The Mountains Once Smoldered

On my way from an interview the other day, on my way home, I was winding up a mountain in a little town called Windber when the tree line broke to my right, revealing a panoramic, and quite startling sight. Spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table, so to speak, was a huge expanse of what was once the beginnings of Windber, and many little towns before and after, the remnants of a giant coal mine. Naturally, I took some time to take a closer look and a few photos.

The mine itself was called Mine 40, while the town that cropped up around it, created and managed by the Berwind-White Mining Company, was named Windber. The reversal of syllables, obviously, was intentional; Berwind wanted their little company town to be a framework for similar projects in the future.

The little town had everything a miner required: a company farm that provided products for the company store that miners purchased using their company wages, a company hospital, churches, chapels and schools that held festivals and parades and in the very back of the photo, company housing where the miners' wives and children would live.

Don't be fooled, however; this wasn't the beginnings of the Google office. It was done by companies solely to increase profits.

The building in the forefront of the picture used to be a wash house, a miner's locker room of sorts, where they would get cleaned up before going home. Mine 40 hit its peak production around 1905 or so. The state didn't require companies like Berwind-White to install wash houses for their employees until 1950, so this one was somewhat of a novelty I would imagine. Coincidentally, the mandate came only about a decade or so before Berwind-White closed their last mine.

The coal culture, if it can be called that, is fascinating to me, and I can't really explain why. I've been a resident of this area for about four years now, but I have been visiting since I was a kid. It seemed normal then, part of the landscape. It has become more and more alien to me with the passing years.

I've related stories I've heard from some of the older residents of this area, how they remember the coal mines on fire, the mountains smoldering during the day, their fathers returning home covered in soot, stinking of sulphur. Back then it was hard work done for the benefit of a family, providing fuel for the expansion of American industry.

Hindsight tells different stories. Poor tunneling allowed mine drainage to pour into major waterways.Strip mining fragmented the landscape into smaller and smaller pieces, driving species like the Indiana bat to near extinction. And now, once a major part of the American economic machine, places like Mine 40 and Windber have become stark monuments to a stigmatized heritage.