Jul 28, 2002 By Steve Ostrosky 2 min read

Evelyn Hovanec, 64, founder of the Coal and Coke Heritage Center at Penn State Fayette Campus, said her family’s mining heritage went back to the early 1900s, when hundreds were killed each year in Pennsylvania mines. “These are risks that miners have been running for over 100 years in Pennsylvania,” Hovanec said. “It’s an interesting, and very tragic, kind of occupation. The families know that.”

In 1907 in Westmoreland County, explosions killed 239 miners in the Darr Mine and 34 in the Naomi Mine within days of each other, Hovanec said. A 1928 explosion killed 195 workers in the Mather Mine in Greene County.

“My grandfather was killed in that Mather Mine explosion, so I heard that story from my mother,” she said. “All the women and children were there, waiting and waiting and waiting. Somebody came and gave them food. There were probably security guards – my mother called them troops – to keep the people away from the shaft.”

Such memories haunt the region. The Somerset mine made Pam Seighman think of her grandfather, Joe Yurick, nicknamed “Camel Joe” for his hunched posture from a life working in low coal seams.

Seighman, 50, coordinator of the Coal and Coke center, once asked her grandmother why her grandfather was always bent over.

“My grandmother said that was because he worked in a 5-foot coal mine,” she said. “He made his living, I’m sure very proudly, by being a coal miner. But like many of the men, he didn’t want his sons to follow in his footsteps.”

Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this report.