. The H. C. Frick Coke Company closed and abandoned the Mammoth Mines and Coke Works in 1927 and soon afterwards offered the coal company-owned houses for sell. The H.C. Frick Coke Company leased the Mammoth Coke Works in the 1930's to John Dent and Gus Kelly of Greensburg, PA. The coke ovens near the former shaft mine (Mammoth No. 1 Mine) were operated until about 1946. M & A Suggerman subsequently took over the coal property and strip mined the remaining coal pillers and in recent years the coal has been reclaimed from the slate dump (boney dump) near the site of the shaft mine. (History and description of the Mammoth Mines & Coke Works, with additional data and pictures adapted from "Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, 1994," 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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Mammoth No. 1 Mine Slate Dump |
| Coal
Miners Memorial, Mammoth Mines, Mammoth, Mt. Pleasant Twp., Westmoreland Co., PA
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The Mammoth Mine Disaster,
January, 1891,
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