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The Crow's Nest Mine died in 1944. Its bones lie buried beneath Bovard, a little town near Greensburg.
Ghosts still shimmer round the place, even in bright daylight.
Ghosts of hundreds of jobs nobody does anymore, titles that live only in looping copperplate handwriting in company ledgers and history archives. Manly jobs, like:
- motorman,
- car-catcher,
- dynamite-shooter,
- digger,
- pick-miner,
- pinner,
- trackman,
- blacksmith,
- tipple-boy,
- fire-boss,
- heavy-iron man.
The tipple still moulders at the mine's mouth. Swifts dive for insects, and crickets sing in the goldenrods . There still is life here, but it's far from lively.
In 1910 Crow's Nest Mine was drilled from this hilltop down to the fat black coal seam that kept Keystone Coal and Coke Co. busy here for more than three decades. The tiny village at its foot turned into a town. It was three streets -- First, Second and Third -- with:
- 120 company houses,
- auditorium,
- company store,
- ballfield,
- school,
Three Churches:
- Reformed Protestant,
- Roman Catholic,
- Eastern Orthodox.
The town was re-christened Bovard, for Harry Bovard, Keystone Coal and Coke's owner.
Families followed, immigrants mostly, none with labor-union affiliations:
- Hungarians,
- Poles,
- Lithuanians,
- Italians,
- Slovaks,
- Slovenes,
- Austrians,
- Irish,
- Americans
- and "Colored."
Some lived in the $4 per month company-owned duplexes. Others lived in shanties or boarding houses. Some walked in from nearby Roseytown. The town's 20 black families lived in their own enclave.
By 1915, Bovard was a booming town, with 456 people working in the mine or company-owned businesses. That year they pulled 726,000 tons of coal from the ground.
The cages took down men with names like:
- George Plonsky,
- Shorty Nelson,
- Nick Bolivich,
- Denver Miller,
- Sam "Crackshot" Bryant,
- Oscar Boehme,
- Attilio Marazza.
They worked 10 hours for $1.25 per day in a maze of miles-long tunnels, hunched over and chipping away at the walls, pinning up ceilings as they went, shoveling, driving mules, laying track and dynamite. Their handiwork is still down there, sealed in the dark.
After work, they played in brass bands, formed fraternal groups, a baseball team, even a Ku Klux Klan klavern. On Saturdays they whooped it up in Greensburg.
They ran a tab at the company store. The Coal and Iron Police hung around the roads into town, and kept out salesmen and farmers, anyone who might undercut prices at the Keystone-owned enterprise. Hoboes were told to keep moving. Troublemakers disappeared.
Accidents happened.
There were plenty of ways to die in Crow's Nest Mine:
- Back broken by fall of slate,
- Face and breast punctured by flying coal from blast,
- Crushed by mine car,
- Fatally burned by explosion of gas and dust,
- Instantly, by falling down the shaft.
The Isabella brothers, Alphonse and "L.," both died in the same slate fall.
On December 17, 1936, Walter Haynackie, a Polish digger who'd worked at Crow's Nest since 1918, was killed instantly in a roof fall. He left behind a wife and 10 children.
Bovard is still alive. It's neatly mowed and trimmed, its once identical company houses now done-up in various combinations of vinyl siding and backyard decking.
The company store is now a gift shop and hot-air ballooning outfit. The Community Center is a garage. The railroad spur is abandoned to weeds. Cars and trucks on Bovard Tunnel Road take turns squeezing beneath the tracks through a neat one-lane stone archway. They beep and flash their headlights to avoid colliding in the dark.
Crow's Nest Mine is tucked out of sight behind a bank of knotweed, up beyond where First Street turns to ruts. The two-lane where two generations walked up and back with each changing shift is lined with abandoned machinery, concrete pipes, rotting utility poles.
Up there now, like a buzzard in the bones, a "bituminous reclamation" outfit sifts the trucked-in tailings of other coal mines, searching for something combustible in the bygone generation's throwaways. Heavy machines send up rooster-tails of dust.
Crow's Nest is not a dead place. Not yet.
But over by tipple when the light is right, you see them shimmer through the haze. They're Crow's Nest's manly, dirty ghosts, coming out from under ground again:
- John Bahorick, coal loader.
- Domenic Battalino, blacksmith.
- Charles "Tough" Burk, motorman.
- Zion McClain, miner.
- Lukac Bolha, miner.
- Elmer Sphon, miner.
.is a weekly feature produced by Post-Gazette photographers and writers who roam the region to capture close-up slices of life. Can you point us to a special person or place, experience or story? E-mail us at here@post-gazette.com.
HERE.
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First Published: October 17, 2004, 4:00 a.m.
