Thomas White could tell the air was getting worse by watching a flame.

There was not much else to look at.

White was hundreds of feet beneath Cherry, Illinois, inside a coal mine that had been burning since Saturday afternoon. He was part of a group cut off from both shafts, with smoke and the suffocating mixture miners called blackdamp pushing farther into the workings. They had already tried finding another way out. There wasn’t one.

So the men started building a wall.

They blocked the passage behind them with mine material, attempting to keep the contaminated air on one side and whatever breathable atmosphere remained on the other. White later remembered the enclosed space as roughly 300 feet long and twelve feet wide.

For a while their lamps still burned. Then, on Tuesday night, the flames began to flicker. Soon they went out.

Above ground, crews were trying to control the fire, restore access, and decide when the mine could be entered safely. Below ground, the trapped group had a narrower problem: keep smoke and blackdamp outside the barricade, conserve the breathable air inside, and survive on seep water until someone reached them.

It started with hay

The official 1910 Illinois investigation traced the beginning to something almost embarrassingly ordinary. A pit car carrying five or six bales of hay had been sent underground for the mine’s mules. The electrical lighting system was out of service, so work areas were being illuminated with open oil torches. At the second-vein landing, the hay car was left near, and probably directly beneath, one of those torches.

The hay caught fire sometime around 1:30 on the afternoon of November 13. At that stage it was still, in principle, a manageable problem.

Instead of extinguishing the hay where it sat, workers moved the burning car through the mine. State mine inspector Thomas Hudson later estimated that the ventilation current moving through that area was traveling at about 700 feet per minute. The burning load was shifted from place to place until the heavy pine timbers overhead caught.

Eventually the car itself went into the sump at the lower vein and the hay fire was extinguished. The mine was already burning. Smoke made the overhead timber fire increasingly difficult to reach. Ventilation that ordinarily kept men alive underground could now feed the flames and carry smoke through the workings.

Workers moved the burning hay car through a ventilation current that the state mine inspector later estimated at about 700 feet per minute. By the time the car itself was extinguished, overhead timbers were burning and the same airflow that normally cleared the workings was carrying heat and smoke through the mine.

People were still going down

One of the ugliest parts of Cherry happened before anyone had time to invent an organized rescue operation. Men went back into the mine.

Some were employees. Some were local volunteers. Contemporary accounts record repeated attempts to reach trapped miners through smoke and heat. Several rescuers died doing it. A federal engineering account published the following year described a twelve-man rescue party entering without artificial breathing equipment and being killed.

That matters because the equipment required to enter a poisoned mine was only beginning to become a serious American institution. The U.S. Geological Survey had recently started training mining engineers and miners in artificial breathing apparatus. A rescue substation at the University of Illinois in Urbana had men learning to work in gas-filled environments while wearing oxygen equipment. When word of Cherry reached the station, mining engineer R. Y. Williams and an assistant were put on a train with rescue gear. Other federal specialists followed.

Williams and Webb tried the shaft in oxygen helmets. The heat drove them back.

The mine presented a particularly nasty engineering problem. Ventilation could clear poisonous gas, but air could also revive or intensify the fire. Closing the mine could starve the fire of oxygen, but anyone still alive below needed oxygen too.

Behind the wall

George Eddy knew mines. That may have mattered more than anything else the trapped group possessed.

The Carnegie Hero Fund’s record says Eddy and another experienced man attempted to lead nineteen miners out, but smoke and blackdamp blocked their routes. Eventually they directed the group in building barricades.

Thomas White’s later account gives the physical dimensions of their world. The barricaded area ran roughly 300 feet through a passage only about twelve feet wide. The ground was cold and wet. Water seeping through the mine became their drinking supply. The wall kept much of the smoke and contaminated atmosphere away, but the air inside was finite.

They had some food at first. Then they did not. They had lamps. Then those failed too.

White remembered the darkness after the last lights went out more vividly than most other details. They prayed. Some wrote messages to their families. Mostly they waited.

Mine rescue was still becoming a trained service

When Cherry burned, American mine-rescue practice was still being organized around trained crews and artificial breathing apparatus. Federal engineers and University of Illinois personnel had begun practicing in smoke- and gas-filled rooms before the disaster, and oxygen-equipped specialists were among the people sent to Cherry.

The 1910 federal engineering report devotes pages to the breathing apparatus used in this period because American rescuers were still evaluating several designs. Some used compressed oxygen. Others chemically generated it. The equipment could weigh twenty pounds or more and required training under simulated underground conditions.

That training was not decorative. Federal engineers had already learned that putting an inexperienced miner into breathing apparatus for the first time during an actual disaster was a good way to create another emergency. Their training rooms were deliberately filled with smoke or gas, darkened, obstructed with timbers and debris, and used for sustained physical work while the wearer breathed through the apparatus.

At Cherry, helmet-equipped rescue crews went ahead of ordinary rescuers, testing gases and checking routes before unprotected men followed. A Chicago Fire Department engine was brought into the operation. Hose was lowered down the main shaft. Water finally reduced the underground fire enough for rescuers to push farther into the workings.

Even then, the place was unstable. Heat had damaged the mine roof. Blackdamp remained in the workings. Helmet men had to precede other crews because a passage that was usable at one point could become lethal again.

November 20

By then, almost everyone had stopped expecting this part of the story.

A week had passed. The federal engineers were probing farther into the mine while other crews removed bodies and shored damaged areas. On November 20, rescuers reached a barricaded area and discovered men alive behind it.

Sources do not give one perfectly consistent survivor count. Modern Illinois histories generally describe 21 men spending the week behind the barricade, while the contemporary federal engineering account says 20 living men were taken from the room. Newspapers published still other preliminary figures while the rescue was unfolding. The safest wording is therefore “roughly twenty men” unless a sentence is tied to one named source.

White remembered being too weak near the end to do much more than lie on the floor. Finally, some of the stronger men ventured beyond the barricade looking for water and a way out. They found rescuers.

259

The rescue produced exactly the kind of headline newspapers love because it briefly suggested the disaster might have a different ending.

It did not.

The final accepted death toll is 259 men and boys. The victims included immigrants from numerous European communities, fathers and sons, and men who had gone back into the mine to help people who were not members of their own families. The disaster left hundreds of dependents behind.

Early government and newspaper accounts reported substantially higher totals. One 1910 federal publication still used a figure above 300. The Illinois mine inspector’s preliminary accounting also contained people initially thought lost who later turned out to be alive elsewhere in the state.

That is why I would use 259 throughout the finished article and explain the discrepancy once. Bad casualty accounting is common after large disasters. Repeating the largest early number because it sounds more dramatic is not historical rigor.

Illinois built rooms for the next disaster

Cherry did not invent concern about mine safety. Federal mine-accident investigations were already underway, and the terrible mining disasters of 1907 had already pushed the issue into national politics. The institution that became the U.S. Bureau of Mines was not conceived from one fire in one Illinois town.

Cherry did make certain arguments considerably harder to postpone.

In a special legislative session in 1910, Illinois authorized three mine-rescue stations, at La Salle, Springfield and Benton. The state says Illinois thereby became the first in the nation to provide statewide mine-rescue teams and facilities. The stations were meant both to dispatch trained rescuers to accidents and to teach miners how to use rescue equipment so mines would eventually possess trained teams of their own.

Workers’ compensation changed too. Illinois enacted its system in 1911.

The connection to Final Vestige’s The Rescue Machine Nobody Had Ever Needed is unusually good here. At Cherry, American mine rescue was still building the trained personnel, breathing equipment and institutional structure needed to enter lethal environments. Twenty-nine years later, when Squalus went to the bottom off New Hampshire, a specialized submarine rescue system already existed before the accident occurred.

The stations never went away

Illinois still maintains mine-rescue capability. The state says the system has existed continuously since 1910. Its underground rescue teams are still made up of miners trained to enter dangerous mine atmospheres. Modern crews wear self-contained breathing apparatus and train for underground fires, gas conditions, collapses and trapped miners.

The equipment would be incomprehensible to the men at Cherry in some respects. The underlying problem would not.

There is an atmosphere underground in which a person cannot breathe. Someone has to go into it anyway.

What the barricade changed

The barricade did one essential job: it reduced the movement of smoke and contaminated mine air into the space where the group waited. It did not solve the other problems. Their food ran out, their lamps went dark, the ground was cold and wet, and the breathable air remained finite. Seep water helped keep them alive while rescue crews worked back into the mine. On November 20, oxygen-equipped rescuers reached the barricaded section and found the group alive.

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Sources & Further Reading

• Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report on the Cherry Mine Disaster (1910). The principal state investigation into the fire, mine conditions and casualty accounting.
• Herbert M. Wilson, federal mine-safety engineering report (1910). A near-contemporary technical account of the rescue operation, breathing apparatus and discovery of living miners behind the barricade.
• Illinois Department of Natural Resources, “Cherry Mine Disaster”. Current state history, survivor material and the accepted 259-person death toll.
• University of Illinois Archives, “The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster”. Documents the university mine-rescue station and dispatch of oxygen-equipped specialists.
• Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Mine Rescue. Current state mine-rescue system and its historical roots.