Monongahela coke ovens topic at genealogy meeting
WAYNESBURG – John “Buzz” Walters was raised in Poland, a town in Monongahela Township so small that there was only one way in and one way out and it was a dirt road.
Most of the guests and members at the January meeting of Cornerstone Genealogical Society agreed or remembered their own small hometowns, and knew that’s just the way it was in Greene County.
Poland is a small “patch” town between Greensboro and Bobtown and Poland Coal Co. owned the coal and coke ovens. Walters’ father worked at the coke ovens and he said in the early 1900s the homes in Poland were heated with coal. “They cooked with coal, used kerosene lamps, carried their water and every home had a clothesline in the back yard,” Walters said.
Coke ovens were used as early as 1817 in Pennsylvania, with the number more than doubling between 1870 and 1908.
Coke, which is needed to make steel, makes for a hotter fire with less impurities. Coke was first made by burning coal in a heap on the ground with timbers on top, Walters said. It burned in such a way that only the outside layer burned. In the late 19th century, beehive ovens were invented and they allowed more control over the burn.
The ovens in Poland were rectangular and a row of 100 ovens were called a “battery.” The ovens were built into the side of a hill enabling the earth to work as an insulator to keep the fire hot. Coal was brought to the coke ovens by an electric powered coal car called, the “Larry car” and dumped into the ovens through a hole in the top of the oven called a trunnel head.
Walters said the doors to the oven were bricked up and the “coking” began for 36 to 48 hours. At the end of this time the coke was pushed through the oven, or raked out into a rail car and cooled down with water, then loaded onto a train car and taken to the steel mill. These ovens were used 24 hours a day and at night they lit up the sky, Walters said.
The ovens were neither efficient nor environmentally friendly and produced gases linked to cancer. In 1925, the use of coke ovens slowed down, but during the Depression, people lived in the coke ovens.
Judge Farley Toothman explained that by 1880, H.C. Frick controlled 80 percent of the coal production in Pennsylvania. The H.C Frick Co. and Carnegie Steel Co. eventually partnered, assuring Andrew Carnegie of adequate coke for his steel mills. This was the beginning of U.S. Steel.
The next meeting will be at 7 p.m. Feb. 11 in the log courthouse on Greene Street. Thad Swestyn will speak on “Surveying and Genealogy.”