Don't miss Margaret Wicker's first-hand recollections about the Coal Glen Mine explosion that occurred in Chatham on 27 May 1925. The interview is just one of the resources about the mine disaster available on our website thanks to Paul Wilson, who has collected information about the event for years. A small part of the interview is included here:
"We were chopping cotton out in this field. I was just little, and my mother had some colored women and white women helping her chop cotton. There was a whole bunch of them out there. I was playing in the dirt with a little black girl.
All at once, we heard this big noise, like booooom, and black smoke just boiled and rolled up in the sky. All the women started screaming and hollering. Their husbands worked in the mine.
Everybody that lived up and down in those houses knew what the explosions were, and people were just hollering and screaming and going every which way. It just got plum dark, black like night, with all that black dust and smoke. In just a few minutes, there was another explosion.
My daddy didn't work in the mine, but he worked with them. He cut timbers and cross ties and things like that for them. He got in somebody's car and came out here to our house to get some sweet milk, because two men had went to open the air shaft's doors. When the second explosion came, it blew them back up the slope and 'bout killed them. I don't know why, but they wanted milk for them.
That's where I was, somewhere along here in the middle of this field. I was just a young 'un and scared to death. I know there wasn't any more chopping cotton that day."
The Coal Glen-Farmville Mine Disaster was the worst industrial accident in North Carolina history--killing 53 men, making 38 women widows, leaving 79 children fatherless, making Farmville a ghost town, and virtually putting an end to coal mining in North Carolina. Paul Wilson's collection of resources relating to this Chatham County disaster is provided on our website:
https://chathamhistory.org/resources/Documents/PDFs/ResearchArticles/CoalGlenMiningDisaster/CoalGlenMiningDisasterMainPage.pdf
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