The 1881 History of Lucas County, Iowa tells a coal story that runs from farmers digging thin seams out of creek banks to a shaft mine at Cleveland employing three hundred miners and lit by electric light. If your people mined, kept store or preached in Cleveland, Lucas or along Little Whitebreast creek, the book names the companies, superintendents, church members and town plats you will want to know.
Written from History of Lucas County, Iowa (1881). Everything below comes from that book, and where it gives an opinion, we say so. You can read the full book free on the Internet Archive.
What lay under the county
The 1881 history says Lucas County is entirely underlaid by coal measures, and it calls Lucas, geologically, one of Iowa's most favored counties. Its geology chapter leans on the state survey work of Dr. C. A. White, who divided the beds into Upper, Middle and Lower Coal Measures. The Upper measures rarely show at the surface, and the book suggests that in the west both they and the Middle measures had to be pierced before coal worth mining would be reached. The Lower measures, the valuable ones, came near the surface mainly in the eastern townships of Pleasant, Cedar and Chariton.
The mines White described were small drifts into hillsides and stream banks. On Flint creek, a branch of the North Cedar, a three foot seam had long supported what the book calls one of the best coal mines in the county; White's report refers to it as Cole's mine. Near the steam mill on the North Cedar, in section 27 on the Fowler estate, coal reported at three to four feet thick had been worked for several years. In the valley of the Little Whitebreast near Thompson's Mills, two to three miles northeast of Chariton, several workings had produced quite large quantities from a bed of twenty to thirty inches. On English creek in the north, considerable good coal had been mined by drifting into the hill.
Coal banks for the farm stove
Away from the big shafts, rural families dug coal close to home. In Lincoln township, the book counts many small coal banks along Little Whitebreast creek that together turned out a large amount of bituminous coal, most of it sold in Chariton. In Liberty township coal came from surface veins in different parts of the township, and even though wood was plentiful, the book says a large number of residents preferred coal for winter heat.
In Union township, in the southwest corner, coal had come into heavy use for heating and cooking within a few years. Some was hauled by wagon from the mine at Cleveland; more arrived by rail at the Derby station. A company at Derby was sinking its own prospect shaft when the book went to press.
“…raise a ton of coal to the upper landing, 270 feet, in sixteen seconds…”
The White Breast Coal and Mining Company
The deep coal came from a prospecting partnership of G. C. Osgood, L. R. Fix and Wesley Jones of Burlington and William Haven of Ottumwa, who began work in May 1875. On January 16, 1876, they struck a vein of excellent coal five feet four inches thick, which the book calls the first opening of the lower coal measure in the county. That sits oddly beside the geology chapter, which had already placed the Flint creek and Little Whitebreast workings in the Lower measures; the book does not reconcile the two. The White Breast Coal and Mining Company was organized January 19, 1876, with capital stock of $150,000, and the five foot prospect shaft became its air shaft.
Quicksand made the hoisting shaft hard to place. After about four attempts the company found ground that avoided it, and sinking and curbing the new shaft took seventy-six days from May 1, 1876. The first shipment of coal went out early that October. A thirty horse engine soon gave way to an eighty horse engine that could raise a ton of coal 270 feet to the upper landing in sixteen seconds.
In August 1878 fire destroyed the wooden buildings around the shaft while men were underground. The book says nobody was hurt and nothing but the buildings was lost, and the works were rebuilt more solidly. By 1881 the mine could hoist fifty car loads of sixteen tons a day and still could not meet demand, so the company sank a second shaft about three fourths of a mile away. In June 1881 the underground workings of shafts A and B were within some eighty feet of meeting, and the company expected to ship a hundred cars a day once they joined. It then employed three hundred miners, more than forty mules underground and some sixty men in other jobs.
Inside the Cleveland mines, 1881
Early in 1881 Andrew Roy, the state mine inspector of Ohio, visited the White Breast mines and wrote them up for the Coal Trade Journal; the county history reprints his letter in full. He gave shaft A a depth of 338 feet and shaft B 227 feet, with B not ready to ship before the middle of April 1881. He called the coal, five to seven feet thick, unusually good for a western coal.
Roy laid out a room and pillar system: double entries seven feet wide, rooms twenty feet wide and pillars twenty feet thick. Once rooms had advanced sixty to seventy yards, the pillars were pulled and the roof allowed to fall. Roy counted about eighty per cent of the coal recovered. A Crane Brothers patent hoist served both mines, and shaft A put out 650 to 700 tons of screened coal a day. The railroad bought the slack for ballast.
Ventilation came from a Murphy's patent fan six feet across that moved 35,000 cubic feet of air a minute. Roy warned that slack and pyrites were liable to spontaneous combustion, that the gob had taken fire, and that abandoned places had to be walled up and sealed. He called the electric light at the shaft top the first applied in Iowa.
The company supplied all the coal the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy used west of the mines and all the coal the Burlington and Missouri River used in Nebraska. In early winter it had to send out circulars admitting it could not fill its customers' orders. General manager Haven let Roy copy the output: 10,430 tons in May 1880, rising to 16,667 tons in December with a pay roll of $23,310.23, then 12,377 tons in January 1881, when a machinery accident stopped work for several days. Roy also found miners unhappy that the new state mine inspector was not a competent practical miner.
“A proviso in the deed to every lot forever prohibits the sale of intoxicating liquor on the same.”
Cleveland and Lucas, two towns a mile apart
The Burlington and Missouri River main line crossed the county through Russell, Chariton, Cleveland and Lucas, and reached Chariton about July 1, 1867. Lucas came first: on May 9, 1868, H. S. Russell, trustee for the landowners, platted twelve blocks with 108 lots, and the town lot company later sold the whole town to John W. Ladow of New York. The discovery of coal early in 1876 set it growing. Then the plats piled up: Ladow's addition on May 22, 1876, with sixty-two lots; A. M. Hood's addition on May 9, 1877; Jedediah Knotts' addition of eighteen lots on November 19, 1877; Knotts' second addition on May 15, 1879; and James B. Knotts' third addition of eighty-six lots on June 14, 1881.
The mining company laid out Cleveland itself. After two years at its shaft the White Breast company decided the spot was a good place for a town and laid one out on part of section thirteen, with superintendent William Haven doing the surveying. It was named for the Ohio city, and its streets ran on the diagonal, southwest to northeast and southeast to northwest. Less than a mile from Lucas, it soon needed the Gordon Addition, which wrapped around the original plat and brought it to 160 lots. A clause in every lot deed forever barred the sale of liquor, and when a saloon opened just over the line in Whitebreast township, the book says residents quietly starved it out.
Lucas tried to catch the same vein. After the Cleveland strike, A. Knotts, J. W. Ladow and C. H. Jack of Lucas and a Mr. Dufur of Murray sank a shaft just west of town and let it sit idle for a couple of years. In 1879 the Union Coal and Mining Company bought or leased it, sank it deeper and found a paying vein, which it worked only briefly. In 1877 D. Eikenberry of Chariton sank a shaft east of town, spent several thousand dollars and went back to buying grain and stock. The Lucas Coal Company, organized in March 1879 by Chariton businessmen and Lucas miners, let miners earn stock by sinking the shaft; it fell into debt and the sheriff sold its franchises. Some of the same men formed the Chariton Coal Company in November 1880, which ran the shaft under Thomas A. Francis. Absalom Knotts' biography says coal mining at Lucas employed over five hundred men.
One town did not survive. E. C. Rankin had kept store and the Tallahoma post office a couple of miles north of where Cleveland stood, and by 1881 the book says Tallahoma no longer existed.
Welsh miners and the families the book names
Thomas A. Francis (spelled Frances in his own sketch) was a native of South Wales who came to America in 1866, bossed a Pennsylvania coal mine for twenty-one months, and came to the county in 1875 working for the White Breast company. He claimed the honor of the first discovery of coal in the county, and the book says Lucas people were largely indebted to him for finding paying mines. He married Miss E. Phillips, also of Wales, on November 10, 1859; their living children were William P., Henry T., Arthur V. and Margaret A. William Haven, the company's superintendent, was born in New Hampshire on November 11, 1846, graduated from Norwich University in 1868 and served as assistant superintendent of the Union Coal and Mining Company at Ottumwa. He was also a large stockholder in the Lucas mines.
Lucas also had a Reorganized Latter Day Saints branch, formed among the miners in the fall of 1878 with twenty-eight people, including James McDiffit, John R. Evans, John Watkins Sr., Evan B. Morgan, Lorenzo Powell, James Burchell and Thomas G. Thomas. By 1881 it had 115 members and a church built by volunteer contributions for something over a thousand dollars, with McDiffit as presiding elder, Morgan as priest, Robert S. Gray as teacher and David Crow as deacon. John R. Evans, born in Wales on December 11, 1837, had gone to Utah, rejected polygamy and blood atonement, and settled at Lucas to mine and preach. James Robinson, an English-born practical miner who had worked in Ohio and West Virginia, later sold furniture in Lucas; his family belonged to the same church.
Other miners built their own institutions. In 1878 a Congregational society made up largely of miners put up a church in Cleveland. Roy counted 280 men cutting and loading coal in shaft A and thirty-three drivers, and noted they had built and paid for their own two-story hall. On Friday evening, February 18, 1881, after Roy addressed them there, they organized a forty-member association to help one another in case of mine accidents. The 1881 history describes Cleveland's miners as intelligent and industrious, and both it and Roy say many owned their homes.
Finding your ancestor in Lucas 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 Iowa database by surname.
- The county histories themselves: the biographical sections of History of Lucas County, Iowa 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
When was deep coal first struck in Lucas County?
According to the 1881 history, a prospecting company of G. C. Osgood, L. R. Fix, Wesley Jones and William Haven struck a vein five feet four inches thick on January 16, 1876, near what became Cleveland. The book calls it the first opening of the lower coal measure in the county, and the first shipment followed early that October.
Who was Thomas A. Francis?
A miner from South Wales who came to America in 1866, bossed a Pennsylvania mine, and came to Lucas County in 1875 for the White Breast Coal and Mining Company. He claimed the first discovery of coal in the county and by 1881 superintended the Chariton Coal Company's shaft at Lucas.
Why were there no saloons in Cleveland?
The 1881 history says a clause in the deed to every lot in Cleveland forever prohibited selling liquor there. A saloon that opened just over the line in Whitebreast township was quietly starved out, and Andrew Roy also noted there was not a single saloon in the place.
What happened to the Lucas Coal Company?
Organized in March 1879 by Chariton businessmen and Lucas miners, it paid miners in stock for their labor sinking the shaft. The arrangement worked poorly, the company went into debt, and the sheriff sold its franchises. Some of the same men formed the Chariton Coal Company in November 1880 to run the shaft.
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