Derry Township man cultivates museum on the Web

Raymond Washlaski can't explain why he does what he does, he just does it.

For the past half-dozen years or so, Washlaski has been working on a World Wide Web site devoted to the history of coal and coke in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The 59-year-old Derry Township man is a trained engineer, not a historian, and yet the Web site, at www.patheoldminer.rootsweb.com , appears to be a hit with an average 3,401 visitors a month. Moreover, the site exemplifies a growing trend: history on the Internet replete with original documents and vintage photographs.

According to Elizabeth Ricketts, a professor of labor history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the kind of information contained in Washlaski's "virtual museum" is the type that until now has been locked away in an archive, likely in another part of the country.

"For me and my students, the wealth of new sources appearing online is a gold mine," Ricketts said in an e-mail message. "I think that the Internet is wonderful for local communities and historically minded citizens with contributions to make to the collective knowledge."

Washlaski is decidedly modest about his Virtual Museum of Coal Mining in Western Pennsylvania, which includes several thousand "pages" of text, hundreds of photographs, and dozens of daily e-mail inquiries from individuals looking to track down information on a great-grandfather or grandfather who worked in this or that mine 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 years ago, during the region's halcyon days as the center of the nation's bituminous coal and coke trade.

"I don't know what the motivation is," Washlaski said. "Some days I work all day. Suddenly, it's the middle of the night."

All of this started five or so years ago after Washlaski got to know a retired miner who had been invited to speak to his son Ryan's Boy Scout troop. That man's name was Pete Starry Jr., of New Alexandria.

Starry, now 85 and a bit of a recluse, according to Washlaski, told stories of the mines in and around Salemville, which had been located along Route 22 in Salem Township, near Quality Road and Township Route 854.

Starry, in fact, carried around in his head quite a bit of history, much of it gleaned from firsthand experience as a miner and as president (in the 1940s and 1950s) of United Mine Workers of America Local 5763. He had also gotten to know a number of mine owners and superintendents.

As their friendship deepened, Starry and Washlaski began to take car trips to long-abandoned mine sites, coke ovens and company towns. In addition to Salemville, Starry was familiar with nearby Shieldsburg and Frogtown. Their travels eventually extended far and wide in Westmoreland County, and it seemed Starry knew something about every little dot (or former) dot on the map.

Even though his own father had worked in mines in the Harmarville area of Allegheny County, Washlaski hadn't paid any attention until then to the coal mining story. After a while he realized that some basic information about coal mining in southwestern Pennsylvania, the names and locations of the mines themselves and the identities of the miners, would be lost if someone like himself didn't collect and index it.

This is why Washlaski's Web museum encompasses not only Westmoreland but Fayette County, which together formed the Connellsville Coke Region, whose Pittsburgh Coal Seam produced the highest grade coking coal in the world. But Washlaski wasn't satisfied with just two counties. He undertook cataloging coal-mining activity in Indiana, Washington and Allegheny counties as well.

To date, Washlaski estimates he has nearly completed Westmoreland County and "50 to 60 percent" of Fayette and Indiana counties. Washington and Allegheny counties, however, are not nearly as far along.

According to Pam Seighman, curator of the Coal and Coke Heritage Center at Penn State's Fayette Campus near Uniontown, Washlaski "is such a quiet person" that you would never know, as he sits for hours reading state mine reports from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, that he is doing anything special.

The names and other materials collected and posted by Washlaski on the Internet are "invaluable," Seighman said. "You can't get (this information) in collected form at any other location," she said.

Washlaski's use of the Internet is similarly inspired, Seighman said. As a general rule, Seighman believes the Web is "making a great deal of difference" to people living in one part of the world whose lives would be enriched by information stored elsewhere. Before the Web, the two rarely got together. Now, as in Washlaski's Virtual Museum, they do every day, and in some cases with remarkable results.

Joanne Gottke, a retired school teacher residing in San Diego, Calif., was searching the Internet for information on an old western Pennsylvania iron furnace she remembered from discussions years before, when she was a girl growing up in Charleroi. She eventually found what she wanted on another Washlaski site devoted to iron furnaces (paironworks.rootsweb.com).

That site led to the Virtual Mine Museum. Afterward, Gottke got to thinking about the circa-1909 book handed down from generation to generation, beginning with her grandfather, Jacob Frick Rowe, and her grandmother, Annetta Zudel Rowe.

Jacob Rowe had been postmaster in Jacobs Creek at the time of the Darr Mine disaster in 1907. Annetta Rowe was a leader in relief efforts after the disaster, which killed 239 miners and left behind hundreds of widows and orphaned children.

The book, which Gottke had placed in a dresser drawer, was a publication of the Darr Mine Relief Committee and contains the names of every organization, business and individual who contributed to the relief fund (a total of $97,062). Slipped inside the book were several pages of names of the victims, the number of their dependents and, in some cases, their house numbers in Jacobs Creek.

Uncertain how her nieces and nephews would eventually regard the book, Gottke decided, after e-mail exchanges with Washlaski, to have him find a suitable repository for the manuscript. Washlaski agreed to try and turned to Seighman.

Seighman was overwhelmed. "No one ever knew such a book existed," she said.

The Virtual Mine Museum's "guestbook" contains queries such as the one from Larry Gerulis, of Dallas, Texas, who e-mailed Washlaski that he was "trying to research the history of a company by the name of American-Slovak Coal and Coke Co."

Doug Merryman posted this note from Rio Vista, Calif.: "Searching for a mine around the Nilan/Pt. Marion area of Fayette County. In the year of 1900, my G-G-Grandfather was a miner in the area."

Inez Beatty Doberneck e-mailed Washlaski from Tampa, Fla., that she had grown up in Marguerite, that viewing the Web site "brought back memories" and that she "loved" seeing the photos. "I recognized many of the names. My father, John F. Beatty, mined the coal opposite Rt. 30 in Beatty, Pa. I am now 84 years old."

The names and locations of the mines, the names of the miners, and their mutual histories form the core of Washlaski's efforts.

Sometimes, the information can be haunting. Washlaski researched the Hill Farm Mine and Coke Works in Dunbar. An explosion at the mine in June 1892 killed scores of miners. They include the German immigrant John Cope, the fully bearded Martin Cavanaugh, and Thomas McCleary, whose "check Number 23" was stuffed in his shirt pocket. The bodies of all the Hill Farm miners were recovered in March-April 1894, nearly two years after the blast.

A Penn State-trained engineer who worked for Gulf Oil, Washlaski in recent years turned to archaeology to make a living. Married to a school teacher who shares his enthusiasm for French and Indian War re-enacting, Washlaski was slowed by a heart attack last spring. Forced to sit still, he has devoted more time than ever to the Virtual Mine Museum on the Internet.

"There is so much information, it's hard to imagine it ever being completed," Washlaski said.