Down in the mines
Tourists get a feel for the dangers of coal-mining by actually going into a mine.
BECKLEY, W.Va. (AP) -- The shuttle cars clatter forward, a metal-on-metal squeal bouncing off the rock walls of a passageway growing darker by the second. Then, abruptly, they stop. George Archibald hops off.
"This is our claustrophobia stop here," he bellows. "If anybody is apprehensive about being in here, I can take you back outside without disrupting our tour."
Satisfied fear is in check, Archibald returns to the driver's seat. The cars lurch deeper into the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine, one of the few underground operations where tourists are not only welcome, but wanted.
From April to November, seven ex-miners guide some 50,000 people through 1,500 feet of underground workings that last produced coal around 1910. Fifty years later, the city of Beckley bought the mine.
"They turned a coal mine into a gold mine," Archibald says. "People come from all over the world to see this mine -- from Sweden and England and all kinds of places."
Increased interest
This year, there may be more than usual. Donna Totten, who arranges group tours, says inquiries have shot up since January, when two West Virginia mining accidents that killed 14 men dominated the nation's news coverage. So far, 18 miners have been killed in West Virginia mines this year.
A school from Upshur County, home of the Sago Mine where 12 men died, is sending pupils in May. But Totten says a school in Logan County, home of the Alma No. 1 Mine where two other men died, doesn't plan to allow children underground. Instead, they will tour a half-dozen historic buildings, play in the science museum and visit the 19th-century frontier village.
Archibald's group has no such trepidation. They are eager to see the mine used to film episodes for The Discovery Channel and scenes in "Matewan," the 1987 movie about the bloody battle to unionize a coal mine.
At his second stop, Archibald explains the job of a fireboss, who walks every foot of a mine to make sure it's safe for a crew. A chalkboard this day shows Superintendent Melvin Polk cleared the first checkpoint at 8:11 a.m.
How it was done
Archibald demonstrates the tools of the old coal mining days, from the timbers that hold up the roof to a safety lamp that requires 16 percent oxygen to stay lit and can signal the presence of deadly methane gas. He points to dirty, yellowed cloth and explains how miners hang the canvas to block and divert bad air.
Occasionally, he pauses to catch his breath. He worked underground for 27 years, and his lungs are the worse for it.
Archibald dons a carbide light, an old-fashioned headlamp with an open flame, and explains how it works.
Then he turns it off. For a few seconds, the mine is pitch black. There is no light, no sound, no sense of direction. Then the flame pops back on, and several people let out their breath.
Archibald displays the round metal tags miners used to mark their carts. In the early days, they were expected to dig and load 10 cars a day, 20 cents each. "Back in 1890, that's not a bad piece of change," he says.
But at the next stop, he shows how hard they worked for it.
Grueling work
With a pick and shovel, miners dug rock and dirt from under a 36-inch seam, then sat on the ground with an auger, a metal bar pushing against their chests, to drill holes one at a time, by hand. Each was loaded with a gunpowder shot wrapped in waxed paper.
"Then you yell, 'Fire! Fire! Fire in the hole!' and you're gonna hustle on out of there. In fact you've got very, very little time to get out," Archibald says. "Most coal miners, they just take and fall down on their face right there -- because they're gonna end up that way anyhow, and then you're gonna have to go find your hat."
At the final stop, steel plates and 4-foot rods called bolts have replaced timbers, and there are machines to help cut the coal. As mines modernized, Archibald says, companies stopped paying by the ton and started paying by the hour.
Tourists leave the mine with an appreciation for hard work. But Polk and Archibald say it's a window into the past, not to be confused with modern mines. Coal mines today are still dangerous, but highly mechanized operations.
"I can't imagine what it's like today," says tourist Becky Patterson, from Elizabeth City, N.C. "Now I want to see what it's like."
So does Anna Davis, of Orville, Ohio.
"In college, I studied history, so I know about the labor movement in the coal industry," says Davis, 38. "What this was is halfway between the historical way of mining and what I saw on 'Modern Marvels."'
Side trip
Patterson and her husband, Chip, had been driving home from a visit with their son in Kentucky when they began to pass mining operations and notice visible coal seams in the geology alongside the highway.
"I said, 'Man, that would be cool to see,"' Becky recalls. "Then we saw a sign and said, 'Oh! We can go!"'
They took a few wrong turns, as signs in town are easy to miss. But the journey was worth it.
"It's one job I wouldn't want," says Chip, amazed by slow technological advances and practices such as redirecting bad air with cloth. "How many times did a person get killed before they figured that out?"
Polk, who spent 20 years with Westmoreland, Pittston and Maben coal companies before coming to the exhibition mine 16 years ago, says he can't imagine a job that wouldn't let him work underground.
"You miss it if you don't go," he says. "It's the smell of it, really. I can't explain it. A mine just has this smell."
At one mine, Polk had to lie on his stomach or back on a flat car, basically a metal sled with runners.
"Whatever position you started in, you had to stay in for 30 minutes to get back to the work area, then crawl out," he says. "We had machinery then, but you had to work on your hands and knees.
The 27-acres park features a half-dozen antique-stuffed buildings.