Coal cropped out of the creek banks around Givin and Muchakinock when the first settlers arrived, and they had little use for it. By the 1870s Muchakinock was headquarters of a company whose Mahaska County mines could turn out two thousand tons a day, and camps like Beacon, Evans and Lost Creek grew and shrank with the shafts. This page draws only on three county histories, from 1878, 1900 and 1906, to trace the companies, camps, accidents and named miners.
Written from 3 county histories, all free to read on the Internet Archive: The History of Mahaska County, Iowa (1878); Proud Mahaska, 1843 to 1900 (1900); Past and Present of Mahaska County, Iowa (1906). Everything below comes from those books, and where they give an opinion, we say so.
Before the companies: coal in the creek banks
The author of Proud Mahaska (1900) remembered the first claims around what became the little town of Givin, taken up by the Brewers, the Munsells and a few others. They could see coal cropping out of the banks along the Muchakinock, she wrote, but wanted farms, not fuel. In 1843 and 1844 about its only use was a blacksmith digging into a hillside for enough to work his forge.
Demand came as the prairie toward Fremont filled with settlers, who found coal cheaper than wood and easier to get. They hauled it from Bowen's bank, which the 1900 book says was reputed to give the best coal in that region. She also names the Harper brothers, John, William, Jacob and Archer, James Bowen, Andrew Baughman and the Olneys.
Small farm banks kept working. The 1878 directory lists W. Barrowman, farmer and miner on section 9 near Oskaloosa, born in Scotland in 1823, whose coal bank had a five-foot vein the book calls noted for its purity, and Levi Ellis, farmer and miner on section 5, born in North Carolina in 1810, who had opened another. The 1906 history tells of a miner named Evans, married in 1857 to Mary Jones, daughter of a Welsh-born miner. He mined in Union township, leased and ran the Pilgrim mine, then worked his own Evans coal bank, and at one time owned eleven hundred acres.
Muchakinock in 1878
The 1878 history described Muchakinock as an unincorporated miners' settlement stretching two or three miles along Muchakinock creek between Beacon and Givin, with several hundred inhabitants. The first mine of much importance, by then called Mine No. 2, began working in 1870 or 1871. In 1872 a switch was laid up the creek from Givin station, and the town grew from there. The 1906 history adds that the name came from the creek and is of Indian origin, meaning muddy water.
The 1878 writer judged the miners generally quiet and industrious, with not much drinking, though the town had a saloon. The only general store was kept by Little, Kelly & Co., with sales of $50,000 a year and close to $9,000 in stock, plus a drug store. Land nearby was worth about one hundred dollars an acre because of the coal under it, though the book thought it poor farmland.
The town's only church was the Welsh Congregational Church (the book spells it "Welch"), organized before 1870, with a frame building put up about 1874. Rev. Jones of Beacon had held services there every Sabbath until recently, and D. L. Davies and D. R. Lewis had also preached.
“…they used to donate a turkey to each miner's family in their employ for their Christmas dinner…”
The Consolidation Coal Company and the McNeill brothers
In the 1878 history's view, Muchakinock was remarkable mainly as headquarters of the Consolidation Coal Company, incorporated January 12, 1875, with $500,000 in capital stock. It names H. W. McNeill as leading spirit and founder. He became interested in the Muchakinock mines in 1873 through the Iowa Central Coal Co., which absorbed the Hardin and Mahaska Coal company and then the Southern Coal Co., with seven hundred acres in the Muchakinock valley. These were organized as Consolidation, along with the Black Diamond works south of the Des Moines river. In 1877 Consolidation bought the Mahaska County Coal Co., which the book says gave it the largest mines and interests in the county.
In 1878 the company owned 1,600 acres of coal land, and its Mahaska County mines could produce two thousand tons a day. They comprised one shaft and six drifts: one drift drew coal out by machinery, the rest by mules. The six-foot Muchakinock vein was worked by three drifts near where the Harrison and Des Moines township lines meet a branch of the creek. The Mahaska County mine, about a mile and a half southwest of Beacon, was a shaft on an eight-foot vein. The Black Diamond mines, two drifts on three-foot veins, were in Monroe County.
The later books credit both brothers, W. A. and H. W. McNeill. Proud Mahaska calls them big-souled, brainy business men and says hundreds of men were soon working underground, their houses lining the creek and dotting the hills, as thousands of tons shipped out daily. The brothers gave a turkey to each miner's family in their employ for Christmas dinner. A third brother, Colonel James F. McNeill, came later; the 1906 history says he arrived in Oskaloosa in 1883 as an assistant bank cashier and joined the coal business under the firm name McNeill Brothers.
Proud Mahaska says a railroad company bought nearly all the farms around Givin; offered a hundred dollars an acre, nearly everyone sold. The author could name only Wm. Harper and Harry Brewer as keeping their homesteads. Farmers who stayed sold produce in mining towns that lay, she wrote, in every direction from Oskaloosa, and the coal heated homes on the treeless plains of northwestern Iowa and the Dakotas.
Muchakinock's peak, its Black miners, and its end
The 1906 history says the fields came to the McNeills in 1873 and reached an unexpected development. Between four and five thousand acres in East Des Moines and Harrison townships were mined, earning the owners at least one hundred dollars an acre without entirely ruining the farmland. In 1881 the stock of the McNeill brothers' coal company was sold to the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad Company for $500,000. The railroad ran a branch from Belle Plaine and built a depot and yards at Muchakinock.
That same book records that twenty-five years before it was written, Muchakinock was home to two thousand people, most of them Black, who worked in the coal mines. The 1906 wording, in the language of its day, is "mostly colored." That sentence is all these three histories say about Muchakinock's Black miners in the passages used here. They give no names and do not say where the families came from or how they came to Mahaska County. The 1878 account does not mention them, and Proud Mahaska speaks only of hundreds of men underground.
By 1906 it was a mere village. With the railroad extended to Buxton and other coal fields across the Des Moines river, the book says, Muchakinock had almost ceased to exist.
“…the dwellers on the vast woodless plains of Northwestern Iowa and the Dakotas are warmed by fires made of coal from Mahaska County…”
Beacon, Evans, Bolton and the southern camps
The 1906 history places Beacon on section 27, two and a half miles southwest of Oskaloosa, in Garfield township. It says that about 1863 Hiram Ethridge, then postmaster at Givin, opened a coal shaft there and a community sprang up. Refused a post office because it was too close to Givin and Oskaloosa, Ethridge went down to Givin one Sunday on a handcar and took the post office effects from Harry Brewer's home up to Beacon. Givin complained and got its office back. In 1864 the village and post office were founded as Enterprise, later renamed Beacon, with E. J. Evans as first postmaster. By 1906 the adjoining mines were worked out and the population had fallen to about six hundred.
The 1900 author, who called Beacon the nicest mining town about here, wrote that Welsh families settled in and around it, among them four Price brothers, Jenkin, Joshua, Watkin and John R., who built railroad, ran stores and farmed. The 1878 directory lists J. J. Phillips, born in Wales June 26, 1841, a Beacon merchant since 1875, and Harry A. Pittman, born in Keokuk in 1855, manager of the store and business of the Iowa Coal Co. at Beacon.
Evans, on section 17 on Muchakinock creek, was first called Elida, the name of the coal company that began work there. Its post office was named for D. J. Evans, whose land was among the first mined, and T. J. Evans was first postmaster. It was long the center of the American Coal Company. Bolton, on sections 30 and 31, was a new mining town of several hundred workmen in 1906, named for J. B. Bolton, who started the enterprise.
To the south, the 1906 history names Pekay and Lost Creek as mining camps of varying population and activity. Lost Creek, ten miles southeast of Oskaloosa, was operated by the Lost Creek Fuel Company.
Deaths at the shafts
The worst early tragedy struck the farm of William G. Briggs in Harrison township on the morning of August 12, 1871. A coal shaft thirty-two feet deep and eight feet square held water for the stock. Ten-year-old Charles Briggs went down to fill the bucket and called up that he was suffocating. His brother Mahlon, eighteen, got him into the bucket but fell back as it neared the top; Charles was pulled out unconscious. The father went down, then fourteen-year-old Anna Briggs, then the father's brother George, and then Edward Grier, an Irishman who had worked for the family four years. The 1906 history counts six dead in perhaps an hour.
The 1878 history says Muchakinock had seen only one fatal accident to that date: in 1877 a fall of slate from the roof killed John E. Richards, a Welshman.
On January 24, 1902, an explosion in a shaft at Lost Creek killed twenty men and wounded fourteen. The 1906 book calls it the greatest catastrophe in the history of Iowa mining. It was set off by a shot fired by Andrew Pash in room No. 10 of mine No. 2, and Pash was among the dead. Almost $3,000 was raised for the widows and orphans.
Miners and union men in the biographies
In the 1906 biographies, Mr. Ramsay went into the mines in England at ten, came to America with his mother at eighteen, and mined at Morris, Pekin, Coal Valley, Streator and Braidwood, Illinois. At Albia he was assistant superintendent under Mr. Whiteman in the Excelsior mines, staying with that company sixteen years, before opening mines at Beacon as the Garfield Coal Company in 1893 and later working mines at Evans with his sons William C. and John H. His brothers William T., Richard and Joseph were a mine manager in Oskaloosa, a mine manager at Braceville, Illinois, and a Des Moines coal operator.
John P. White, born at Coal Valley, Illinois, on February 28, 1870, to Irish-born parents, entered the mines at fifteen at Lucas, Iowa. In 1904 he was elected president of District No. 13 of the United Mine Workers of America, which covered Iowa and Putnam County, Missouri, with headquarters at 105 High street west in Oskaloosa. His brother Joseph died in the mines in Lucas County at nineteen, a brother James mined in Appanoose County, and a brother-in-law, John J. Brown, was a miner at White City in Mahaska County.
Edwin Perry, born in Wales on November 17, 1854, went into the Welsh mines at ten, then came with his mother in 1869 to Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, for seven years in the anthracite mines. He came to Oskaloosa in 1876 and mined there, apart from five years with the gas and electric light company, until 1902, when he became an officer of District No. 13. He was its secretary and treasurer from April 1, 1904.
People from this history in our records
These Mahaska 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.
- William G. Jones (b. 1861)
- William N. Hoover (b. 1867)
Finding your ancestor in Mahaska 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 The History of Mahaska County, Iowa and Proud Mahaska, 1843 to 1900 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
What was Muchakinock?
The 1878 history calls it an unincorporated miners' settlement two or three miles long on Muchakinock creek between Beacon and Givin, with several hundred people, and headquarters of the Consolidation Coal Company. The 1906 history says it once held two thousand people but had almost ceased to exist after the railroad reached Buxton.
Who ran the Consolidation Coal Company?
The 1878 history names H. W. McNeill as its leading spirit and founder. The company was incorporated January 12, 1875, with $500,000 in capital stock. The 1900 and 1906 books credit H. W. and W. A. McNeill together, and the 1906 book says the stock of the McNeills' coal company was sold to the Chicago & Northwestern in 1881 for $500,000.
What happened at Lost Creek in 1902?
On January 24, 1902, an explosion in a Lost Creek Fuel Company shaft, ten miles southeast of Oskaloosa, killed twenty men and wounded fourteen. The 1906 history traces it to a shot fired by Andrew Pash in room No. 10 of mine No. 2. Almost $3,000 was raised for widows and orphans.
Do these histories say anything about Muchakinock's Black miners?
Only briefly. The 1906 history says that about twenty-five years earlier Muchakinock was home to two thousand people, mostly Black, who worked in the coal mines. In the passages used here, none of the three books names any of these miners or says where they came from.
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