A photograph taken about 1900 of miners’ safety lamps hanging on numbered pins in a colliery lamp and check off house.
From a series of articles that appeared in the Pottsville Republican and Herald in 1998:
The Mount Carmel Colliery was located east of Mount Carmel on the Shamokin Creek.
It was opened by a slope sunk 165 feet on the South Dip Bottom-Split Mammoth Vein by Z. P. Boyer and Thomas Jones in 1858. The first shipment of 344 tons of coal was made in 1859.
Boyer & Jones continued mining the slope gangways to 1861, when William Montelius & Company purchased the interests and continued mining to 1866m when it failed.
After adjusting its financial affairs, William Montelius & Company continued operations until 1880, then the breaker was destroyed by fire. During the same year, a Mr. Robinson became a member of the firm and, under a firm of Montelius, Righter & Robinson, the name of the colliery was changed to “Mount Carmel.” This new firm operated to 1882, when it failed.
Mr. Leisinring was admitted to the firm and it again resumed work at the colliery.
In 1883, the company sank a water shaft 375 feet and also sank the No. 3 inside slope on the Bottom-Split Mammoth Vein that later reached a total length of 900 feet.
In 1885, Montelius and other members of the firm retired and the mining was continued by Thomas M. Righter & Company until 1893, when it claimed its lease on the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company’s Mount Carmel Coal & Iron Company Tract was exhausted and it decided to surrender its lease on this tract. (The Month Carmel Colliery leased both from the Locust Mountain Coal & Iron Company’s lands and the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company’s Mount Carmel Coal & Iron tract).
After a long study of the mine by the engineers, it was agreed by the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company to terminate the lease of Thomas Richter & Company and allow it to abandon its section of the mine, allowing it to fill with water.
Thomas Righter & Company immediately began to erect a barrier dam to prevent the water from the abandoned workings from flowing into that part of the mine that was still active. The dam was completed by July 25, 1893.
Thomas Righter & Company continued operating the colliery on its original lease from the Locust Mountain Coal & Iron Company until 1905, when it was abandoned for the Sayre Colliery, which had sunk a large shaft to the north of the colliery.
The total shipments from the Mount Carmel Colliery were 3,771,379 tons.
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Article by Frank Blase, Historian, Reading Anthracite Company Historical Library, Pottsville Republican & Herald, January 3, 1998. Obtained from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.