Monongah is a small town on the West Fork River in Marion County, West Virginia, a few miles south of Fairmont. In 1907 its working life was the Fairmont Coal Company’s Nos. 6 and 8 mines, two workings that met underground and shared one ventilation system. Coal was got by hand and the men were paid by the ton, which is why registered miners routinely took their sons, brothers and other relatives down to help them — men and boys whose names appeared on no company roll. Much of the workforce was foreign-born. Italians were the largest single group, alongside Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Greeks and others drawn to the West Virginia coalfields, working beside native-born Americans, white and Black.
On the morning of Friday, December 6, 1907, 367 men were officially recorded as going underground. At 10:28 a.m. an explosion ripped through the two mines. Its exact cause was never proved: the investigators could say only that gas and coal dust had ignited, whether from a spark off a derailed trip of coal cars, from blasting, or from an open light. The blast wrecked the surface works and the great fan that ventilated the mines, and with the air current gone the workings filled with afterdamp, the suffocating gas that follows an explosion underground. The shock was felt for miles around.
In 1907 there was no such thing as an organised mine rescue service. Volunteers went down into the gas-filled workings without breathing apparatus, and some of them were overcome in their turn. The recovery of the dead went on for days, the bodies carried out and laid in rows to be claimed. Almost no one who was underground that morning came out alive. The official death toll was set at 362 — the figure the United States Mine Safety and Health Administration still carries in its historical tables — and the explosion left some 250 widows and about 1,000 children without a father.
But 362 is the official number, not the true one, and the record says as much. A few West Virginia references give 361, and every serious account agrees the real toll ran higher, because the unregistered helpers were never counted and the count could never be closed. Of the official dead, 171 were Italian immigrants. Davitt McAteer, the West Virginia lawyer and historian who spent years reconstructing the disaster, concluded that it was reasonable to put the dead in excess of 500, and probably at more than 550. On any reckoning, Monongah remains the worst mining disaster in the history of the United States.
Nowhere did the news land harder than in Italy, where Monongah is still remembered as the worst disaster ever to befall the country’s emigrants abroad. Many of the Italian dead were buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in Monongah. A century later, for the centenary commemorations of December 6, 2007, the Italian government restored their graves and set a monument of black granite among them, while the region of Molise, which had lost so many of its sons, sent a great bell cast by the Marinelli foundry at Agnone. The bell stands in the town beside the “Monongah Heroine”, a statue of a mother with her children raised in honour of the widows and mothers left behind.
Monongah did not stand alone. December 1907 was the bloodiest month of the deadliest year in American mining history, in which more than 3,200 miners were killed, and the public demand for a federal response followed. In the words of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s own historical summary, the Monongah explosion “impelled Congress to create the Bureau of Mines”. Congress did so by Public Law 61-179, effective May 16, 1910, placing the new United States Bureau of Mines in the Department of the Interior under its first director, Dr. Joseph A. Holmes. The Bureau was charged with research, investigation and rescue work rather than enforcement — that power came only decades later — but it was the federal government’s first permanent step into mine safety. Since 2009, December 6 has been marked in the United States as National Miners Day, in memory of Monongah.
West Virginia Encyclopedia — Monongah Mine Disaster
MSHA Fact Sheet 95-8 — Historical Data on Mine Disasters in the United States