History of Thurber (majority of information from WK Gordon Center web site)
Thurber, in Erath County west of Fort Worth, was once the largest coal-mining town in Texas. High quality bituminous coal was first discovered there in the mid-1880s. Within a few years, miners from all over the world had come to work the mines. The Texas and Pacific Coal Company was founded in 1888 to manage the mines. Thurber was a classic company town, with schools, churches, houses, library, saloons, entertainment, hotel, and city services all constructed and owned by the company. The miners received scrip (whendrawing against a future paycheck) that was good only at the company stores. The town was defended with a barbed wire fence and armed guards to keep out union organizers and other unauthorized personnel but was removed when the whole town was unionized in 1903.
In its heyday, Thurber had a population of over 10,000 residents from 18 nationalities, which made it the largest town between Fort Worth and El Paso. Thurber is remembered for its coal mines rather than cattle ranches and farms. Coal was the basis for the Thurber economy as the town sat on top of the only bituminous coal reserve in Texas. The mineral was discovered by a William Whipple Johnson in the mid 1880s. Johnson bought several thousand acres encompassing most of the underground mineral and in 1886 started large-scale mining operations. He closed the mines in 1888 rather than accede to certain demands of the miners. Later that same year, Johnson sold the property to Eastern investors who formed the Texas and Pacific Coal Company to settle the strike and continue operations.
All the mining around Thurber was underground through 15 different shafts. By 1900, there were more than 800 men producing between 1,500 and 2,000 tons of coal a day. Two work trains transported miners each day to the shafts. Burros pulled the coal cars in the mines at first, but by 1910, electric motors replaced the animals. Electric lights strung throughout the long underground passageways supplemented the carbide lamps attached to the miners helmets. Statewide, coal production reached 804,798 tons in 1901, growing to 1,247,988 tons by 1913. At the close of the 19th century, the value of the state's coal output exceeded the combined value of all other mineral products.
In order to take best advantage of its resources, the owners of Thurber initiated the manufacture of brick in 1897. During the late nineteenth century, brick making had become a leading industry in Texas, described as second only behind "car building and shop construction by railroads." Company officers knew that they had virtually inexhaustible supplies of shale at Thurber, so they sent samples to brick makers in St. Louis for analysis. When they received a positive response from St. Louis, the firm incorporated a new entity, the Green and Hunter Brick Company. Using the otherwise nearly worthless "nut and pea" to fire the kilns, workers at Thurber produced a reported 80,000 bricks daily. They made several varieties of brick, but specialized in road paving brick. Advertisements in the Texas Almanac reported the use of Thurber paving brick "in Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, Galveston, Beaumont, and other cities of the South." Furthermore, the ads boasted that structures in Dallas (the Dallas Opera House, among others) and Fort Worth (the Texas and Pacific Railway station and the First National Bank) had been built using brick from Thurber.
Initially workers excavated shale from a hill adjacent to the kilns. Then in 1903 the company laid a rail line from the brick plant to a richer shale deposit about a mile north of the kilns. Workers used electrically operated locomotives and dump cars on the spur line until gasoline-fueled engines came into use during the 1920s. Shortly after World War I the plant producing construction brick burned, leaving the company to concentrate on paving brick.
As railroads changed from coal to oil as fuel for their steam locomotives during the first quarter of the twentieth century, demand for the bituminous coal extracted by Thurber miners started to fall. After the company failed to meet demands for higher wages, the union workers organized a strike in 1921. In response to the diminished market the company continued to mine limited quantities of coal until the company closed the mines permanently in 1926. Changing economic times likewise effected this operation, for increased petroleum production led to expanded use of oil-based artificial asphalt as a paving material. Because asphalt was a far more cost effective material than using paving brick, the brick market declined as well. A reduced market, combined with general economic depression starting in 1929, led to the closure of the Thurber brick kilns in 1930.
Although petroleum development in Texas instigated the demise of Thurber, it insured the survival of the Texas and Pacific Coal Company. The company had hired William Knox Gordon, a native of Virginia, in 1889 as a civil and mining engineer. Improvements to the coal mining operations were among his early contributions. Realizing that coal could not continue to compete with other fuels, especially oil, Gordon began to seek petroleum in the area surrounding Thurber. As early as 1915 he discovered an oil well just west of Strawn which produced a great deal of excitement in the area, but not much oil. President Edgar Marston wrote from New York and told Gordon that the company needed to decrease the cost of coal production and increase production of oil.
Convinced that West Texas held oil, Gordon used his knowledge of both geology and the local terrain to continue his search. Professional geologists sent to the region to search for evidence of oil failed to find any, but Gordon was persistent. His enthusiasm unhindered by the low production of the 1915 well near Strawn, he conferred with a committee from the town of Ranger. They offered to exchange a lease for oil that might be produced from 80,000 acres in exchange for drilling four exploratory wells. Gordon convinced company directors to risk $20,000 on the venture. The first well at Ranger produced millions of cubic feet of natural gas, worth almost nothing on the market at the time, but it hinted at the presence of oil.
The second well, the J.H. McCleskey No. 1, blew in as an oil gusher in October 1917. The discovery opened the great Ranger Oil Field, which after expanding into other areas eventually produced almost four million barrels of petroleum and opened oil production in West Texas. As a result, the firm altered its name to Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company the next year. In 1923 the company relocated its headquarters from New York to Thurber to be closer to physical operations.
The income from oil produced on company leases could not save Thurber. After the mines and the brick kilns ceased operating, the company permitted workers to live rent-free in Thurber until they could relocate to other jobs. In 1933 the firm moved its corporate offices to Fort Worth. Some company businesses continued for a while, including the company store, which did business until 1935. Though Thurber once claimed to be the largest town between Fort Worth and El Paso, it was little more than a ghost town by the 1930s. Many of the workers' homes and other buildings were sold and moved to surrounding towns where they survive today, while other structures were dismantled and their materials salvaged for reuse elsewhere.
The former town site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Texas Historical Commission has placed several markers at the site, but only a handful of buildings remain. Among those are the general mercantile, the ice house smokestack, and many foundations all of which are located on private property. The Thurber Historical Association has moved a miner's residence, the Catholic Church, and the top of the bandstand to an area adjacent to the museum which is open to the public for special events.
Coal Formation
Coal is called a fossil fuel because it was formed from the remains of vegetation that grew as long as 400 million years ago. It is often referred to as "buried sunshine," because the plants which formed coal captured energy from the sun through photosynthesis to create the compounds that make up plant tissues. The most important element in the plant material is carbon, which gives coal most of its energy.
Most of our coal was formed about 300 million years ago, when much of the earth was covered by steamy swamps. As plants and trees died, their remains sank to the bottom of the swampy areas, accumulating layer upon layer and eventually forming a soggy, dense material called peat.
Over long periods of time, the makeup of the earth's surface changed, and seas and great rivers caused deposits of sand, clay and other mineral matter to accumulate, burying the peat. Sandstone and other sedimentary rocks were formed, and the pressure caused by their weight squeezed water from the peat. Increasingly deeper burial and the heat associated with it gradually changed the material to coal. Scientists estimate that from 3 to 7 feet of compacted plant matter was required to form 1 foot of bituminous coal.
Coal formation is a continuing process (some of our newest coal is a mere 1 million years old). Today, in areas such as the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia, the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia, and the Everglades in Florida, plant life decays and subsides, eventually to be covered by silts and sands and other matter. Perhaps millions of years from now, those areas will contain large coal beds.
Mingus Formation (the formation that provides Texas with coal)
Mining Coal
The most economical method of coal extraction from coal seams depends on the depth and quality of the seams, and the geology and environmental factors. Coal mining processes are differentiated by whether they operate on the surface or underground. Many coals extracted from both surface and underground mines require washing in a coal preparation plant.
Technical and economic feasibility are evaluated based on: regional geologic conditions; overburden characteristics; coal seam continuity, thickness, structure, quality, and depth; strength of materials above and below the seam for roof and floor conditions; topography (especially altitude and slope); climate; land ownership as it affects the availability of land for mining and access; surface drainage patterns; ground water conditions; availability of labor and materials; coal purchaser requirements in terms of tonnage, quality, and destination; and capital investment requirements.
Surface mining and deep underground mining are the two basic methods of mining. The choice of mining method depends primarily on depth of burial, density of the overburden and thickness of the coal seam. Seams relatively close to the surface, at depths less than approximately 180 feet (55 m), are usually surface mined. Coals that occur at depths of 180 to 300 feet (91 m) are usually deep mined but, in some cases, surface mining techniques can be used. For example, some western U.S. coals that occur at depths in excess of 200 feet (61 m) are mined by open pit methods, due to thickness of the seam (60-90 feet). Coals occurring below 300 feet (91 m) are usually deep mined
Types of Coal
Anthracite Coal
Anthracite is a hard, compact variety of mineral coal that has a high luster. It has the highest carbon count and contains the fewest impurities of all coals, despite its lower calorific content. Anthracite coal is the highest quality type of coal available.
Anthracite is the most metamorphosed type of coal (but still represents low-grade metamorphism), in which the carbon content is between 92% and 98%.[1][2] The term is applied to those varieties of coal which do not give off tarry or other hydrocarbon vapours when heated below their point of ignition. Anthracite ignites with difficulty and burns with a short, blue, and smokeless flame.
Other terms which refer to anthracite are black coal, hard coal, stone coal (not to be confused with the German Steinkohle or Dutch steenkool which are broader terms meaning all varieties of coal of a stonelike hardness and appearance, like bituminous and often anthracite as well, as opposed to Lignite, which is softer), blind coal (in Scotland), Kilkenny coal (in Ireland), crow coal (or craw coal from its shiny black appearance), and black diamond ("Blue Coal" is the term for a once-popular, specific, trademarked brand of anthracite, mined by the Glen Alden Coal Company in Pennsylvania, and sprayed with a blue dye at the mine before shipping to its Northeastern U.S.A. markets to distinguish it from its competitors). The imperfect anthracite of north Devon and north Cornwall (around Bude) in England, which is used as a pigment, is known as culm. Culm is also the term used in geological classification to distinguish the strata in which it is found and similar strata in the Rhenish hill countries are known as the Culm Measures. In America, culm is used as an equivalent for waste or slack in anthracite mining.
Bituminous Coal
Bituminous coal or black coal is a relatively soft coal containing a tarlike substance called bitumen. It is of higher quality than lignite coal but of poorer quality than anthracite coal. Bituminous coal is an organic sedimentary rock formed by diagenetic and submetamorphic compression of peat bog material. Bituminous coal has been compressed and heated so that its primary constituents are macerals vitrinite, exinite, and so on. The carbon content of bituminous coal is around 60-80%; the rest is composed of water, air, hydrogen, and sulfur, which have not been driven off from the macerals. There are several sub-types of bituminous coal: