Rolling Mill Mine Disaster

On July tenth, nineteen oh two, a gas explosion tore through the Cambria Iron Company's Rolling Mill Mine on this hillside above Johnstown, killing one hundred twelve bituminous coal miners. Most of them were immigrants. It was the first of four major mining disasters in Pennsylvania that together made the nineteen hundreds the deadliest decade in American underground coal mining history.

The Rolling Mill explosion joined a national outcry already inflamed by the great anthracite coal strike of nineteen oh two, which had shut down mines across the region and forced President Theodore Roosevelt into unprecedented federal arbitration. The combination of catastrophic death tolls and organized labor pressure finally moved the Pennsylvania Legislature to create a state Department of Mines in nineteen oh three, one of the earliest mine safety regulatory agencies in the country. One hundred twelve men died on this hillside so that safety inspectors could eventually have the authority to go underground.