The Casaletto Brothers

The Casaletto brothers immigrated from Fiano, Italy, to America to work in the Weir-Pittsburg coal fields in the early 1900s.

The oldest, Defendente, left home at 22 and traveled to La Harve, France, where he booked passage on the La Lorraine, a French steamship built in 1899. On the voyage with him was another resident of Fiano, 18-year-old Secondo Colombatto whose father was already in Kansas working in the coal mine at Stone City. They arrived at Ellis Island Port of New York on March 5, 1905.

Ellis Island records show that Secondo declared $29 and passed customs immediately because he had the address of his father as a final destination. Defendente, who declared $30, was detained until the following day when arrangements could be made for him to travel with Secondo. Defendente declared his destination to be Cherokee, Kan.

Defendente, or Dave as he would be called in America, went to work in the mines and was soon joined by his younger brother, Guiseppe. Guiseppe, or Joseph, traveled to Genoa, Italy, to board a ship for America. He arrived in New York on or about July 24, 1906, when he was 20 years old. He bought a basket of fruit and set out on a train for southeast Kansas. A paper was pinned to his clothes listing his final destination as Cherokee. Once he arrived, he joined his brother Dave working the mines in the south end or the southern part of the Weir-Pittsburg coal field near Cherokee. The work was hard, dirty and dangerous. They worked there the next four years.

The mines were idle a lot and the miners went on strike at times, so it was hard to make a good living. The two Casaletto brothers, being bachelors and not ready to settle down, rode the Santa Fe 600 miles to a coal field at Trinidad, Colo., in 1910. Not long after, the youngest Casaletto brother, Tommaso, age 23, made the trip to America. Like Defendente, he traveled first to France where he sailed on the same ship as his older brother, arriving at Ellis Island on New Year’s Eve, 1910. He listed Trinidad as his final destination.

The brothers soon discovered that Trinidad wasn’t for them and headed back to Kansas. Not long after, Dave moved north to work in the coal mines around Benald, Ill. He married, had four children and continued to work as a coal miner for many years. He died at the age of 96 and is buried in Benald.

Joe and Tom lived in the area around Franklin and Arma and continued to work in the mines. Records show that Tom was listed as injured in a fall on July 21, 1915, in mine No. 15 of the Western Coal Mining Co. northeast of Franklin and south of Arma. Joe was listed as being on a pit committee to investigate a death at the same mine.

About 1919, Tom decided to return to the area around Fiano, Venaria and Torino – all in northern Italy in the beautiful area close to Italian Riviera near the Mediterranean Sea. He married, raised four children, died and was buried there.

Joe continued to work in the mines until 1920. In the times the mines were idle, he worked in the cement masonry trade in which he had apprenticed in Italy. (As a young boy Joe fell out of a tree and broke his upper arm. It was a bad break that the doctor patched up as best he could, but it left his right arm shorter than his left giving him the nickname of “Short-Arm Joe.” He told the story of his arm hurting so badly at night that he couldn’t sleep and would go out and lay by the side of small canal and put his arm in the cool mountain water to ease the pain.)

The town of Arma incorporated in 1909, and a building boom ensued that called for concrete sidewalks, culverts, and new buildings. Joe contracted pouring cement sidewalks and made block and culvert tile mixing the chat, sand and cement by hand before putting them out to dry.

Soon Joe was too busy with masonry and cement contracting to work in the mines. In the early 1920s you had to have a lumberyard to buy cement in car loads on the railroads, so with $10,500 he had saved over the years, he incorporated his business as the Inter-Urban Lumber, Tile and Cement Co. Joe went on to pour sidewalks, make block and build show houses in Arma and Englevale as well as some of the masonry buildings in Arma. In 1933 he added a large hardware store. One of the first to employ women as clerks, Joe hired young women who could speak the various languages that the immigrant miners spoke.

Joe was married to Alice Rons Wayenberg at Girard in 1924. Alice had a son named Arthur whose coal miner father, Joe Wayenberg, died young. Alice and Joe had one son, Louis Lavern, born in 1927. Arthur and Louis (known as “Cas” in Arma and the surrounding area) took over management of the store in 1947. Arthur died in the 1960s. Cas changed the store’s name to True Value Home Center when he moved it to North Broadway in Pittsburg in 1972, where he ran it until 1999.

Guiseppe “Joe” Casaletto died in 1957 at the age of 71 and is buried in Mt. Olive Cemetery. His hard work and vision were significant in the founding and growth not only of Arma, Franklin and Englevale, but many other southeast Kansas communities.

The following brief mining history of her grandfather and father was submitted by Joyce Sanders to Miners’ Memorial.

Guiseppe (Joseph) Mariucci left his homeland of Genoa, Italy in the late 1800s to begin what was one of three trips across the Atlantic Ocean, working as a cabin boy in order to earn passage money for his young family. In May 1898, leaving the port of Le Havre, France by steamship, they headed for America. They landed at Ellis Island in New York with many others who were striving for a new beginning.

Guiseppe, his wife Maria, along with their sons, Domenic age ten, and Elizo (John), age three, traveled from New York to Iron Mountain, Mich. At the turn of the century, Iron Mountain is where many Italian immigrants came to work in the iron mines.

Maria, a very enterprising woman, opened a boarding house to help supplement the family income. In June 1900, Luigi (Louis) was born. He was fondly known as GeGe by his friends.

As work began to dwindle, miners were given the opportunity to move to other places. At the age of three, GeGe, along with his family and other miners and their families, began their trek to the state of Kansas. Loaded into cattle cars, they traveled by train to the small town of Frontenac where they settled for the next several years. It was here that a sister, Anna, was born. Later, when new mines opened in surrounding towns, the family moved again to settle in what was known as North Radley.

At the age of 13, GeGe was given the choice of continuing school or working in the mines. He chose the mines where his father continue to work also. Dad was small in stature; he worked on his knees in the mines. During a cave-in at one of the mines, he was able to crawl through the small hole to safety before rescuers arrived.

As the years passed, life was good for the Mariucci family. They were the first people in the town of Radley to own a car. They owned another boarding house, a movie theater, a dance hall and a barber shop. The family also brought wild horses down from Wyoming and Colorado, which they broke and sold. Music was also an important part of their family life. Each child played several musical instruments and formed a band. They played throughout the area and at the family-owned dance hall. My dad, GeGe, was an accomplished drummer.

In June 1920, Dad married our mother Emma Peradotto. They raised five children. They are Joe, Wilma, Gloria, Joyce, and Connie, along with a granddaughter Barbara. GeGe continued to work in the mines until they played out in the mid-1930s. From then on, he supported his family through odd jobs until the early 1940s. He earned enough money to buy a farm on the old airport road in Pittsburg. He worked as a plumber’s helper, a common laborer, in defense work, and as a farmer.

Life on the farm was ideal for raising a family. They raised chickens, hogs, and cattle. Most of the livestock were used for the family’s needs. The activity of butchering, smoking the meat and making the sausage kept them busy. A lot of farm land was rented out to others but Dad kept a large space for the family garden. It was tended with loving care and produced enough to not only feed his family, but others.

Italians are known for their love of good wine and from the basement of our family home, came many a batch. Persimmon, cherry and blackberry were among my favorites. Homemade bread and jam was served on the table along with fresh milk and eggs. If you happened by unexpectedly, the Mariucci door was always open and you were greeted with a warm welcome and plenty to eat.

Margaret Martin Dollar submitted her father’s name and some of the following information to Miners’ Memorial. Donna Taylor Beasley, daughter of Evelyn Martin Taylor and granddaughter of miner Michael Martin, Sr. wrote most of the information provided below.

Michael (Mike) Martin was born on Feb. 24, 1887 in Hazelton, Penn. He was the son of what were then Austrian-Hungarian immigrants. This land is now considered part of the Czech Republic. He married Margaret Osterfelt. Their children are Michael Jr. (deceased), Margaret (Dollar), Dorothy (Beck), Edward G. (he died in 1943 in India during W. W. II), Virginia (Taylor), Alfred, Evelyn (Taylor) and Catherine (McClure) Martin.

In 1898, at the age of 11, Grandpa became a part-time coal miner. In those days, children were only required to attend school for sixty days a year, or the equivalent of three months, after which time they were permitted to help their fathers in the mines. In order to work in the mines, a child had to be twelve years old. My great grandparents needed my grandfather to work in the mine so they gave his birth date as 1886. Actually he was born in 1887, but the Records Office in Pennsylvania …had burned down, so there was no official record.

When a son worked in the mines with his father, he would receive half the wages of his father for half the amount of work. This is what my grandfather referred to as a “turn and a half”. When a child reached the age of fourteen, he could quit school and begin working full time in the mines. So, at the age of 14 (really 13) my grandfather went to work “full time” in the mine. My great-grandfather loaded six cars of coal in ten hours. He received one dollar and sixty cents per day—my grandfather received seventy-five cents per day.

In 1906, labor prices went up and Grandpa became a “tonnage” worker. This meant he received $.60 for every ton loaded. One car equaled approximately one ton. In different states the weight of a ton differed; in Kansas one ton might consist of two-thousand pounds while in Montana it was two-thousand, 400 pounds. Mining was not steady work. There was always more work in the winter than in the summer because of the need for fuel for heating purposes. Whenever work was slow, Grandpa would move on to a place where work was available. He mined in Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Missouri, Washington, and Montana.

While working in Black Diamond, Washington, he experienced a mine explosion, which trapped 17 men. This mine was 2.400 feet deep, declining at a 67 degree angle. It was impossible to reach many of the men, so the mine was sealed and a plaque was engraved with each man’s name on it.

In another mine disaster Grandpa witnessed in Kansas, my great uncle Joe Osterfelt was killed. He was loading a coal car onto the elevator. When the elevator began going up, Uncle Joe was crushed between the elevator cage and the mine shaft.

My grandfather claims to have done almost every job required of a miner. He even worked as a “trapper”, opening doors for the mules. He told me that once a mule was taken into a mine, it was never brought out again.

Grandpa considered “shooting” the most dangerous job of a miner. For this reason, it was the highest paid position. Two men would go into the mine, after all the other men were out, to light fuses to prepare the mine for the next day’s work. Black powder was used for this instead of dynamite because dynamite caused too much waste of the coal. Many men were killed completing this job. Grandpa said he tried it once or twice until his mother found out and put a stop to it.

In Grandpa’s mining days, electric lamps had not been invented. Instead, they used oil or carbide lamps. These were quite dangerous, since an open flame lighted them. Later . . . battery operated lamps came into use.

The most money Grandpa can ever remember making was during World War I when there was a great demand for coal. At this time, he made up to $7.50 per day. This he said was “good money”.

Grandpa worked in the coal mines for 36 years. In 1936 he became township trustee and assessor for Crawford County. He held this position until World War II broke out when he went to work for a war plant assembling ammunition. In 1943, he moved with his wife and eight children to California, where he went to work for another government plant. In 1957, he retired at the age of 72.

He worked in Mine No.18 located near Englevale. He also worked in mines around Frontenac and Pittsburg.

He died in May 1968.

The following history of miners Martin (Ab) Absolem Clark and Albert (Al) Weaver was submitted to Miners’ Memorial by great nephew James E. (Jay) and his wife Gala Clark.

My great grandfather William Clark was born in 1831 in Kentucky. He and his second wife Ellen moved first to Illinois and then to Kentucky, and finally settled in the Pittsburg area in about 1880, at the time of the birth of their seventh child. Six of the boys worked in the coal mines despite the dangers and eventual loss of their eldest brother, Martin, to a mining accident.

Martin (Ab) Absolem Clark was born in June 1871 in Coles County, Illinois. He married Nancy Ellen Harrison on Feb. 16, 1898 in Girard. Their children are William, Richard, Arthur M. and Floyd Clark.

Martin went to work at the new Western Coal and Mining Company in Mine No. 15 located in Franklin on Nov. 20, 1908. The mine was 210 feet deep. On Nov. 13, just one week before Ab went to work in Mine No. 15, an explosion occurred that badly burned two men, one of whom died a few days later. Since the spring of that year, five shot firers met death in this mine. According to an inspector’s report, it was the driest mine in the district. A recommendation had been made to keep the mine sprinkled with water.

On Nov. 30, 1908, just ten days after taking employment in Mine No. 15, Ab and another shot firer, George Barton age 25, had been at work about two hours when an explosion was heard above ground at 6:20 p.m. Black smoke issued from the shaft.

The explosion damaged the cages and blew the stairs out of the escapement shaft. A rope was swung over the shaft making a loop to lower rescuers and the inspector into the mine.

The two shot firers were found at 10 p.m. in the second north on the east side at the mouth of room five. It was determined that both men had inhaled the flames and were killed instantly.

The inspector found extensive wreckage of timber and debris in the mine. However, the roads had been sprinkled and were still damp. A test made with a safety lamp showed no signs of gas. The coal in room seven had blown out in big chunks, indicating there had not been a great excess of powder used in this shot. The shot firers had only been at work in the mine for two hours and had fired only two entries showing that they were not firing too rapidly.

The inspector concluded that the company’s steam pipes had not allowed enough warm air into the mine to create the much-needed moisture to avoid an explosion. The little warmth that was reaching the bottom of the mine actually added to the ventilating pressure and caused more cold air to enter the mine. The strong air current of cold air reaching these places where the shots were being fired, in the inspector’s opinion, was certainly a factor in the cause of this explosion.

Several recommendations in the accident report for the future safety of shot firers in Mine No. 15 were as follows: the roadways should be kept sprinkled with water, the air should be heated by steam, only one shot should be fired at a time to give the smoke time to clear away before another shot is fired, there should only be two shots in one place (room), only one room should be turned at a time, and there should be refuge holes for the men to go into for safety when the shots are fired.

After the above recommendations were made, the company put in the refuge or safety holes and made other improvements. There were no more explosions in this mine during the winter of 1908.

Ab Clark left a widow and four children. He is buried in the old Hobson section of the Pittsburg Highland Cemetery. George Barton left a young widow. Both men were members of the United Mine Workers of America.

In 1910, Albert (Al) Weaver Clark, who was born on Oct. 15, 1880 in Crawford County, married his late brother’s wife, Nancy Ellen Harrison. He cared for his brother’s four surviving children. Three more children were added to the family of Al and Nancy Clark. They are Clifford, Beulah, and Alvin.

He and his brothers, Charles Newton, George W. Francis (Frank), Marion, and Enoch Benton Clark, continued to mine coal in southeast Kansas.

Al died on June 17, 1966 and was buried in the Crocker Cemetery in Cherokee County. Nancy died in 1965.

The following two accounts were submitted to Miners’ Memorial by grandson William R. (Bill) Godina, and daughter Flora Tomasi Scherff, respectively.

Blasius (Blas) Godina was born on January 31, 1864 in Yugoslavia. He married Julia Potocnik who was born in Austria.

Four children were born to my grandparents in Austria. In the mid-1890s, they moved to Germany looking for work. Another child was born in Germany.

Blas and his son Frank (my dad) came to America in 1902 aboard the German ship Frederick der Grosse (Frederick the Great). They arrived in New York on November 18, 1902, four days before my dad’s fourteenth birthday. They came to Mulberry, Kansas where Blas went to work in a coal mine.

Frank went to school for six months. He had to be fourteen and a half years old before he was allowed to work in the mine! At that age, Dad became a miner, too. No family members had been miners in Europe.

Blas and Frank had saved enough money by 1903 to bring Grandma and the other four children from Germany. Blas and Julia had two more children born in the United States.

Due to poor safety laws and lack of care by mine owners prior to 1920, some men, including my grandfather and dad, organized the miners in southeast Kansas to become part of the United Mine Workers of America. The mining companies strongly resisted and hired “thugs” and “strong arm” protectors. There was violence between these men and the miners. There were people killed and injured on both sides.

Eventually the Union won the right to organize, and safer mining practices were beginning to take place. The pay to miners gradually improved, too.

In 1924, Blas and Julia, along with their youngest children moved to Montana. Blas died in 1928 of asthma, according to the doctor’s diagnosis, but it more likely was black lung, or miner’s consumption, as it was sometimes called.

Pietro (Pete) Tomasi was born on September 25, 1881 in Baselga de Pine, Trento, Italy. He came to the United States when he was about seventeen years old. He worked in the coal mines in Central City and Gunnison, Colorado. On October 31, 1904 he became a United States citizen while in Colorado.

When he moved to Novinger, Missouri, he met Marie Magdelana Magnetti (born December 10, 1893). They were married on Nov. 11, 1910.

Soon after they were married, they moved to the Mulberry, Kansas area. My dad went to work in the coal mines there. My parents had two daughters, Norma Peterson and Flora Scherff.

Mother was one of the marchers in the Amazon Army. I was young and during the days of marching I was quite frightened. [In December 1921 several thousand women marched to protest the use of scabs during the strike of that year and a law which took away the right to strike. For more information refer to the October 3, 2004 edition of Coal Mining Days in The Morning Sun.]

My father was one of those men who always managed to bring home some pie, cookies, or cake from his lunch bucket for his two small daughters. He spent the last years in the mining industry as a blacksmith.

I recall one Thanksgiving he had to work to repair a breakdown. My mother prepared a traditional Thanksgiving dinner and took it to the mine where we all had dinner in our car.

My father worked for the Sheridan Coal Company in Mines No. 3 and 7, as well as for Western Coal Company in Mine No. 20.

The following two accounts were submitted to Miners’ Memorial by Wendell Dean Goll and his wife Marilyn JoAnn Widmier, and daughter Phyllis M. Fry, respectively.

My name is Wendell Dean Goll. I was born on July 12, 1933 in Dawn, Carroll County, Mo.

I went to work for Mackie-Clemens Coal Company in Mine No. 22 in Mulberry, as tipple boss on Feb. 1, 1972. Mine No. 25 southeast of Pittsburg was also in operation.

We would bring the coal from Mine 25 up to Mine 22 by Frisco Railroad so that the coal could be washed. The coal from Mine 22 was dug out by a shovel and a dragline and brought to the tipple by trucks.

We had a hopper that we ran the railroad cars over. Under the hopper was a metal pan conveyor. This conveyor carried the coal to the third floor of the tipple where it would go through a crusher and then drop into a wash box which was operated by water and air.

The water came from a reservoir that was close to the tipple. When the coal went through the wash box it had three discard chutes. One elevator was to separate the rock from the coal, the second elevator had rock and coal mixed together and would drop by conveyor into a hammer mill. The third was for the finer coal which floated to the top. On the second floor of the tipple there was another wash box with two elevators where the coal would go to different conveyors with shaker screens that would size the coal.

It would then be taken outside the tipple by conveyor to the railroad cars to be shipped to the power plants at Asbury and Kansas City, Mo.

The refuge would go on a different conveyor to a holding tank that was hauled off by a refuge truck.

There was also a scale house where we sold custom coal to the public. The coal cars were moved to the scale house by a small locomotive engine called a dinky. We sold three grades of coal: lump, nut and stoker coal.

Anytime there was a break down in the tipple everyone pitched in to get things running again.

We produced about 20,000 tons of coal a day. Because the coal in Kansas has a high sulfur or BTU content, in the 1980s, the government put regulations on the company. This made selling the coal more difficult.

I spent twenty-one years working for Mackie-Clemens Coal Company. I retired in June 1993.

Harold (Dobby) J. Fields was my dad. He was born in Yale in 1895 to B. J. and Georgiana Fields.

His folks had homesteaded in Kansas, coming from Virginia after the Civil War. He was known affectionately as Dobby. He worked in the coal fields of southeast Kansas for over 43 years as a strip miner.

As a very young man, he was working for the Crowe Coal Company when his friend, Rue Fenimore, approached him to help solved a problem with the Chinese pumps at the Scammon Coal Company.

This was the beginning of a friendship with the Fenimore family that lasted the rest of his life.

Although Dad worked for Crowe, he and Rue often worked out problems that arose at the Scammon site.

Dad worked at Crowe until 1917, when he volunteered for the Army.

He returned to Crowe after the War in 1919, as a shovel operator. In June of that year he married Margaret Quinn and moved from Scammon to Pittsburg.

It was shortly after that when he began working for the Litchfield Coal Company at Yale. At that time he was operating the loader.

About 1926 he went to work for the Commercial Fuel Company (Clemens Coal Co.) located on West Fourth Street. Just before they closed he moved to the Mackie-Clemens Coal Company which was located at Foxtown.

He worked there until 1942 as a loader operator. He left the coal business for a few years to work at Jayhawk Ordinance Works, where he stayed for three years. In 1945, Dad once again returned to the coal business, working for Pittsburg & Midway Coal and Mining Company at Hallowell. He worked there as a shovel operator until his retirement.

When I began piecing together the list of companies that Dad worked for, I had to call on my eldest brother, Harold, to fill me in on the details.

Dad would take my brothers, Harold and Joe, with him to visit mining sites and his miner friends around the area, but as a girl I was never allowed on those excursions. Before his retirement, Dad took my younger brother Gene and my husband, Tom, to show them around the shovel.

In those days it was common practice for the mines to work for six months and be shut down the other six.

When he was off, Dad would work at other coal sites on construction.

At the time of his retirement, the shovel he operated had a bucket capacity of thirty-two cubic yards, and was the biggest in the world.

When P & M brought in Big Brutus, it had a bucket capacity of over ninety cubic yard!

Dad died in 1986 at the age of ninety-one.

A mining and family history was submitted to Miners’ Memorial by daughter Ruth Haslam Butler. Betty Butler, Ruth’s daughter-in-law, helped put the information together in story form which has been excerpted below.

Samuel Haslam was the fourth of six children born to John and Elizabeth Haslam on July 30, 1878 in Dronfield, Sheffield, England. Sam quit school in the sixth grade to work in the coal mines with his father to help support the family.

After Sam’s mother died in 1897, he decided to travel to America to see the country and make some money. He planned to return to England after his adventure. It was easy for a young man to find work in America. Sam worked in Chicago for awhile as a bricklayer’s assistant. He moved to San Francisco and then to Colorado where he met his future wife, Ivah Pearl Leatherman. Ivah was from Stafford County in western Kansas. Ivah had traveled by stagecoach to Colorado to be with her sister Goldie Faulk. Goldie and her husband Ed were expecting their second child.

Ivah’s father, Wesley, was a wheat farmer who owned two sections of land. He died when Ivah was fourteen years old. She was the sixth of eleven children.

Sam wrote to Ivah’s mother to ask permission to marry Ivah. She gave her consent. Sam and Ivah went to St. John, Kansas, to meet the family and were married on April 25, 1911. Ivah was eighteen years old, Sam was thirty-three. They moved back to Cokesdale, Colorado where their first child, Elizabeth, was born.

Eventually, the small family decided to try “homesteading” in western Kansas. Land was free to homesteaders if they staked their claim, lived on the land and developed it for five years. They built a dug-out home with a dirt floor, one door and one window. Charlotte Mae was born in that home but she died only eight hours after birth. Homesteading was a difficult life.

Sam heard of coal mines in southeast Kansas, so they moved to Arma where he began working in what may have been Mine No. 9, north of town. They bought two homes and lived in the third house west of the high school on the south side. Frank Edwin was born in 1914 and Ruth Lillie was born in 1916. We were the first boy and girl born in the northeast section of Arma.

Papa sold the two houses and bought seven acres in the southern part of Arma, east of the street car track that ran between Pittsburg and Ft. Scott. My brother, John James was born in 1918 and Samuel Wesley was born in 1919.

Papa provided for his growing family by continuing to work in the coal mines just south of Arma. He also had a big garden, a cow, pigs, chickens and a field for grain. All the kids helped in the garden and with the farming. We had a horse-drawn buggy that the whole family rode in to church every week.

In 1925, Papa purchased an eighty-seven acre farm five miles east of Sheldon, Missouri in Vernon County. He sold several properties to purchase this farm and another one in Bourbon County. He was promised a loan of $1,000 from the purchasers, Home Builders Association. He was going to use the money to start farming and coal mining on the property. The association went bankrupt shortly after that. Papa never saw any of the money.

Several places had been dug into the side of a big hill on the farm. Papa thought that it would be a good way for the boys to learn how to mine coal. He made use of the best of the slope mines. He hired two young men who were brothers to help with the mine. Mr. Zehring, another farmer, was hired to do the planting. All five children were put to work in whatever area they were needed. Papa bought a team of mules and a wagon with a spring seat. When we used it for family transportation, Papa would put boards across the sides of the bed of the wagon to make a seat. In the winter we put straw in the wagon bed for warmth and used blankets to keep warm.

When they had mined enough coal to sell, they would take two wagon loads to Nevada, Missouri. It was an all day trip. Mama drove one wagon and Mr. Zehring drove the other one. We packed a lunch to eat on the way.

The vein of coal on our place was about two feet deep. In the summers, John and Frank helped Papa in the cool mine. Samuel and I pulled weeds and worked in the garden or the field. Pearle helped Mr. Zehring cultivate, plow and plant. I hated to work in the sun and complained to Papa about the unfairness of my situation. He allowed me to trade places with Frank and John. I put on the boys pit clothes and cap with a carbide lamp and went down to work in the mine. My job was to pick up and remove the rocks away from the tracks and to clear out the drainage ditches beside the tracks so the water would run out of the mine.

It was pitch dark and very cold inside the mine. I worked all alone. I did this for two days and I was ready to give my brothers back their job. In the afternoon after work, we were free to play.

The rooms in the mine were very low, too short to stand up. The track tunnels were not very tall either. The men had to work on their knees most of the day. Their pit pants had knee pads. There wasn’t enough room for mules in this slope mine. The men would drill holes in the rock above the vein of coal and another hole in the coal then put powder in each hole. Papa didn’t have a shot fireman so he did that job himself. This blast broke up the rocks and coal for removal. After the blast, the men would shore up the walls and ceiling with boards and poles to keep the rock ceiling from collapsing.

After a year and a half of hard work, the mine and farm were still not productive. We gave up and moved back to Arma. One of the houses Papa sold to the Home Builders Association had unpaid taxes. It was still in Papa’s name, so he paid the taxes and we moved in Thanksgiving weekend in 1927. Papa went to work again in one of the mines in Arma.

Papa wasn’t well; he lost fifty pounds and was hemorrhaging. The strain of the previous two years from losing everything had affected his colon. He wasn’t working much in the mines by the summer of 1928, but he did put in a nice garden. Several doctors, including our family doctor, Dr. Tinder from Girard, told him that he was in the last stages of massive cancer of the lower bowels. They gave him three to six months to live. He was fifty years old. Mama was only twenty-eight years old. She earned as much money as she could and all the children helped in whatever way they could. God supplied our needs so we never went hungry.

We attended church every Sunday, but Papa was so weak he would have to stop to sit on the steps of houses all the way to rest. We could hear the Baptist church people praying for Papa. We were all praying. It all seemed hopeless. After about a year, the hemorrhaging began to subside, he began to gain weight as his body seemed to be processing food normally. His healing was slow, but he lived healthy and strong for a long time after that.

After he regained his health he began working in the mine near the Girard corner. The mines were closing and people were selling their homes. Papa sold our home in Arma. Papa and Mama moved to Pittsburg in 1941 or 42.

The men had to work a specific number of years to qualify for a mining pension. In 1948, Papa and a few other men reopened a dinky mine in Mulberry, Kansas. The necessary paper work had been taken to the miners’ union in Pittsburg and turned in before the deadline. However, the union leaders failed to turn the papers in on time causing all these men to lose their pension. Papa was very disappointed because he had supported the union all the years he worked in the mines.

Papa died of lung cancer (black lung from the coal dust) at the age of eighty-eight.

The following miner’s name was submitted to Miners’ Memorial by daughter Eda R. Hobson. Her brothers Edo (Ed) and James (Jim) Reda provided the information for the story.

Antonio Reda was born on November 15, 1887 in Paterno, Calabria, Italy. At an early age, Pa had heard of the mines in Kansas. He came to the area at the age of 18. He always believed one should be compensated for the work accomplished and that is what attracted him to the mines. Despite the fact that he realized how dangerous this work was, he had no choice, for he neither spoke nor understood English when he arrived in America.

He married Carmella M. Filosa who was born in 1896. Their five children, Judy (Marrazzo), James (Jim), Edo (Ed), Eda (Edie) (Hobson) and Mary (Pones) Reda, are still living. Edo and Eda are twins.

Pa became one of the best miners in the area. Due to the seasonal nature of work in the mines, he bought a small farm in the Cherokee area. Pa kept us well fed and very happy. He always said to give thanks to the Lord and count our blessings. We can truthfully say we never heard him complain. He was a proud man and would never ask for credit. If he didn’t have the cash, he didn’t buy.

There is always more to a job than one realizes. We remember Pa saying that one had to be aware of the dangerous surroundings in a mine because there were no fringe benefits. If a miner was hurt, there was no insurance and no union, so one was never compensated for injuries.

The deep mines in the area were approximately 100-250 feet deep, and the coal veins were two and a half to four feet thick. The average work force was approximately 200 men per mine. Southeast Kansas was known for the best coal in the state. Each mine had its own labor camp (living quarters) and general store. In essence, “you owed your soul to the company store”.

Son Jim Reda, now age 88, said “I went to work in the mines at the age of 18 for three years under the watchful eye of Pa.” He did not want me to work in the mine, however, there was no other work available during the Depression. He told me the first thing a miner needed was coal miner’s trousers; then, a carbide lamp, cap and a lunch pail. The lunch pail was designed to hold approximately one-half gallon drinking water in the bottom and sandwiches in the upper half. The carbide lamp was placed on the front of the miner’s cap so that it would provide light whichever direction the miner turned his head.

The first day I went down into the mine, I was mystified. It was an experience I have never forgotten. If there was a good vein of coal to mine, a person could earn almost $2.50 per day!

An air shaft gave the miners fresh air and was sunk at the same depth as the working mine. The workday was eight hours. Mules were also lowered into the mine to pull the coal cars and rock (slack) to the main shaft cage. Once the workday was over, the miners had to prepare for the following day. This preparation consisted of drilling four holes, one and a half inches in diameter and six feet in length, and packing the holes with black powder and a fuse.

The shot firers would go down and light the fuse which would ignite the powder to loosen the coal and debris for the next day’s loading. The shot firers also “gas tested” the area and marked it with crosses. One cross meant the area was workable and safe, two crosses indicated the area could be worked, but the coal lamp had to be placed at ground level. Three crosses were a signal to stay out of the dangerous area until the ventilation was adequate.

Two mules named Joe and Jack were the pets of all the miners. Jack became a special mule after coming into contact with a high voltage line. It burned off half his tongue and half of one ear. Surprisingly, when the mine closed the mules were still there. They were put up for sale. Pa bought both of them and we used them on the farm. They lived comfortably to a ripe old age.

We are a happy family and most proud of our father who mined coal in the Pittsburg area for 44 years for the Simon Mines No. 7, 42, 50 and 9. He ended his mining career working for the Kruger Coal Company in Cherokee. Pa died at the age of 85 and Ma died at the age of 83.

Our parents loved their new country and were proud to be American citizens.

The following miner’s history and a railroad engineer’s experience and legacy in the days of coal-powered locomotives was submitted to Miners’ Memorial by daughter Joan S. Hamilton and granddaughter Jackie Finley, respectively.

Elza B. Shead was born on April 26, 1896 near Gross, Kansas. He was the son of Ralph and Nancy Krieger Shead. He was one of seven children. He grew up on a farm and worked in and around the coal mines of the Arcadia-Gross area prior to entering the army in 1917. Although the names of the mines in which he worked are not available, he was listed as a miner on his military records. He served in France and elsewhere in Europe in Batteries C & D, 130th Field Artillery during World War I. He was under the command of General John J. Pershing.

After the War, he returned to the Arcadia area and was married to Lydia Duvall. They had two children, Leola and Crystal. He went back to work in the nearby mines. Lydia died and is buried in the Sheffield Cemetery. In the early 1920s he went into partnership with four other men. The five of them owned and operated the Jack Rabbit Mine in Worland, Missouri. Records indicate that in July 1923, they had their coal tested. Other records and checks are also available. They continued to operate this mine until the Great Depression forced its closure.

On May 7, 1923, he married Mary Ann Jenkins, the daughter of John and Estelle Waggoner Jenkins. She was born on January 19, 1909, in Litchfield, Kansas. She was raised in the coal camps of Crawford County. Elza and Mary Ann eventually had ten children: Goldie, Montcella, Velma, Clarence, William, Joan, Barbara, Philip, Jerry and Marilyn. They all graduated from Mulberry High School, with the exception of Marilyn who was in the first graduating class of Northeast High School.

During the time they lived in Worland, a train ran over Elza’s foot. His leg was amputated several inches below the knee. That gave him the nickname “Peggy” for his peg leg, along with “Shorty” because he was only five feet, three inches tall. Later, when he moved to Cockerill in the early 1930s, he got the first of several artificial legs.

He was employed as a truck driver for WPA. During World War II, he was employed at the Army Ammunition Plant in Parsons. He also farmed after the family moved to Curranville in 1936. He was active in the Disabled American Veterans, as well as the American Legion. He died on September 10, 1960. Mary continued to live in Curranville until her death on May 29, 2003. They are both buried in the Old Arcadia Cemetery. With the exception of Goldie, Crystal and Leola, all the children survive at this time.

Jackie Finley writes that her grandfather, Joseph Allen Buckley, loved to talk about his years of piloting a Frisco train from Arcadia through Pittsburg to Cherryvale, Kansas from 1892 to 1923.

In the early days of Pittsburg and the mining industry, the colorful steam engine had a long cow-catcher in front, a big smoke stack, and boilers that were stoked with coal by the fireman. The locomotive pulled two or three passenger cars which were the main form of transportation at that time.

An engineer, like my grandfather, sat on the right side of the cab with one hand on the throttle and the other hand operating the whistle that warned everyone of its location or arrival at the station. He leaned out the window to watch the rails ahead and waved to the people as the train passed. My grandfather told me that sometimes he would have the fireman throw a little coal off the side for people who lived near the track.

In the Pittsburg Headlight account of my grandfather’s death on August 25, 1938, it stated, “Railroading was crude compared to that of today, and an engineer was forced to cope with many unique situations. On one occasion while Mr. Buckley was piloting his engine through Weir, a stray bullet struck him in the neck.”

Then on August 26, the day of my grandfather’s funeral, Brinkerhoff wrote a complimentary editorial about the eighty-five year old pioneer. “Joseph A. Buckley had been piloting railroad locomotives for 43 years when he retired in 1923. He took a throttle back in 1880 when locomotives were frail creations constructed along peculiar lines and without a great deal of speed. For 31 years he pulled the Frisco passenger train between Arcadia and Cherryvale, a train that became know as “Buckley’s special.” Everyone along the route knew the engineer, and had he wanted to run for office he could have carried the towns overwhelmingly.”

Many of these people were the same emigrants from Italy, France, and the Balkan nations who rode the Frisco railroad from Kansas City to southeast Kansas to work in the coal mines.

My grandfather would have been pleased to know that my husband, Norman Finley, would be firing a steam locomotive over some of the same tracks he used earlier. Norman had a run from Pittsburg to Midway on the Frisco Railroad during World War II. Each day at four in the afternoon, a small engine pulled empty cars out and returned with full cars loaded with coal from the area mines. Many nights, about midnight, I listened for a train whistle to blow the familiar “long-long-short-long” tones that meant my husband’s train was returning to Pittsburg. I couldn’t rest until I heard the rattle of his dinner bucket as he came up the walk to our porch.

The mining industry provided jobs for many families in bygone days in the Pittsburg area. It was a remarkable era. I’m glad that my grandfather and husband had a hand in making lives better for those who traveled the rails.

The following history was submitted to Miners’ Memorial by Philip and Sherry Castagno. The story was written by daughters Rosalie Machetta Castagno and Beatrice Machetta Jackson.

John Machetta was born on July 26, 1883 in Monestaro, Italy. He and his bride, Maria Adelaide Demichelis, came to this country from the Piedmont area of northern Italy. They sailed from Le Harve, France, on La Provence, landing at Ellis Island on December 20, 1908. Soon after their arrival and clearing with the immigration service, they departed for Illinois where relatives and their sponsor lived.

After spending a few months in Illinois, where work for miners proved to be limited, they decided to relocate in southeast Kansas. They chose to live in East Mineral where our father began his long years of work in the coal mines in the surrounding area.

His first employment was with the Mackie Clemens Coal Mining Company nearby. Our three brothers, James, Barney, and Charles were born in East Mineral. The eldest brother, James, also worked in the coal mines for a short time. He and our two other brothers are now deceased. In order to be closer to his work, our father moved the family in 1918 to East Chicopee where he went to work for the Hamilton Coal Mining Company.

In his spare time he lent a helping hand in the construction of the public grade school in Chicopee. The construction of the school was completed in the summer of 1922, in time for the fall opening of school.

We remember our father telling us how he made use of a horse and buggy to get to and from the mine each day. During winter storms it would be necessary to use a shield for protection from the wind and blowing snow. He traveled many miles using the rig until the arrival of the automobile.

Our home in Chicopee was located on three large lots, which gave ample room for a garden, fruit trees and a grape arbor. Our father grew a large garden during the season. Our mother canned fruits and vegetables to help feed us during the winter months. They also had cows, raised chickens and hogs. The pigs were butchered and processed into delicious sausage, and other cuts. Lard was made, and further processed into soap.

Butter and cheese were made from the cows’ milk. Excess milk and eggs were sold to neighbors in order to supplement family income.

In the early 1940s our mother was concerned about the hard labor involved in working as a coal miner, as well as the danger involved in working underground. She encouraged our father to change his type of employment. There were many construction jobs available in the area because World War II had just begun.

He was able to find work as a laborer at the Jayhawk Works of the Army Ammunition Plant near Crestline. He worked there a couple of years when a friend, who was part owner in a coal mine near Cherokee, asked him to return to work in the Kruger Mine. His reputation of being a hard and safe worker and his love for mining overcame his concern for hard work and danger.

Even though our parents didn’t have many material possessions, they showed a wealth of compassion toward their neighbors. They were always ready to help when needed. One of their neighbors happened to be a blind couple; they made sure this couple had the necessities to survive. Mother prepared food at other times for neighbors who were ill. They assisted another family who had difficulty with the English language. Help with the English language was especially needed when the wife was planning her husband’s funeral. Our father could speak three languages fluently—English, Italian, and French. Mother spoke English, Italian and some French.

We were very fortunate that our father never suffered any serious injuries or respiratory ailments while working in the mines. He was a devoted United Mine Workers of America member.

In 1939, he and mother became United States citizens. To receive their citizenship papers, they had to recite the Preamble of the Constitution. Upon receiving their citizenship, they never failed to vote in both the primary and general elections. Their names appear on the Immigrant Wall at Ellis Island. Father’s name is etched on one of the Miners Memorial monuments in Immigrant Park.

In 1963, our mother passed away at the age of seventy-three. It wasn’t until 1971, that our father passed away at the age of eighty-eight. They lived long enough to see the birth of nineteen grandchildren and several great grandchildren. We love them with all of our hearts and to this day we miss them very much.