The Avondale PA, anthracite mine disaster.
110 humans died.
On the sixth day of September, eighteen hundred and sixty-nine,
Those miners all then got a call to go work in the mine;
But little did they think that death would gloom the vale
Before they would return again from the mines of Avondale.
George Korson in his Minstrels of the Mine Patch tells the terrible
story that lies back of this ballad of the first great anthracite mine
disaster. Early in the morning of September 6, 1869, a fire started in the
shaft of the mine at Avondale. No alternative escape route or source of
air supply had been provided for this primitive death-trap, and when the
flames roared up the shaft and set the breaker at the mouth on fire, the
men below were doomed. While rescuers at the surface battled with the
fire, the men underground frantically threw up a barricade of boxes and
barrels, stuffing the cracks with bits of their clothing to keep out the
dreaded black damp. A rescue party at last groped their way through the
dark alleys of the mine and found the bodies of 67 miners, horribly
bloated and deformed by the poisonous gases, behind an ineffective
shelter. The final toll of the dead in this Pennsylvanian Black Hole came
to 110 men and boys.
No one knows who composed the ballad, It appeared soon after the victims
of the disaster were buried, printed on penny broadsides and attributed to
various miner authors. Hundreds of copies were sold. Everyone in the
coalfields sang it. Versions have been picked up as far away as
Newfoundland.
Quoted in Lomax, FSNA p122.
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