Name/Title
S17.04.007Description
An entrance to the Somers underground coal mine operated near Cadiz, Harrison County, Ohio. The photograph was taken in the 1940s.
Location approximate to township.
REVIEW: May have been taken by Sturgeon & Fuller in the 1940s (check this by comparison with other Sturgeon & Fuller slides in OFR-1941). Mike Hansen said that many of the gray border slides were taken by Myron T. Sturgeon.
From Douglas Crowell in an e-mail to Lisa Long on July 19, 2016: I presume to be a one-man mine, or a mine operated by very few miners. The mine entrance has a familiar appearance to me as Ray Stahl's mine shown on the cover of Bull. 72. This kind of mine (and there were hundreds, if not thousands of them across northeastern, eastern and southeastern Ohio) was labor intensive (coal mined and loaded by hand generally), low budget, low volume produced, and mined from thin seams of coal (three feet or less). The Survey's Mine Locator interactive maps lists 8 underground coal mines that includes the name Somers: 1 located in Belmont Co., 4 in Carroll Co., 1 in Hocking Co., and 2 in Tuscarawas Co., and all were abandoned prior to 1928. J. Osborn Fuller and Myron T. Sturgeon did field work during the summer of 1941 to locate openings to abandoned underground mines in Mahoning Trumbull Counties (Open-File Report 1941-1). Side S17.04.007 of the Somers mine may be Sturgeon's, but there is no mention of a Somers mine in OF Report 1941-1. This photo looks to be of an active or recently idled underground mine. There doesn't appear to be any significant rusting on the mine car or the rails on which it stands, the red color of the shovel handle (in the mine car) looks to be in good shape, and so does the jack stand (used to support a drill used in conventional mining) that is leaning against some timbers at the left side of the photo.
This slide image included in the USGS National Digital Catalog for NGGDPP Grant G15AP00115 in FY2015.Context
Mine entrance with mine car and rock outcrop in the foreground. Somers underground coal mine near Cadiz, Ohio.