Aug 30, 2016 4 min read

CARMICHAELS – The Carmichaels fire hall was cordoned off in mine cloth and transformed into a celebration of mining Saturday with artifacts and tools for sale during the newest attraction this year at the 63rd annual King Coal Show.

The Eastern Mining Collectors Show filled dozens of tables in the fire hall with museum-quality lamps, helmets, lunch buckets, pay script, old photographs and many other collectables.

More than 200 people paid a dollar to browse, ask questions and buy mementos that brought many closer to their own family mining past with stickers that once decorated helmets, a carbide lamp and lunch bucket that once took a great grandfather into a dangerous world of pick axes, horse drawn coal carts and sudden cave-ins.

Prem Trollope, a visitor from London, England, was delighted to meet Mark Hess, a vendor from Clarington, Ohio, who she said had “both Brit and American lamps.” Hess had gone to England to look up his own ancestry and explore English mines in 1996.

She lingered over the collection of lamps, from candleholders once stuck in mine walls to open flame wick and carbide lamps, then pointed soberly to a child sized helmet.

“That’s always shocking to see,” she said. “We have a harvest festival at home and I talk to my students about harvesting energy, just like we harvest crops. I have a jar of coal that I show them that I brought from Greene County.”

Part of the show was the mine displays that were set up in the fire hall for the preceding week of coal show activities. Joe Glad, 86, brought the model of the town of Marianna that took him five years to build.

The late John McCall’s collection of tools, homemade models and memorabilia was brought out by his family in memory of his many years of being a fixture at every coal show until his death. His little, hand-painted plywood donkey pulling a wooden wagon of coal is a reminder of the days children led animals into the mines and canaries were used to detect methane.

Stickers, patches and T-shirts commemorating mine and equipment companies and events brought out the kid in many collectors, who went table to table looking for elusive times that would complete their own collection.

The show was organized by longtime collector and retired miner Brice Rush, whose own extensive array of coal-related memorabilia outgrew his home and now fills a log cabin he reassembled in his yard. This major regional biannual show is held in the spring in Carter Cave, Ky., then moves north to stage another all day event in West Virginia or Johnstown in the fall.

“This is the first year we did the show in Carmichaels,” Rush said. “We had 60 tables and very good turnout so we’re planning to be back next year.”

Rush may have organized the show, but it was his wife, Linda, who put the ham in the oven at midnight Friday to make lunch the vendors who came to the show Saturday, some as far away as Oklahoma.

“There’s mining on both sides of my family, so a lot of what we have collected came from them,” event volunteer Linda Rush said.

The fire boss paper that her grandfather Ed Varesko earned in 1915 at Crucible Mine is framed and hanging on the wall.

“My other grandfather, Maurin Anton, was shot on the picket line at Gates Mine,” she said.

Luckily, her grandfather survived to picket once more for a union job and even luckier for the history of coal mining in this area, saved all of his pay envelopes from every mine he worked at. Now these yellowed envelopes are carefully sorted as part of the Rush collection and were on display at this year’s show.