A recent donation to the Bridgeville Area Historical Society is a 1916 Pennsylvania Department of Mines brochure entitled “Index of the Bituminous Coal Region”. Included in it is a map locating significant coal mines, accompanied by a table listing their names. This prompted me to do some research on the mines in the Bridgeville area. This gave me a list of twelve mines; further research turned up four more on the Pennsylvania Mine Map Atlas. An additional source was the 1891 Census Bulletin entitled “Mines and Mining – Bituminous Coal in Pennsylvania”; it added four more. Some of these are quite familiar; others are merely names.
All these mines existed because of the world-famous Pittsburgh Coal Seam. It was formed during the Carboniferous period of the Paleozoic Era, between 300 and 350 million years ago, from alluvial deposition of organic matter from a lush tropical rainforest. About 125 miles wide by 250 miles long, it extends from Mount Washington in Pittsburgh all the way to Charleston, West Virginia. Its thickness varies significantly, perhaps averaging six feet overall with a maximum of ten feet.
An important source of information relative to it is the Burgettstown-Carnegie folio of the 1911 United States Geological survey “Geologic Atlas of the United States”. Geologically the Pittsburgh Seam is a massive stratum with its main axis in a north-northeast/south-southwest orientation, folded transversely. The folds produce a series of parallel ridges (anticlines) and valleys (synclines) paralleling the main axis. Of special interest to us is the Nineveh Syncline which roughly follows the Chartiers Valley. Its axis rises about 250 feet from Morganza to Pittsburgh (about fourteen miles), a slope of about eighteen feet per mile. Transversely the anticlines are at elevations about 150 feet higher than the syncline and about four miles away.
The best way to visualize its complicated topography is to compare it to a piece of paper that you have crumpled into a ball and then attempted to smooth out. It is filled with random crinkles in every direction. In addition to the Nineveh Syncline, another major local feature is the Panhandle Trench, a steep fold at right angles to Nineveh, roughly paralleling Thoms Run and Painters Run. Consequently the seam is sloping in different directions in different locations. In general, it is close to the ground surface only along Chartiers Creek, as is evidenced by the proliferation of strip mines along it.
This week’s column will focus on the “Bridgeville Mine”. Its story begins with Anthony J. Schulte. Born in Prussia in 1837, he and his family came to this country when he was nine years old. The ship bearing them was wrecked in a storm off Galveston, Texas; his father was drowned and all their household goods lost. Somehow his family found its way to Pittsburgh where his mother and four fatherless children settled in Duquesne. He immediately went to work in a coal mine. By 1869 he had advanced to Superintendent of the Fort Pitt mine.
In 1877 Mr. Schulte opened the Bower Hill Mine at the foot of Vanadium Road; two years later he came to Bridgeville to open a new mine here. One of his first employees was a young man named Casper P. Mayer. Mayer arrived in Bridgeville “with a surveyor’s transit on his shoulder and his pockets empty”. A year later he was superintendent of the Schulte Mine, as well as being Mr. Schulte’s son-in-law, having married his daughter, Philomena.
The Bridgeville mine featured prominently in the news on January 28, 1894, when a mob of rioting miners burned Schulte’s tipple. He sued the county for $5,320 for their failure to protect his property; the judge awarded him $1,756. In 1896 Mr. Schulte died of asthma, after selling his mine to George and John Hosack for $40,000. It included mineral rights to about 250 acres. They then purchased mineral rights for 500 acres of Lesnett property for $35,000 and renamed the company the Bridgeville Coal Company. In 1899 it became part of a massive new combine backed by Andrew Mellon, Henry Oliver, and Henry Clay Frick, the Pittsburgh Coal Company.
Another source of information on local mines is a WPA project documenting the coal industry. Thanks to it, we have a map of the Bridgeville mine. It fed a tipple on the Pennsylvania Railroad, roughly where the Volunteer Fire Department building is today. From the tipple, a mine railroad ran through Cook’s Hill, “daylighted” for a few hundred feet between Bower Hill Road and Mill Street, entered Fryer’s Hill, and exited on McLaughlin Run Road before reaching the mine portal on the other side. According to this map significant areas under both Cook’s and Fryer’s Hills were mined out, apparently as part of the original Bridgeville Mine.
The WPA map shows the Pittsburgh Coal Company Bridgeville mine being bounded on the north by McLaughlin Run and on the west by Elm Street. It extended about two miles to the east southeast (to St. Clair Country Club) and averaged about a mile and a quarter wide. The portion of the Pittsburgh Seam under the bulk of Bridgeville west (downhill) of Elm Street apparently was too close to the surface to mine without disrupting existing houses. During its (35 years) existence this mine produced over 10,000,000 tons of coal.
This mine was a major part of Bridgeville’s evolution and existence for over fifty years. In contrast with many other nearby mines with their “coalpatch” company houses and stores, its workers lived in an established community with access to a wide variety of stores. In future columns we will discuss other mines in the neighborhood.