Mammoth Mine Explosion

On January twenty-seventh, eighteen ninety-one, an explosion tore through the Mammoth Number One Mine, operated by the H.C. Frick Coke Company in western Pennsylvania. One hundred nine coal miners were killed. It was the worst disaster ever recorded in a bituminous coal mine in the United States up to that time. Seventy-nine of the dead were buried together in a mass grave in Saint John's Cemetery nearby.

The force of public grief and outrage pushed Pennsylvania's legislature to act. New laws followed that strengthened safety inspections throughout the bituminous coalfields, a region that had expanded rapidly to feed the coke ovens of Carnegie's steel empire. The Mammoth explosion, like Avondale before it, became a marker in the slow, painful story of mine safety reform, each disaster purchased at the cost of men who never came home.