Wow! The Lonaconing Journal! Who knew?

Mom and I had talked about the "Lonaconing Journals" a couple of times and we even thumbed through her copy on one trip back east from here in San Diego where I live to the little mountain town of Frostburg in Western Maryland where our ancestor lived and Mom still lives. One of the great sagas of our family that carried through the generation of the 1800s and into the 1900s is that of the coal miner. Mining was the occupation put on many a census for the men of the family from that first wonderfully descriptive census in 1850 down to about 1940. That's over 100 years of the hard, crippling and low paid work of mining.

"The Lonaconing Journals" is by a woman who really knows her way around the coal mines of Allegany County Maryland, and that's Katherine A. Harvey. The proper and full title of this work is "The Lonaconing Journals: The funding of a coal and iron community, 1837 - 1840". Published in 1977 by The American Philosophical Society, it was I've been told, a master's degree thesis. This work along with Ms. Harvey's PhD dissertation, "Best-dressed Miners: Life and labour in the Maryland coal region, 1835 - 1920", Cornell University Press, 1970, is all you'd ever need when trying to imagine your coal miner ancestors, especially if the come from Western Maryland. Of all that I've ever read about coal mining and coal miner's families in the area, these two are the very best!

Here's how Harvey describes the facts of the Lonaconing Journals:
The Lonaconing journals, kept by the super-intendents of the George's Creek Coal and Iron Company, cover the period 1837-1840. Their setting is the recent Appalachian frontier, and their subject is the building of an experimental iron furnace and the development of its adjacent company town in western Maryland. The principal figure in these activities was John Henry Alexander (1812-1867), topographical engineer for the state of Maryland, professor of mining and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the founders of the National Academy of Science, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and author and editor of works on many topics.
Harvey states on this same page, page one, that the Journal chronicling the earliest days of the company miraculously survived all moves and destructions of other company documents, files, and papers! It is a window into a point in local history not otherwise available.

It paints the picture of an area in the first days of a boom time. The lives of the miners here - mostly immigrants from Wales, Ireland, England and Scotland with a few from Germany - were better than miners elsewhere and they were more prosperous too. When they moved into the area back then, miners brought the entire family and the area had as a result a much more stable population, unlike other mining town where the miners were almost always single men. This was a relatively peaceful and prosperous mining community.

Don't want to paint too idyllic a picture of it all. There were wage disputes, attempts at unionizing that met with management's resistance and dirty dealing, and awful strikes. The ill or injured miners and their families were sometimes summarily evicted from their cottages because they could no longer work. It was a hard life by today's standards but a pretty good deal for the miners of the day and much better than they were going to get in Pennsylvania to the north and West Virginia to the south.

Mom's ancestors along her father's line, the Williams family,  were almost exclusively coal miners in the George's Creek Mine Field in Allegany County, Maryland until the 1920s. The Williams family's patriarch, Daniel, came from Wales from a line of coal miners, and all worked in the Western Maryland mines from about 1841 to the time of the Roaring Twenties. Mom's father, Camey or more formally Cambria and given the very traditional name for Wales, was brought to the mines to work at a young age. His father, Daniel Williams, immigrated to work there and became a supervisor. He eventually got the fever of owning a mine during the boom times of WWI and purchased one in Mt. Savage near his home place in Ocean, Maryland where he worked for the Consolidation Coal Company. He then bought another mine over in West Virginia. The West Virginia mine, as best Mom and Aunt Betty can figure out, was rich in tin. After he passed it was eventually lost for unpaid taxes. The Mt. Savage mine property is still in the hands of one of Daniel's descendants.

Daniel and his progeny weren't the only miners who came from Wales on Mom's side. The most famous is Benjamin Thomas and his family. Below is the ships' passenger list for the Barque Tiberius where his family is listed. You can see that Benjamin and four of his sons are listed as "colliers" or coal miners.  My great great grandmother, Diana, is just 6 years old!

 

 



 

 Benjamin Thomas and family were recruited in Wales by the Consolidation Coal Company and as such their passage was paid for by the Company and they arrived at the Port of Baltimore in July of 1837. The Company had been busy with their engineers and workers building out the mine and iron works. All was ready for the miners to get to work making a profit, and they did in the fall of that year. And their plans were BIG! Once the whole operation got going, there were was a superintendent, four managers, numerous clerks, and 400 mine workers working under them. Periodically the Journals noted that a couple more families from the Tiberius had arrived, found lodging and were ready to work.

The passages included in Harvey's book are excerpts from the complete set of Journals. She admits to leaving out much of the technical details. Included are some passages from the actual journals kept by John H. Alexander from 1837 to 1840 with a lot of technical description about how the furnace was built as well as some of the more innovational aspects of the entire projects. But the day-to-day stuff about the miners is the real fascinating material.

A post office is established. Local clay gets turned into bricks and those bricks get put to work on many projects and were even used as floors in the dirt floor "shantees" or very modest cottages purchased from farmers nearby. Blacksmiths were hired. Blacksmiths up and quit, likely hired away by mines in neighboring states. Boarding houses popped up for the few single men but mostly housed families until they could find a proper house or cottage. Roads got built, men were injured.

The activity continued at a fast pace until the usual harsh Western Maryland winters gave the whole project a reason to slow down.
February 21.-Mercury stands at -1 at 7 A.M. The mornings have been so cold for several days past that the stonecutters at the hearth could only work in the afternoons.
February 22.-Thermometer at 7 A.M. stands at --9. It is so cold that a number of hands could not work out of doors. Carpenters again stopped working at the molding house in consequence of the severe cold.

Some newly hired workers just don't work out.
February 23.-John Thomas, who has been here since October last and was intended for a furnace keeper, will persist in getting drunk and has been discharged.
I have no idea if this John Thomas was the son of our Benjamin Thomas, listed on the Tiberius manifest above.

And more accidents happen. Snow comes in March and again in April finally making a last appearance in May. Talk about harsh weather!

In Volume 2 of the Journals, the details of the lives of the miners working for The Consolidation Coal Company were recorded. This is the very best description of the terms of employment and daily life under the Company I've ever had the great pleasure to read!  Rules like no dogs being kept in the heart of the winter without the specific approval of the superintendent are noted and a directive that  houses must be kept clean and tidy, making a pleasant appearance. It was set out in writing that the miners must work from sunrise to sunset all days of the year except Christmas and Sundays. And most importantly, no distilled spirits and no drunkenness. Ever. At all. And if the rule was violated, people were fired.

On page 46 I read this.
February 19.-The night passes off quietly. The revelers at Buskirk's pass the sentinels by keeping high up the hill. Benjamin Thomas, miner, and wife stopped by sentinels in a state of intoxication.
WOW! That's our Benjamin Thomas! He and Hanna (Evans) his wife were drunk. Now that's well worth knowing! So the story is that they and others would scamper up the hillside and move as quietly as possible through the woods to get to the home of the Buskirk's where liquor was served. Everyone knew about it and most found their way, often on a Saturday night. And of course the mining company knew. It was no problem at all for them to wait in hiding for intoxicated miners and their wives as they loudly stumbled home.

It always amazes me how such juicy details are hidden and waiting for us to find them, deep in an obscure record. If Mom hadn't been so curious about the life and times of her ancestors she might have skipped the "Lonaconing Journals" in search of some index or listing with less of a beating heart. But she didn't. She found it in a local library and copied out the pages. Her notes from this time when she first read the Journals are a treasure to me. It's like she's right here with me, and we're finding it all over again!

Daniel Williams (1852-1920).

 

 

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SNGF: About Those Houses

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings blog throws out a challenge every Saturday for some Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, or SNGF. I try to do as many as I can but as a relative newbie don't make it as often as I would like. This weeks is right up my alley because it's about family homes. Here's what he said in his blog post:
1) Determine where your ancestral families were on 1 January 1913 - 100 years ago.
2) List them, their family members, their birth years, and their residence location (as close as possible). Do you have a photograph of their residence from about that time, and does the residence still exist?
3) Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google+ Stream post

I've decided to change up Randy's challenge a tad and talk about three houses that were occupied by ancestors in 1913 and list all the relatives who called each their home at some point in their lifetimes.  I chose these because they are houses that held each family through at least two and sometimes three generations and 1913 is a good confluence year for them. They are:
1) the Zeller and Kelly family residence at 89 West Main Street, Frostburg, Maryland
2) the Eckhart and Kelly family residence in Eckhart Mines, Maryland, and
3) the Williams family home in Ocean Mines, Maryland.
So here goes!

1) the Zeller and Kelly family residence at 89 West Main Street, Frostburg, Allegany County, Maryland
This house was built in the 1840s on the main thoroughfare of the town, also known as the Old Pike, The National Road, and the Cumberland Road. Built in the first couple of decades of the 1800s, the National Pike was the first road west paid for by the federal government.

This is a photo taken in the early 1900s in the general vicinity of the Zeller and Kelly house to document the National Road. The house would probably have been on the right.

We have the house history going back to its origins, but for this exercise, here are the ancestors and families who might have lived there in the decades before and after 1913. Here's the house as it was recently in October of 2012.

1. Helen Gertrude Zeller, my grandmother, born in this house 6 Aug 1894, and died there 13 Feb 1985. She left the house to my Dad, Francis Patrick Kelly. She married John Lee Kelly on 30 Sept 1913 in Frostburg, Maryland. She inherited the house from her father, Gustav Zeller. Grandma and Grandpop lived there with all six of their children:
Helen Lee Kelly Natoly 1914 - 1989
Francis Patrick Kelly, Dad, 1916 - 2007
Bernard Michael Kelly 1918 - 2007
John Delbert Kelly, living
Christiana Kelly Fraley 1923 - 1993
Louise Kelly Chaney 1924 - 2002
As you can see Grandma was living in the house in January of 1913 but not yet married to Grandpop. That would come later in the year in September, and the babies started arriving the next August right there in the house
2. Gustav Zeller, my great grandfather, born 3 Feb 1858 in Allegany County, Maryland was the first in the family to own the house. He died 3 Dec 1927. He married Moretta Workman born 3 Apr 1880 and died 24 Mar 1946. I don't know if they both died in the house but if I had to guess, I'd guess that they did. They lived in this house with all five children. The boys left after marriage but Grandma, the apple of GGF's eye never left the house.
Charles Sample Zeller 1880 - 1966
Adelbert (Bert) Zeller 1883 - ?
Gustav William Zeller 1884 - 1964. He owned a house across the street and down three houses.
Helen Gertrude Zeller, Grandma
Anna M. Zeller Mar 1882 - Sept 1882
There was always a full house at 89 West Main Street, and many ancestors lived there for a while after they were married or between houses. My family lived there one summer while the new-to-us house was getting ready. During the Great Depression a few traveling salesmen boarded there as well.


2) the Eckhart and Kelly family residence in Eckhart Mines, Allegany County, Maryland



This is the house where my Grandpop John Lee "Lee" Kelly 1892 - 1969 was born, and the photo was taken last year with one of the many remodels in progress. Uncle Delbert Kelly tells of walking from the house at 89 West Main Street, above, to this house maybe 2 miles east on the Old National Pike, as a young boy of six or so, to visit his grand mother, Christiana Eckhart Kelly 1861 - 1932, who scared the daylights out of him. After the long walk downhill he would enter by the front door to sit properly for a visit in the front parlor on the stiff leather chair! Afterward, Delbert and Grandpop took the trolley back up the hill to home.
Here are the ancestors who lived in this house:
1. Christiana Eckhart Kelly 1861 - 1932, most likely born in this house to her parents, John Eckhart 1831 - 1917 and Mary Myers Eckhart 1837 - 1909. She met and fell in love with my great grandfather Francis Patrick Kelly 1854 - 1932. Yes, you have not been fooled: Dad and his own grandfather were named the same! 
By 1913 they had a house full of kids:
Mary Kelly 1880 - 1949
Eugene Francis Kelly 1888 - 1986
Margaret Ann Kelly 1909 - ?
Edith Bridget Kelly 1891 - ?
John Lee Kelly, my Grandpop, 1892 - 1969
Dora Elizabeth 1894 - 1962
Francis Patrick Kelly Jr. 1897 - 1946 (yes, another Francis Patrick Kelly!)
Also living with the family at the time of the 1910 US Census was Christiana's father, John S. Eckhart 1831 -1917 who was the great grandson of the town founder, George Adam Eckhart 1729 - 1806. I can only imagine which other of my ancestors lived there and am willing to bet there were more than three.

3) the Williams family home in Ocean Mines, Allegany County, Maryland.

Ocean Mines, known locally as simply Ocean, sits in the George's Creek Valley. Ocean Mine Fields were one of the richest coal mine fields in Western Maryland. The little mountain town of Frostburg sits at the top of the George's Creek valley where the Ocean Mine Field runs and this house is perhaps three miles south of Frostburg.
My great grandfather Daniel Williams 1852 - 1920 and his wife Jane Price Williams 1862 - 1939 called this house their family home and would have been living there with most of their eight children in January of 1913. Daniel was born in Wales, was a miner or collier there, and worked in mining when he came to the rich coal fields of the George's Creek area. Most anxious to purchase his own home and settle down, as were the vast majority of miners there, it was not possible at the time to also purchase the mineral rights. So that's why the mining company ran a mine shaft right under the house! And the house eventually sank!
Here's the list of the kids living in the home in 1910:
James Henry Williams 1882 -1936
William Williams 1884 - 1964
Thomas Williams 1890 - 1951
Joseph Williams 1895 - 1948
Cambria Williams, my grandfather 1897 - 1960
Charles Williams, Aunt Betty's father, 1899 - 1979
Aunt Betty and her parents also lived in this house. She remember stories of hearing the miner's voiced under the house as they worked the min shafts! Spooky!

So those are my hand-picked and often loved homes of the ancestors. I do hope that you are not too bored by my rambling SNGF adventure!


The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/01/sngf-about-those-houses.html

A Funny Story About That Sign

When I was four years old we moved from Western Maryland to Ohio. Dad had a wonderful new executive position in a plastics plant... and if you remember the movie, "The Graduate", everyone was talking about "plastic".

We visited my Mom and Dad's families, both from Frostburg MD, regularly. It wasn't a long drive, so we'd pack up the car, later the station wagon, and make the trip. I always loved the ride, and mostly it was along the Ohio and then Pennsylvania Turnpikes. Early on the big road ended or hadn't begun yet, and that was OK with me as I loved the smaller roads that made their way through all manner of villages and towns.

Our family life in Ohio was suburban and the streets went on and on until they hit downtown Cleveland. By contrast, little Frostburg seemed a microcosm of life where stores were just across the way and everyone knew everyone... and probably was related somehow or other.

There were things that puzzled me about life in Frostburg. You could say to the man at the little store, "put it on my bill" and he would! You couldn't do that in suburban Cleveland.

In Maple Heights we lived at "fifteen one one one" Maple Heights Blvd. In Forstburg the house numbers of the people we saw were mostly single or double didgets. Three numbers indicated that your relative lived on a long street, like Bowery. Main Street was so long it had an east and west side.

There were signs that puzzled me and one said simply and profoundly: Beware of Sinks. We passed those signs in and around Ocean Mines MD for a while before I spoke up and asked outright what they meant, interrupting adult conversation. I saw no sinks anywhere on the landscape, of either the bathroom or kitchen variety!

To elaborate on the answer, here's what Aunt Betty wrote recently in answer to a question about my GGF Daniel Williams that reminded me of my puzzlement at the sink sign.

Daniel worked for the Consolidation Coal Company as a foreman at mine #16 at Ocean, MD which is about a mile from where he lived.

In the 1940's, I remember hearing the digging and conversations of the miners in our kitchen at Ocean. They must have been working near the surface.  As a matter of fact, in the late 50"s about 9:00 p.m. one evening, we heard cracking of the walls and I thought the house was on fire. 

I ran outside to look at the house and nearly fell in a 50 foot cave-in of the road. The ground under the house was pulled toward the cave-in and the house fell 9 feet. None of the doors and

windows would close or open properly. What an experience. At that point it was decided that we should move. 

Signs were placed along the road for several miles which read "Beware of Sinks". The house used to be even with the road in front of the house and today it is about 10 to 12 feet lower than the road.

Daniel was elected as a trustee of Ocean School, District #18 on June 22, 1907. He was a member of the George's Creek Valley Lodge of Masons at Lonaconing MD.

Picture of the day from my archive:

Mom and Dad at a function for one of his executive postions, ca. early 1960s 

Me, Easter in front of our house at 15111, 1950-something.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2012/02/funny-story-about-that-sign.html