Lafayette County's coal was thin, seldom more than two feet, but there was a lot of it. By 1881 the county history reported coal shafts or mines of some sort in every township. Two books, the 1881 History of Lafayette County, Mo. and Young's 1910 history, follow the work from the first geologists on the Missouri River bluffs to a Lexington company of about 1,000 men and the forty-six mines counted in the 1908 state mining report.
Written from 2 county histories, all free to read on the Internet Archive: History of Lafayette County, Missouri (1881); Young's History of Lafayette County, Missouri, Vol. 1 (1910). Everything below comes from those books, and where they give an opinion, we say so.
What the first geologists found on the bluffs
The 1881 history starts with David Dale Owen, the United States geologist from 1847 to 1852, who surveyed the Missouri River and took sections from the bluffs opposite Napoleon and Wellington and at Lexington. His Lexington section showed coal 20 inches thick. Owen called the bed at Wellington the first workable coal he met coming down the river: twelve to fourteen inches thick, lying a few feet above the riverbed. At Lexington the same gray limestone over the coal sat at a greater height above the river. The 1881 writer noted that Owen wrote in 1851, when no mines of the kind he described had yet been worked.
The state survey followed. G. C. Swallow was appointed the first state geologist on April 12, 1853. Raphael Pumpelly took the post in 1871, and his report, published in 1873, printed at least twenty-seven geological sections from Lafayette County; the 1881 history told anyone interested in mining coal here to study it. In 1872 Pumpelly's assistant, G. C. Broadhead, examined nineteen coal mines then working in the county. He found coal two feet thick at Henry Franke's mine near Concordia and at R. G. Tucker's mine at Lexington, 22 inches in Gen. Graham's mine up Graham's branch, 21 inches at the Mulky mines two and a half miles east of Aullville, 17 inches on the Little Sniabar six miles south of Lexington, and 16 inches four miles below Berlin. None ran higher than 24 inches. The book places Franke's mine in two spots: a mile and a half east of Concordia in one passage, half a mile north of it in another.
The 1881 writer measured a 23-inch vein himself in the bed of Rupe's branch, about two miles back from the river and only 30 or 40 feet from the old Lexington and Gulf railroad bed. In June 1881 workmen sinking an air shaft for the Lexington and Kansas City Coal Company, about a mile west of town, supplied the measurements for another section: coal 1 foot 8 inches thick under a layer of slate and a roof of coarse limestone, with shale higher up that the miners called soapstone. Geologists called this seam "the Lexington coal." Not every hole was for coal. On the McCausland farm, two miles north of Higginsville, borings went down 800 feet looking for oil, without success.
Lexington's big company in 1881
The 1881 history called the Lexington and Kansas City Coal Company the largest productive industry and business enterprise of the city. Col. John Reid of Lexington had been its president for many years, though the authors could get no statistics on its operations. In September 1881 the business passed to new hands, with A. A. Talmage as president and James C. McGrew as superintendent and general business manager. They reorganized and enlarged it, and the book judged that Lexington was now perhaps the most extensive coal mining town in the state.
The company worked a shaft with steam hoisting in old town Lexington near the Missouri Pacific depot, plus six drift mines in west Lexington that opened onto the Lexington and Kansas City narrow gauge railroad. Mules hauled the coal trucks in all the mines. About 1,000 men were employed, and the company meant to add more as fast as it could find room and men. It did no retail business: its coal went in car-load lots on contract to Sedalia, Independence, Kansas City and other points.
Miners were paid by the piece, five cents for each bushel they got out, and fifty bushels was considered a fair average day's work. The 1881 book says some of the miners were English and some Irish, but that the majority were Black men. McGrew was busy outside the county too. At Camden in Ray County he ran steam-powered coal works with over 300 men and twenty coal cars of his own, each holding 500 bushels, to carry coal to Kansas City.
“About 1000 men are employed in the mines, and more will be put in…”
Drift mines for the home trade
Not all Lexington coal went out by rail. Major Thomas B. Claggett worked drift mines about half a mile down the river from the foot of Pine street, driven straight into the vein where it cropped out at the foot of the bluff. They had been running about fifteen years in 1881. Twelve to fifteen men worked there, the vein was twenty-two inches, and the whole product was sold in Lexington to the colleges and private buyers. The previous year's output was worth about $3,500.
A Mr. Bell and several others also mined for Lexington's local supply, but furnished no figures. C. M. Pirner was sinking a shaft for a local coal works a few rods west of the old Masonic College. His sketch elsewhere in the same book gives a family historian more to go on: born in Saxony in 1829, he came to Lexington in 1856 as a druggist and was wounded and taken prisoner at the battle of Lexington.
By 1910, Young's history was even warmer about the home ground. It said the coal mining interests of Lexington township had come to be of great profit, that farming the land did no harm to the mines beneath, so the land was doubly valuable, and that Lexington soft coal had no superior in all of Missouri's coal districts. Out in Freedom township, west of Concordia, the same book found only small coal mines, worked now and then.
Forty-six mines: the 1908 inspector's count
For its mining chapter, Young's 1910 history leaned on the state mining report for 1908, furnished by Mine Inspector Michael Gavin of Lexington. The county then had forty-six coal mining plants: twenty-three shafts, nineteen drifts and four slopes, running from sixteen to one hundred eighty feet deep. The marketable seam was thirteen to twenty-two inches thick under a heavy slate roof, which the book credited with making mining cheap and keeping accidents few. All but six were longwall mines; the other six were room mines.
The work rose and fell with the seasons. The report counted 2,095 miners and helpers in the winter months and about half that number in summer. The biggest operator was the Western Coal and Mining Company, capitalized at one million dollars, which ran the Glen Oak, Valley, Midway, Summit, Seawall and South mines and kept large machine shops at the mines. A McGrew Coal Company also had several mines around Lexington, which the book said were run on the latest improved plans. Whether it was connected to the James C. McGrew of 1881, the books do not say.
“The shaft here is forty-seven feet deep. Horse power is here employed…”
Higginsville, Corder, Mayview and the prairie mines
Higginsville was ringed with small mines in 1908. Perry Brothers worked a thirty-foot shaft with horse power two and a half miles south of town, on 160 acres owned by John Wagner. The Bonanza Coal Company, two miles east on 257 acres, had an eighty-foot shaft and sent its coal to Kansas City. The Farmers' Coal Company ran an eighty-foot shaft on 320 acres at Higginsville, using steam and electricity, and its No. 7 mine was ten miles west of town. The J. H. Looney mine, a mile west, hoisted by steam from seventy-five feet. Smaller pits near town included the Stoll, Kratz and Canterberry & Griffith slopes, the Davidson mine, the Duncan mine on 120 acres, and Hamilton & Bennett, which supplied winter home trade.
Corder had a cluster of mines of its own. The Kierstead Coal Company, a mile west, held 570 acres and hoisted by steam from a ninety-foot shaft. The Diamond Coal Company's Wilson mine sat on 320 acres three-fourths of a mile from town, and the Salt Fork mine, half a mile east on 420 acres, used horse power on a forty-seven-foot shaft. There were also the Corder Coal Company, the Geisendoerfer mine two miles southeast, and the small hand-power Latchaw mine. Young's list of Corder businesses names Hohenwald Brothers and Anton Stoling as coal miners too, and its societies included a Miners' Labor Union. On May 25, 1910, a fire that burned the opera house also took Miners' Hall, with a total loss of $8,000.
At Mayview, the Cary mines worked a shaft 135 feet deep on 144 acres. The Macey mine near Myric station was a drift into a twenty-two-inch seam of what the book called extra quality coal, sold in Kansas City. Half a mile east of Waterloo, the Waterloo Co-Operative Coal Company used steam on a forty-five-foot shaft.
River towns: Lexington, Waverly, Dover, Napoleon and Wellington
Around Lexington in 1908 were the Plattenburg Coal Company on thirty-five acres three-fourths of a mile out, the Sipe mine to the south with a twenty-eight-foot shaft and horse hoisting, the Ed. Aull mine two miles east on 300 acres, and the Bell & Greer mine half a mile south, which sold mostly to local dealers. The Ridd mine was a drift on Bell & Greer land. The Steamboat Coal and Mining Company had a one-hundred-foot steam shaft on the bank of the Missouri, and the book credits it with an extra thick seam of fifty-four inches, far beyond the county's usual range.
At Waverly, the Waverley Brick and Coal Company stood where the old Backbone mine used to be. It owned or controlled 2,005 acres of coal, clay and shale land, sank its shaft 145 feet, and could raise 1,000 tons of coal a day while its works turned out paving, facing and fire brick. Waverly's 1910 business list names the Christy Coal Company and the Waverly Coal Company as coal operators.
Dover, platted in 1835 by John Duston, had the Dover Coal Company on 265 acres, mining a twenty-two-inch seam for Kansas City and the towns between. The Independence Coal Company worked a fifty-foot mine a mile east of Napoleon. Near Wellington, where Owen had found the first workable coal on the river, the Labor Exchange mine a mile and a half east of town hoisted by steam from a ninety-three-foot shaft.
Finding a miner in these records
If your family mined here, the books point to a few places to look. The 1881 history puts the big crews in Lexington: the steam shaft in old town and the six drift mines in west Lexington, worked by English, Irish and, in the majority, Black miners paid by the bushel. Young's history rests on the 1908 state mining report and the mine inspector's office at Lexington. Corder had a Miners' Labor Union and its own Miners' Hall, and the Corder Journal began on January 22, 1909. The mine and company names on this page, from Perry Brothers to the Western Coal and Mining Company, are the names to watch for in obituaries and local papers.
People from this history in our records
These Lafayette County residents have biographies on our site from the county histories, and each one mentions the mines. Their sketches name parents, spouses, and where the family came from.
- Ai Edgar Asbury (b. 1836)
- Fred A. Young (b. 1834)
- C. L. Wilson (b. 1865)
Finding your ancestor in Lafayette County
- Census records (free through 1950) list each person's occupation and town, so a mining family shows up decade by decade.
- Death records: search our Missouri database by surname.
- The county histories themselves: the biographical sections of History of Lafayette County, Missouri and Young's History of Lafayette County, Missouri, Vol. 1 hold hundreds of family sketches.
- Newspapers on the Library of Congress's Chronicling America carried obituaries, accidents, and local news.
Tell us one grandparent's name. We'll take a free first look at the records and email you back.
Ask about my family →Frequently asked questions
How many coal mines were there in Lafayette County, Missouri?
Young's 1910 history, citing the state mining report for 1908, counted forty-six coal mining plants: twenty-three shafts, nineteen drifts and four slopes. In 1872 state geologist G. C. Broadhead had examined nineteen working mines, and the 1881 history said there were coal shafts or mines of some sort in every township.
Who worked in the Lexington coal mines in 1881?
The 1881 history says the Lexington and Kansas City Coal Company employed about 1,000 men. Some were English and some Irish, but the majority were Black. They were paid five cents a bushel, and fifty bushels was counted a fair day's work. Mules hauled the coal trucks in the mines.
How thick was the coal in Lafayette County?
Thin. Broadhead found nothing over 24 inches in the nineteen mines he examined in 1872, and the 1908 report put the marketable seam at thirteen to twenty-two inches. Young's history did credit the Steamboat Coal and Mining Company, on the Missouri River bank, with an extra thick seam of fifty-four inches.
Which was the largest coal company in Lafayette County?
In 1881 the county history called the Lexington and Kansas City Coal Company the city's largest industry. By 1910 Young's history named the Western Coal and Mining Company, capitalized at one million dollars, as the largest in the county, running the Glen Oak, Valley, Midway, Summit, Seawall and South mines.
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