In the those days, mining companies provided housing for the miners and their families. They'd build a small town, along with a company store, and they'd name it after their company. When the deep mine they were working would run out, they would bulldoze all the houses down, burn the rubble, and them rebuild the town at the next mine location. So, there was more than one Lando Mines town location, and the one I grew up in doesn't exist anymore. All that's left is a bridge across Pigeon Creek and a road to nowhere.
The houses were crude and unpainted. The yards were packed dirt, some were fenced with wire fencing, and all of them faced onto roads paved with crushed coal. Some of the houses had indoor plumbing ($25/month), and others ($15/month) just used outhouses. If you're not familiar with outhouses...they are just a little shack with a swinging door, set down over a big, deep hole in the ground. They're cold in the winter, and smelly and fly infested in warmer weather. All the houses were heated by fireplaces that burned coal. So, they all had quite a pile of coal outside to use as fuel. The coal burned with an acrid smoke, and a pungent sulfur smell. I thought it was amazing that black rocks could burn, and can still see the red glow of the coal in my mind. With coal on the roads, and burning in the houses, the air was always dusty and smelled bad.
The mining companies printed their own money and made their own coins too, and they called it "script". My dad and grandfather were paid half in cash and half in script. Script wasn't worth as much as regular money because you could only spend it at the company store and the company gas station. To get to the company store, we'd walk down to Pigeon Creek, and go across a swaying, hanging bridge to the other side. These bridges were commonly referred to as monkey bridges, because you had to hang on like a monkey when you went across. They were easy to get swinging pretty violently, and it made for treacherous walking - especially when other people on the bridge wanted to give you a scare. The federal government finally stopped the companies from printing script, when the federal courts ruled it was minting money, and only the government has the right to do that.
The company store wasn't much to look at, but to me as a kid was a wonderland filled with all kinds of things to admire and long after. The floors were the same as in the houses, oiled unfinished wood and sawdust. This kept the dust down I guess. They had glass displays of all kinds of goods, and high shelves on the other side also filled with canned food and dry goods. They even had some racks of hanging clothes and some shoes...but these tended towards working gear. If you wanted to buy anything, you had to ask a clerk to help you. They would take it out of the display case, or off the high shelves and ring it up for you. If you didn't have any money, they would put it on your bill, and some people got way behind in payments.
One thing they sold that I really liked was carbide and carbide lamps. The miners worked in the darkness, and wore carbide lamps on their heads. These consisted of a can with the headlamp screwed on top. There was a headstrap on the can, and you could adjust it to fit your head or miner's helmet. The headlamp was a polished metal reflector with a small hole in the center. To make the lamp work, you loaded the can with fresh carbide, added some water, screwed the headlamp back onto the can top, and lit the flame at the reflector hole. Carbide resembled a soft, gray gravel...and when you got it wet it would fizz like Alka Seltzer, and release carbide gas. It came in big cans like paint cans with a sealed lid to keep it dry. The lamps didn't make much light, but enough to work by in the total blackout in the mines. Besides having to reload them all the time, their biggest downside was the open flame. Not a good thing to have in a mine when methane or natural gas leaked into the shafts, or fine coal dust accumulated in the air. So they were the most common cause of mine explosions.
Lando Mines was a step ahead of other mining towns because they also had their own gas station. It was called Red Head gas, and it had a big red woodpecker sign out front. My dad was the co-owner and operator of the station, trying to make some extra money for a growing family. He also had managed to get out of direct mining, because of his business studies - and did payroll and assaying the coal. I think gas was about 18 cents a gallon, and you could buy it with either script or cash. People always used script though, because it was worth less than cash except at the company store or the station. People would sometimes trade script for money, and there was a loose exchange rate, Three dollars of script would get you two dollars of cash.
Miners were very well paid compared to other work in the area, but they ended up having to give a lot of the money back to the mining company for rent, food and gas. So, they often just barely got by from paycheck to paycheck. When they'd run out of money before the next check, they'd trade something in if they could. I remember my dad showing me a veritable armory of weapons at the gas station. I think he had something like 50 rifles and shotguns in the back that people had traded for a tank of gas. Sometimes they'd buy their guns back when they got paid, but often as not dad would get stuck with them. He'd sell the ones he could, and kept a few of the better ones. A lot of them were souvenirs from the recent war...from Japan, Italy, or Germany. I later learned to shoot one of the rifles to help get us food...but that's another story. Dad always used to grumble about the station, and I heard him tell mom more than once that they'd lost money that month on it. He eventually gave up on it, and with no one else interested in taking if over, it was closed for good.
One of my favorite things was to stand out by our fence in the mornings and greet the miners as they walked down the hill going to work. They'd say "Mornin' Henry!", and I'd lower my voice as low as possible, and growl back at them "Mornin' boys". That made them laugh every time. I'd do the same thing again that evening as they came home from their shift. The crew coming home was much different than going in. Now they were filthy black with the coal dust, and their faces were a black and smudged. Their shoulders were rounded from stooping all day, and their gait was slow and their feet dragging. Still they'd say "Evenin' Henry", and I say "Evenin' Boys" and they'd all smile like it was the first time, with their teeth startlingly white against their black, exhausted faces.
Their work in the mines was hard and dangerous. The coal ran in seams or layers and was sometimes only 3 feet thick. So, they rarely had room to stand while they used their picks to break to coal loose from the face, and load it into their bushel baskets. They put timbers in to keep the slate rock ceilings from collapsing...but sometimes that didn't work. Depending on the company, they got paid per bushel, or by the hour. Many of my relatives were hurt in explosions, or slate falls.
The coal was brought out of the mines in low slung, coal cars running on narrow tracks. It was crushed, washed and then graded. The water was mostly kept in holding ponds, but sometimes ran back into Pigeon Creek, and it was often totally black. Big steam engines that also burned coal would load up their cars at the mine steeple, and then haul it away several times a day. Coal was selling for about $2 a ton in those days, depending on the quality of the coal. The quality was determined by doing an assay on samples to measure how much rock content vs pure coal there was in that day's mining. The higher the rock content, the lower the price...and when it got too much rock in it, they would declare that the mine had run out, and they'd close the mine and move on.
Mining was a very hard life, and most would say that Lando Mines was not a very nice place - but I loved it there, and saw only beauty in the hills, trees, and in the hearts of the people who worked their lives away there.
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