Kaymoor: Coal Mining Methods at Kaymoor

 

The most common coal mining method in this area in the early 20th century was hand cutting and loading. Using pickaxes, a small team of men would create an undercut in a coal seam to create a shelf of coal. This was a very labor-intensive process and would require several hours of laying on your side. “The object of undercutting or shearing is to expose two faces of the mass of the coal to be brought down, and, as coal generally tends to break along vertical planes, to permit the explosive to exert a wedging effect, rather than to shear or tear off the mass” (Munroe and Hall 1909: 41). Making an undercut along the bottom of the coal face gave the coal somewhere to fall once the explosive charges detonated. There are two ways of applying this method, shearing and undercutting. Occasionally, where the coal is hard to shoot down, both shearing and undercutting are done, so that a “less amount of explosive is needed; in fact, in some places none is required, as the coal can be wedged down” (Munroe and Hall 1919: 37).

 

Illustration of Harrison Mining Machine 1882

Kaymoor was one of the first mining towns in the New River Gorge to adopt the new technology of Harrison Compressed Air Mining Machines. These were first patented in 1877 and feature a “reciprocating drill or pick … operated by a piston worked by compressed air or steam” (Harrison 1887:1).
These machines would create the undercut of a coal seam and would save miners many hours of difficult labor. The Harrison Mining Machines had been replaced by short wall cutting machines by 1935 (Rhinehart 1935). The exact brand of these machines is not mentioned, but they generally have the appearance of a sideways blade which moved horizontally to cut an undercut.

 

Diagram showing sizes of blasting powder from A Primer on Explosives for Coal Miners 1909

Regardless of how the undercut was made, holes would then be drilled into the face of coal with a large auger and explosive charges inserted. Charges would have been made with a form of mining powder until at least 1908. Mining powder was not pure black powder, but was a mix of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate, also known as saltpeter. Many companies, such as DuPont, manufactured various forms of powder with multiple grain sizes. Smaller grain sizes were used to blast hard rock, while larger grain sizes were better suited for softer rocks, such as coal. The coarser grains allowed the coal to break from the face in larger chunks (Twitty 2009: 3). Large grains produced a slower explosion because they offered less overall surface area. To denote grain sizes, powder manufacturers used a scale with FFFFFF as the finest, F as medium-small, C as medium-large, and CCC as the coarsest. According to a 1899 King’s Powder Co. ad, sizes FFF, FF, and F were commonly used for coal mining.

According to a 1922 DuPont explosives catalogue, “Magazines for blasting powder or sporting powders should be fire-proof and weather-proof. Tests have indicated that ventilation is not necessary in such magazines and that its elimination is a benefit in preventing sweating of the metal kegs. (La Motte 1922:19).

 

Dynamite, a form of explosive that contains nitroglycerine, was first created by Alfred Nobel in 1867. This discovery happened before the first mines came to the New River Gorge in the 1870s, but the original form of dynamite was not safe to use inside of a coal mine. Early forms of dynamite were not only extremely volatile, but they were too powerful to remove the soft coal from the mine wall.

The high number of mine explosions before 1907 caused the United States Geological Survey to begin testing forms of explosives in a simulated coal mine in 1908. Brands of explosives that passed all test requirements were labelled as permissible explosives. These were “so made as to modify very greatly the shattering effect upon explosion, while at the same time the volumes of gases produced are relatively cool” Munroe and Hall 1909: 27). As a result, the flames produced are short and not lasting, and coal is thrown without being powdered, when the proper charge of such an explosive is used and this charge is properly placed. These explosives are designed to take the place of black blasting powder, which has been found to be unsuited for use in coal mines where dangerous gas or inflammable dust is present, because of the great mass of flame which it produces and the long time that this flame lasts, and because of the quantity of poisonous smoke and noxious gases which it gives out when exploded (Munroe and Hall 1909: 25).

The small blast would remove the coal from the face, and it would then be shoveled into empty coal cars. Each car could hold about 3 ½ tons of coal. These seams are not always pure coal, and impurities such as slate would be loaded into a separate coal car to dumped outside of the mine in the slate dump. West Virginia coal miners typically call this rock slate, but it is actually shale. Mules or horses, known as “pit ponies” would pull these coal cars in the early years of mining. Electric locomotives, simply known as motors, later replaced the mules. These electric locomotives were connected to a catenary system like a trolley car. An arm on the motor would connect to the wire on the ceiling of the mine. Kaymoor used Goodman, Jeffrey, and Westinghouse motors. The smaller six-ton motors were called “gatherin’ motors” and were used at the face to move around empty coal cars and pull loaded cars towards the entrance. Thirteen ton mainline motors could haul 28 to 30 cars per trip with one of these larger engines.

Like many other coal mines in the area, Kaymoor used a room and pillar system to create the passageways to extract coal. These were cut in a grid like system, and new pieces of track would be laid for the motors and coal cars. As the mine progressed deeper into the mountain the old side passageways would be blocked off with “curtain” and old track lines would sometimes be removed to relay them in the new area. Curtains in a coal mine are pieces of canvas material hung across passageways to direct airflow to other areas. Large fans are used create the airflow, and smaller “punch outs” are used to bring more air in. Many fans worked to create a chimney affect and the curtain would be similar to closing a door into a room to block the airflow.

Coal was loaded into waiting coal cars using shovels until the late 1940s, when one duck bill conveyor system was added. This duck bill conveyor system was a conveyor with a duck bill shaped front that would slide directly under the coal that had been removed from the face with a mining machine. A shaker would send the coal down the line onto a waiting conveyor system and directly into coal cars to be taken out of the mine. A different form of conveyor system is still used in West Virginia coal mines today.

This belt system still required men to shovel some coal, but they would no longer need to mark each car they loaded with a pit check. There was no way to know how much coal someone would move individually with this system, so miners were paid by the day instead of by the ton.

 

Kaymoor Headhouse

After the coal was loaded into cars and sent out of the mine it would be sent to the headhouse. The headhouse of a mine was one of the most important buildings. Loaded coal cars would come out of the mine and come to the wooden headhouse to be dumped. A dock boss would inspect the cars for slate (shale) or other types of rock almost immediately after it left the mine. If there were too many non-coal inclusions, the miner who claimed the car would lose out on that car’s pay. The car would then enter the headhouse, and the weighboss or checkweighman would remove the tag from the car, weigh it, and credit the miner with the weight. The car would then be dumped into a chute that fed into a conveyor.

 

Kaymoor #1 East Side Monitor Trestle 1920

The conveyor would push coal into the main storage bin where it would be held temporarily before being sent to the tipple at the Kaymoor Bottom. The 1,000 foot journey to the tipple happened in a monitor car. The Monitor car system at Kaymoor would propel one full car down the side of the mountain and pull an empty car back to the headhouse. This gravity fed system worked to propel the 8 ton cars by a wire cable attached to a steel drum at the headhouse. This system could send 30 cars per hour up and down the mountain. The conveyor system to transport coal down the mountain was also made of wood until the 1920s. It was then replaced with a monitor system that used gravity to propel two coal cars up and down the mountain.

The Kaymoor Tipple is now laying on its side, but at one time this imposing structure would have held the facilities to sort coal and load it onto railroad cars. The new version of the tipple was built in 1927 by the Linkbuilt Company from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Burgess 1980).

 

Kaymoor coal separating screens

Once it arrived at the bottom, coal would be fed into a 100 ton storage bin and sent into the tipple by a reciprocating feeder. Coal would be separated from any remaining impurities by passing over a series of screens. A team of men called the “boney pickers” would pick out any rocks missed by the dock boss at the headhouse. These pickers were often considered the “lazy men” of the mine, and this was one of the lowest-paid jobs. The smallest sizes of coal would pass through 5/8” screens and would go into a slack storage bin. From there, slack would have been sent to the coke ovens until 1933. Kaymoor, like many of the other communities in the New River Gorge, stopped producing their own coke as steel factories began getting their own industrial sized coke ovens. The coke ovens at Kaymoor served as a refuse dump after being closed.

Larger pieces of coal would pass over more screens. Most pieces would pass through a 3 ¾” screen and would pass into the wash room. The largest sizes of coal would not pass through a screen smaller than 3 ¾” and would be sent to loading booms and waiting train cars.

 

Kaymoor coal agitators

The Simon-Carves cleaning system in the washroom would use an air piston agitator and specific gravity to separate coal from impurities like slate or other rock. The specific gravity of rock is about 140 pounds per cubic foot, but the coal from the Sewell seam mined at Kaymoor was about 80 pounds per cubic foot. The agitators would keep the water moving and this would cause the rocks or slate to sink to the bottom of the wash bins and allow the coal to stay floating on the top. (Burgess 1980).

 

Kaymoor slack bin

The remaining coal would then be taken by conveyor to another set of sizing screens where it would be separated into ¼ to 3/8” pea, 3/8” to 1 ¾”nut, 1 ¼” to 3” stove, or 3” to 3 ¾” egg coal bins. Nut coal was about the size of a chestnut or golf ball and would be used for cook stoves. It would pass through a 1¼-inch mesh. Egg coal is about the size of a chicken egg and would pass through a 2 ½ inch mesh. Slack coal (in this area) is anything smaller than egg coal. This would have typically been used to produce coke. (Spencer Standard Heater). The largest sizes of coal would have been sent to industrial customers.

Most of the coal mined at Kaymoor was sent to the Coke Ovens while the town was owned by the Lowmoor Iron Company. New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company did not need coke to make steel, so they used an agent to sell coal to customers across the country. According to long-time employee Virgil Burgess, the primary sales agent for coal going east was the Cabell Coal Company in Covington, Virginia. The largest customer during the late 1930s and 1940s was the Western Virginia Pulp and Paper Company in Covington, Virginia with special orders for large lump coal (Burgess 1980). Other customers also purchased Kaymoor coal from the Cabell Coal Company and would have used it to heat homes or cook stoves.

 

New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company did not upgrade all of the working faces to include duck bill conveyor systems, as the General Manager believed hand loading would always be the way forward. This proved to be the undoing of Kaymoor. Continuous mining machines were introduced into coal mines in this area in the late 1940s and are still used today. These machines use a large rotating drum with tungsten drill bits to remove coal from the face and load the coal directly into a conveyor system to be taken out of the mine. Unlike other mines in this area, Kaymoor never adopted this new technology. The Kaymoor mine “got so far behind they would have had to spend millions of dollars to catch up buying equipment” (Burgess 1980). A decision was made to change the company from a mine operator into a leasing company. Residents were moved out of Kaymoor Bottom in 1955, and New River and Pocahontas Consolidated Coal Company ceased operations at the Kaymoor mine in 1963. The Barbara Gale Coal Company, a small local venture, was brought in to remove the last extractable coal in the Kaymoor mine and completed this in 1965. The Barbara Gale Coal Company used the same hand loading methods previously used in Kaymoor.