Fraterville: The Letters Left Behind

A few miles west of here, near the small town that no longer exists, the worst mining disaster in Tennessee history unfolded on the morning of May nineteenth, nineteen oh two. At seven twenty in the morning, an explosion tore through the Fraterville Mine. The cause was almost certainly methane gas, allowed to build up by inadequate ventilation. Two hundred sixteen men and boys went into the mine that day. None came out alive.

The community of Fraterville was erased in a single morning. All but three of the town's adult men were dead. More than a hundred women were widowed in a matter of hours. Close to a thousand children lost their fathers. Some families lost as many as eight members in the same explosion.

Twenty-six miners survived the initial blast, taking shelter in a side passage. Rescuers reached them eventually, but too late. They had all suffocated. But in those final hours, while they still had air enough to write, some of them did exactly that. They left letters.

Jacob Vowell wrote to his wife, Sarah Ellen. He described his faith. He asked her to care for their children. His fourteen-year-old son, Harvey, was with him in the mine. Near the end, Jacob wrote: 'Ellen remember me as long as you live. Goodbye darling.'

Other letters followed the same pattern: tell the family I love them, make sure the children are cared for, do not grieve too long. Men who knew they were dying wanted most of all not to be forgotten.

The Fraterville Mine disaster prompted urgent calls for mine safety reform in Tennessee, and the farewell letters survived. They are still read aloud at memorial services today, more than a hundred and twenty years later, as evidence that the people who built this region with their labor left something of themselves behind.