Remembering the Mather Mine explosion
At 4:07 p.m., May 19, 1928, the whistle blew at Mather Mine, alerting people of an emergency.
The explosion that caused it, and the loss of life that followed over the coming days, continues to be remembered.
Out of 211 miners underground during the explosion, 195 were killed. It still stands as the second-highest death toll in Pennsylvania mining disasters, trailing only the Darr Mine disaster that killed 209 people in Westmoreland County, and the seventh-highest nationwide.
Center for Coalfield Justice community organizer Tonya Yoders and events coordinator Sarah Sweeney, both Greene County natives, said it was something people in the county just grew up knowing about.
“We both have miners in our family, a few generations back, just a lot of labor workers in our families, and they would just talk about it and how much it impacted the area,” Yoders said.
The organization is holding an event from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, May 18. “Remembering Mather: How Mining Shaped Greene County” will mark the anniversary of the fatal explosion and celebrate the area’s mining history.
The gathering is being held at the Liar’s Den gazebo in Mather, about where families had gathered as close to the mine shaft entrance as allowed to wait for news of their loved ones,
as recounted in the area news coverage collected and republished by Tony Bubka in “The Mather Mine Disaster.”
The explosion happened during the changeover from day to night shift. Nick Shrako, a night shift miner, recalled he had just entered the mine for his shift when the explosion happened.
“I was knocked down, and I was trying to regain my feet when a blast of hot, black smoke swept out the tunnel,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shortly after the incident. “I lost my way and wandered back into the mine for a quarter of a mile, staggering along and falling over debris at every step.”
He heard men shouting near the air shaft, but passed out from gas. The same men rescued him, going down the air shaft along a stairway and sliding down a water pipe where the bottom stairs had been destroyed.
The scene attracted what the former Waynesburg Republican newspaper estimated at a crowd of more than 35,000, combining onlookers with rescue teams, supply trucks and the Red Cross.
Between the time the whistle blew and two days after rescuers brought an exhausted miner named Johnny Wade to the surface 47 hours later, families clung to hope.
The follow-up coverage compiled by Bubka showed how different, and how capricious the outcomes could be. Some miners were spared by chance, whether by an alarm not going off, or taking off early to meet their wife for dinner.
Four brothers — Andy, Paul, Samuel and John Bootz — perished after starting at the mine earlier that week.
Members of the mine’s baseball team got out early to head to their game against Nemacolin, aside from one player who turned back at the entrance to pick up his equipment.
A memorial built to honor the victims of the disaster in 2002 stands near Mather Park in the center of town. From the park, people can see the mine area to the south that was part of a state reclamation project.
‘”Even if people don’t realize it, it’s definitely very central, and a lot of these buildings were historically a part of the mine town when Mather was created,” Sweeney said. “So I think there’s always this undercurrent of the Mather mine in the Mather community.”
State inspectors determined the likely cause in a report released later that year. An interruption of airflow in the northwest section of the mine, about two miles from the main shaft, led to a buildup of methane gas. That ignited at a storage battery locomotive, and was aided in its spread by coal dust that had collected.
The whistle that blew in 1928 now sits at the home of Brice Rush, a former miner who has amassed a wide collection of mining memorabilia. His grandfather had worked at Mather at its inception, driving the horse team that delivered supplies to the mine as it was opening in 1917.
He also has a brief recording from another relative, an 11-year-old girl in Mather at the time of the explosion, who recounted her memories to him near the end of her life.
She remembered her father, who worked at the mine, going in after the explosion to help with the recovery; they wouldn’t see him again for another three days. But there was also time for levity. At one of the traffic blockades, she and other children were entertained when a policeman bent over and split his pants along the seams.
“It’s a funny story, but sad for the time,” Rush said.
Yoders and Sweeney said the disaster contributed to the movement toward a worker’s compensation plan for miners. It may have also made union membership more likely, as Mather miners would do in 1933.
Safety improvements are one legacy of the disaster, Rush said. The state commission that investigated the explosion made several suggestions, expanding rock-dusting to every part of the mine, to prevent coal dust from igniting.
That became a reality, a U.S. Bureau of Mines representative said in a Lebanon Daily News article commemorating the disaster’s 11th anniversary. So did other improvements, such as regular inspection of electrical equipment and wetting of coal.
“But it cost 190-some people their lives,” Rush said.
At the 2002 dedication of the monument, UMWA International President Cecil Roberts called the men “heroes.”
They were providing a product everyone in the United States had to use and risked their lives to produce it,” he said. “Because they died, life has been better for all of us. Society has suffered a great loss. These men didn’t die at 4:07. The gates of heaven sprung wide open, and these men marched in to their reward.”