Man Researches Andrico History
NEW ALEXANDRIA--When Bob Ackerman was seven years old, his family became the owners of a mining ghost town north of New Alexandria.
Seventy years later, Ackerman still has vivid memories of roaming among the shelves of the old company store in Andrico.
"It was a great place to play in," he noted. "Everything in the store was left like it was the last day they operated," in the 1920s.
"For a young boy, this was like a magic place," Ackerman recalled of his initial childhood visits to the property in 1932.
Also left behind by operators of the New Alexandria Coke Co. was a "dinkey" steam engine which ran on a narrow gauge track. It once hauled coal from several of nine Andrico mine shafts to a tipple, for loading into rail cars at a spur of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
"It was still sitting in its little garage," Ackerman said of the dinkey. "I would climb into it and pretend I was the engineer."
Most signs of the mining operation, including the dinkey and a "patch" town of about 30 double homes, since have faded from the landscape.
But Ackerman is hoping to preserve the memory of once-bustling Andrico.
Drawing upon old mine sketches, statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Mines, anecdotes shared by neighbors and photos obtained from other local historians and a descendant of the mine operator, Ackerman is working on a draft of a proposed book detailing the history of Andrico.
Once the volume is finished, he's hoping to make it available to area historical organizations.
It's natural for Ackerman to become a custodian for Andrico's history since he's already in charge of the property where the mine and town once stood.
Since 1984, when he retired from an overseas career as a chemical engineer, Ackerman has been making his home once more in the house his late father, Lloyd W., resurrected from the closed Andrico company store.
"My dad used some of the choice lumber from the old store in this house when he built it in 1942-43," Ackerman noted. The store's stone foundation remains in place about two-thirds mile to the west, but it has become obscured by vegetation.
Ackerman's house sits on a hill overlooking a branch of Tubmill Run--a tributary to Loyalhanna Creek which provided Andrico's developers and the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) a valley from which to access the area's Pittsburgh coal seam.
A portion of the PRR's rail spur has been supplanted by the main driveway linking Rt. 981 to Ackerman's estate. He has named the property "The Woodlands," reflecting his current interest in preserving its older trees and woodland habitat.
He reveals a less-inspired origin for the area's previous name. Andrico, he explained, is a half-hearted acronym derived from New Alexandria Coke Co.
"Although the company's name included 'coke,' there was never any coke produced at the site," Ackerman said, referring to the specially heated coal favored for fueling metal production.
Founder Richard Howard Jamison (known to colleagues as R.H.) never carried out his original plan of developing a row of beehive ovens parallel to the PRR spur and directly below the Andrico patch.
"They would have wanted to dig the coke out of the ovens, put it in a wheelbarrow and drop it right into the rail cars," Ackerman said.
R.H. Jamison was in his early 30s in 1907, when he formed New Alexandria Coke Co., headquartered in Greensburg.
He'd gotten his start in his family's Jamison Coal and Coke Co., serving as superintendent of three of his father, Robert's, Westmoreland County mines--at Luxor, Hannastown and Crabtree.
After launching his own coal operation at Andrico, R.H. continued to oversee two of the Jamison mines.
According to Ackerman, the younger Jamison purchased much of the Andrico property from Doty Guthrie, a member of one of the New Alexandria area's original Scots-Irish farming families.
Mining at Andrico was not a long-lived enterprise. Ackerman noted the first shipments of coal began in 1909, but the local seam was becoming "mined out" by about 1925-26.
Ackerman pointed out, "Most mining companies have a short life. Once you've mined out all the ore or coal, it's time for the operator to move on."
Still, he said, Andrico was one of the more efficient operations among the Jamison family mine holdings. In its peak production year of 1913, 283 employees brought forth 549,000 tons of coal (averaging about 1,940 tons per employee).
During their respective production peaks, Jamison Coal and Coke's 2,503 employees generated more than 3.2 million tons of coal (1,310 tons per employee) and Keystone Coal and Coke's 1,499 workers produced about 1.6 million tons (1,089 per employee).
According to Ackerman, R.H. would personally deliver the Andrico payroll from Greensburg.
During his initial years growing up in Greensburg, Ackerman saw the coal operator only a few times, on occasions when he would go to the New Alexandria Coke office to meet his mother, Anne.
His mother, who passed away in 1988, served as secretary and bookkeeper for the coal company, and its successor, Irwin Gas Coal Company, until the latter closed its doors in the 1950s.
It outlived its founder, R.H. Jamison, who died in 1946.
According to Ackerman, it was his mother who alerted his family in 1932, when Jamison decided to sell the defunct Andrico complex. "My parents bought 250 acres, all the old buildings and the old company store," Ackerman said.
In retrospect, Ackerman has decided that his mother's boss "was a very successful young entrepreneur in coal mining. He understood the technicalities of the field and had the right business sense."
At the time, though, the young Ackerman mainly noted, "He was a big man, and he liked baseball." Thus, Andrico had fielded its own sandlot team.
In 1932, when Ackerman first stepped foot in the vacant coal town, evidence remained of several amenities which had made Andrico fairly advanced for its time.
Located along the rail spur, a boiler house drew water from Tubmill Run, generating steam to power turbines and provide electric current to many of the mine-related facilities.
"Each of those miners' houses had one little light bulb hanging down on an electric cord," Ackerman said, adding, "Toward the end, some of the mines were electrified," allowing motorized units to haul coal to the pit mouth rather than the traditional horse- or mule-drawn wagons.
Ackerman noted Andrico's private power plant had shut down by about 1930. It wasn't until the mid-1940s that public electrical service reached the area, through a federal program.
Andrico also "had a crude phone system that ran between the company store and the No. 5 Mine," nearly two miles away.
Other modern marvels were introduced at the company store, a large, two-story building with an extensive basement and attic.
According to Ackerman, the company store featured a hand-operated elevator and, in the basement, a cold storage walk-in compartment for fresh meat. He explained the refrigeration system relied on ammonia and was powered by an electric motor.
"The company store and the superintendent's house were the only two places with indoor toilets," Ackerman added. All other homes were accompanied by outhouses.
Other items at the company store fascinated him as a child, revealing details of the daily routine of the store's operations.
"From the area where the cashier would sit, there was a system of steel wires leading to the different departments," including a meat market and a bread and cake department, Ackerman noted. "When they sold something, they would put the money in a small cup and shoot it along the wire back to the cashier."
"I'd pry around in the wooden floor and pick up an Indian head penny, or a nickel or dime," he noted. But no valuables were found in the store's safe.
While exploring the old store, Ackerman wisely decided to bypass the rows of canned peaches: "They were starting to swell. They were probably fermenting inside."
As in most coal towns, Andrico's company store was expected to supply all of its workers' household staples. "Just about anything anyone could want, they kept there," Ackerman noted.
Instead of dealing in cash, purchases were deducted from paychecks.
Ackerman related a neighbor's tale about his grandfather engaging in a surreptitious swap that likely would have been frowned upon by mine officials: "His grandfather led a pig on a rope into the woods near the patch late one night. Arrangements had been made for him to meet a miner, who would buy the pig."
According to Ackerman, Andrico's No. 2 mine mouth was located just 75 yards from the company store. But, by the time his family took over the property, "All you could see was a trench into the side of the hill. The pit mouth had fallen in."
Though his father eventually razed most of the old duplex workers' homes in the patch, Ackerman noted at least one of the wood frame houses still stands vacant on a neighboring property.
In addition, very little remains of Andrico's former rail and coal handling facilities, or of the boiler house. All were removed in preparation for the 1942 construction of the Loyalhanna Dam.
Ackerman noted, the federal Army Corps of Engineers "took a finger of ground that comes up my driveway about 200 yards. When the dam gates are closed, the driveway is under about two feet of water."
During such times, he uses an alternate access off Rt. 981, via the township-owned Andrico Road.
Along the driveway, the only sign of the former coal handling operation is a single foundation stone which once supported a tipple.
Some other Andrico structures have fared better through the years.
According to Ackerman, a handful of former supervisors' homes still remain and are now privately owned along Andrico Road.
The original mine superintendent's home, which was the most elaborate in the town, "burned about 30 years ago and was rebuilt," Ackerman recalled.
Also along the road is one of two successive Andrico public schoolhouses, which has been converted into a private residence.
Aside from the boiler house, the only other brick building at Andrico was a small one-room windowless structure which sat behind one of the supervisor's homes.
Ackerman recalled, during his early boyhood investigations of the town, he took a look inside the mysterious building, found rows of paper sticks packed in an old wooden box and took one to show his father.
His father "jumped several inches off the ground" when he saw the stick of dynamite his son had brought him.
Ackerman noted his late father's initial career was as a coal mining engineer, a profession which had involved stints working for the Jamisons as well as for Koppers of Pittsburgh.
The latter company at the time was involved in designing and constructing a more modern style of coke oven. When the younger Ackerman spent time on the Koppers payroll decades later, he was assigned to the company's tar products division.
Ackerman explained his father had lost his job with Koppers at the beginning of the Great Depression. Once the family obtained rights to the old Andrico complex, his father launched a second career raising mushrooms there.
"He grew them in the basement of the old company store and in the old boiler house, and later in a part of the No. 5 Mine," said Ackerman, who often accompanied his father to tend the crop.
According to Ackerman, his father learned the finer points of successful mushroom cultivation from an older Italian gentleman and continued to raise the prized fungi until his death in 1960.
"When they're growing, it's a job that keeps you busy 6 1/2 days a week," said the younger Ackerman. He noted, because the ripe mushrooms are highly perishable, haste must be made in harvesting them and getting them to market.
"The main market for selling them was in Pittsburgh, but the markets in the strip district were closed Saturday night."
To provide needed nutrients for the mushroom crops, equine manure regularly was hauled in from Frick Company mines in Fayette County, where mules and horses still were being used to cart coal from the mine depths.
The family didn't have to travel so far to look after its mushrooms once Lloyd Ackerman built them a new home in Andrico.
His son noted the house originally was used as a summer retreat, until the family made their move from Greensburg permanent in about 1947.
Coal operations commenced again in the Andrico area, with surface mining during World War II and in the 1970s.
With no pertinent state laws yet in place, Ackerman said, the wartime mining left an open scar.
According to Ackerman, the 1970s operation, which employed more modern methods, actually improved the local environment by reclaiming and sealing up the older mine workings.
He explained, "By keeping oxygen from getting into the mine, you stop the formation of acid mine drainage."
As a result, "The water in Tubmill Run is pure again and is supporting trout."
