The Hocking Valley coal towns that heated Columbus

A Columbus house built before the Second World War was designed around a fuel that came from somewhere else. This page is about the somewhere else: the Hocking Valley coal field in Athens, Hocking and Perry Counties, in southeastern Ohio, and the towns the mines built there. It sets out the seam as the state survey describes it, the canal and the railroad that carried the coal north, each town dated by its own marker, nomination or state report, and the strike, the mine fire and the production series as the record states them. It gives no advice about any house.

Last updated September 2026 · Ohio Historical Markers, the state geological survey's Bulletin 72 of 1995, two National Register nominations, a federal Bureau of Mines circular and the state's coal directory for 2022 were read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

Why a page about Columbus houses is about a field in southeastern Ohio

No coal was ever dug under Columbus. What a Columbus furnace burned had to be carried in; how much of the city burned it and when it stopped are on the page on heating a Central Ohio house. This page is the other end of that haul.

Ohio's chief inspector of mines reported Athens, Hocking and Perry Counties together as one Hocking Valley District, and the National Register nomination for the Hocking Valley Coal Company Town, on the National Park Service's form, places the Little Cities of Black Diamonds coal region in portions of Athens, Hocking and Perry counties in southeastern Ohio. Those counties are southeastern Ohio, not Central Ohio.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Division of Geological Survey, in Bulletin 72, its 1995 history of coal mining in Ohio, names the seam worked there the Middle Kittanning, or No. 6, coal, and says the Middle Kittanning of the Hocking Valley area is renowned in Ohio for its thickness of as much as 14 feet, the survey's own upper bound for the area and not a measurement of any one mine. The same agency ranks Perry County fourth and Athens County fifth among Ohio counties in all-time coal production, behind Belmont, Harrison and Jefferson.

The canal, and then the railroad to Columbus

The survey says the first coal shipped from the mines at Nelsonville, in Athens County, went out on the Hocking Canal in September 1840, and that from 1843 to 1869 the canal was the main means of carrying Hocking Valley coal to market, principally Columbus and Newark.

Bulletin 72 says construction of the Columbus and Hocking Valley Railroad, originally known as the Mineral Railroad, from Columbus to Athens was completed in 1870, and that in its first four years of operation, 1869 to 1872, the line shipped 838,389 tons of coal from Nelsonville, more than the whole Hocking Canal had carried from 1840 to 1860. The marker that dates the railroad's arrival at Nelsonville is quoted on the heating page and is not repeated here.

The towns, each dated by its own record

These towns are dated by four kinds of record, and most of the dates have one publisher, so each row names who says it.

Rendville is the one whose founding the record does not settle. The marker credits William P. Rend; the Ohio History Connection's own encyclopedia credits the Ohio Central Coal Company and calls Rend its founder. Both come from one organization and both give 1879. The marker also says that in 1888 Dr. Isaiah Tuppins was elected Rendville's mayor and calls him the first African American to be elected a mayor in Ohio, a superlative printed here in the marker's words, and that Richard L. Davis arrived in 1882 and was one of the labor organizers from the region who helped found the United Mine Workers of America in 1890.

Two more records belong beside the table. A marker at Shawnee says the village's Local Assembly number 169 of the Knights of Labor was organized in 1876 and that the Knights of Labor Opera House was built in 1881. At Glouster, Bulletin 72 records the same brick and concrete tipple at mine No. 22 in Trimble Township, Athens County, that the marker dates, and the demolition year rests on the marker alone.

The clay half of the same valley belongs to another page. Haydenville, in Hocking County, the Logan clay plants and the Nelsonville paving brick are on the page on what Ohio made for houses.

The operators, and the union

In 1883 the coal companies of the Hocking Valley consolidated. Bulletin 72 names the two companies that resulted as the Ohio Coal Exchange and the Columbus & Hocking Valley Coal & Iron Company, the second of them generally known as the Syndicate.

The same bulletin says the Ohio legislature passed the Jones Law in 1885, making the use of scrip and overpricing at company stores illegal; the strike marker records that change without giving the year or naming the law, so both belong to the survey. The Sunday Creek Coal Company held mines across the field, among them the San Toy mines in Perry County and the No. 6 mine at Millfield in Athens County, whose coal rights the bulletin says it acquired in September 1929.

The union side has markers of its own. The marker at Robinson's Cave, on a forested hillside south of New Straitsville, says that beginning in about 1870 labor-organizing meetings were held at the cave by various emerging unions including the Knights of Labor. Two rival miners' unions then joined forces in Columbus on January 25, 1890 to form the United Mine Workers of America, the one date here belonging to the city rather than the field. The marker for Christopher Evans says he was born in England in 1841, moved to New Straitsville between 1875 and 1877, organized union meetings in the cave, served as president of the Hocking Valley District of Ohio and its Relief Committee, and died in 1924.

The strike of 1884, and the fire that followed it

The marker for the Hocking Valley coal strike says the Ohio Miners' Amalgamated Association struck on June 23, 1884; Bulletin 72 gives the same day and adds that notice of a reduction came on June 20. The marker says the strike idled three thousand miners in 46 mines at Nelsonville, Murray City, New Straitsville, Carbon Hill, Buchtel, Longstreth and Shawnee; that mine count is the marker's alone, since the survey gives nearly 3,000 miners and no mine count anywhere. The marker also says the syndicate mines imported hundreds of immigrant strikebreakers and employed dozens of Pinkerton detectives as mine guards, and the survey says the disturbances caused Governor George Hoadly to send four companies of the Ohio militia into the area between August 31 and October 3, 1884.

Mines were set on fire on October 11, 1884, and the two publishers count them differently. The marker at New Straitsville says that starting that day unknown men pushed burning mine cars into six mines located around the village. Bulletin 72, citing the State Inspector of Mines for 1884, records seven: five near New Straitsville and Sand Run, one at Carbon Hill and one at Shawnee. The date is agreed and the count is not, so both print here. The strike ran on until March 1885 and ended with no victory for the miners, the marker giving the month and the bulletin March 18.

The fire outlasted all of it. The New Straitsville marker ends with the sentence that the World's Greatest Mine Fire endures. That is the marker's word, and this page asserts no present tense of its own: the most recent evidence either publisher gives is Bulletin 72's record, printed in 1995, that some fires continue to burn 110 years later and that reports of the mine fire were as recent as May 1993. The marker says that in 1938 the Works Progress Administration tried to create barriers to slow the fire by replacing coal and wood with brick and clay, a year and a method the survey does not carry; it puts the failed attempts in the mid-1930s. How much ground has burned is not settled at all, so no area prints here.

Millfield in 1930, and the office that inspected the mines

Eighty-two men were killed in the explosion of November 5, 1930 at the Sunday Creek Coal Company's No. 6 mine at Millfield, in Athens County. That is Bulletin 72's count and wording, taken from the Ohio mine inspector's report of 1930. A federal Bureau of Mines circular of October 1937, on coal-mine explosions in Ohio from 1874 to 1936, independently records an explosion in which 82 persons were killed and lists November 5, 1930 among five Ohio explosion disasters of five or more deaths, but names neither Millfield nor the mine nor the company; the count has two publishers and the tie to the place is the survey's.

Ohio had been inspecting mines for more than half a century by then. The survey says Ohio's mine law of 1874 was the first legislation in the nation enacted by state authority to provide protection to bituminous coal miners, a superlative given here in that agency's words, and that Andrew Roy was appointed by Governor William Allen in 1874 to be Ohio's first State Inspector of Mines, a post he served until his retirement in 1884. The same passage says only that disasters and near disasters in Ohio and neighboring states during the mid-1800s led to that legislation, so this page says the law followed and names no incident. Ohio incidents and the rules that followed each one are on the page on Ohio fires, floods and collapses.

The production record, county by county

Bulletin 72 carries the series, in an appendix titled Ohio coal production (in short tons) by county, 1800 to 1993, whose columns are the year, the total, the surface tonnage and the cumulative figure; a zero there is a reported zero, because the appendix prints NA where a figure is unknown.

In that county series Athens County's production peaked in 1920, at 6,872,646 short tons. Hocking County's highest year came earlier, in 1901, at 2,348,869. Perry County's is later than either, 1970, at 3,703,297 short tons, of which 1,146,763 came from surface mines; that peak belongs to the strip-mining era rather than the company-town era, which is why the three counties do not share one curve. Through 1993 the appendix puts cumulative production at 218,954,437 short tons for Perry County, 200,508,978 for Athens and 85,341,841 for Hocking, counted from first recorded years of 1816, 1820 and 1840.

The statewide table in the same bulletin gives the shape of the industry those towns belonged to: 503 coal mines in Ohio and an average of 20,101 people employed in 1884, rising to 1,051 mines and 50,267 employed in 1908. Ohio's own record year came later still, in 1970, which that table puts at 55,136,699 short tons.

The end of the series is as plain as the peak. In 1993, the last year the appendix covers, Athens and Hocking Counties reported no coal at all and Perry County reported 395,321 short tons, all of it from surface mines. The same agency's Ohio Coal Directory carries the record further: in its worksheet for 2022, one mine in Athens County reported 16,092 short tons, all from the surface, and no mine in Hocking or Perry County appears in that year's list. No operator is named here, because that is a present-day business rather than history.

What emptied the towns

Two things ran down at once. The mines and the towns declined, which the series above measures, and the Columbus houses that burned the coal stopped burning it, which the Census Bureau's heating-fuel tables measure decade by decade on the heating page; that page also carries the city's smoke ordinance of 1913, and the office that enforced it is one of those dated on the page on how Columbus came to inspect its houses. Athens, Hocking and Perry are not Central Ohio counties; the three that sit beside Franklin are counted on the page on Delaware, Licking and Fairfield County houses by the numbers.

The valley now, and the rules that came after

The mine-fire marker says the Wayne National Forest purchased many ruined fire lands in the 1930s. The United States Forest Service says the forest was pieced together from old farmland and mineland as part of a large-scale restoration project, calls it Ohio's only national forest of 244,000 acres, and puts one of its two ranger district offices at Nelsonville.

Bulletin 72 says Ohio's first surface-mine law was passed in 1947, and that the General Assembly later passed what the survey calls the 1972 Ohio Strip Mine Law after the earlier statutes proved weak in some respects. The Division of Mineral Resources Management's history page names that act the Strip Coal Mining Act and says it became effective in 1947, while another page of the same department gives 1948, so the year is not settled inside the department that keeps the record. The survey also says Ohio's 1972 law served as the model for the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, and it is the only source read here that states that link.

Two present-day bodies appear in this record only as marker sponsors: the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Council on the strike marker, and the Hocking Valley Scenic Railway on the Ohio Historical Marker for the railway at Nelsonville, which records the line's own listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. No source read here gives either a founding date, so neither carries a sentence beyond that.

What the record does not settle

No source read for this page gives the Columbus and Hocking Valley Railroad's charter year, the Sunday Creek Coal Company's founding year, or a founding date for Buchtel, Glouster, Murray City, Carbon Hill or Congo. Bulletin 72 names Sand Run and Carbon Hill among the mines fired in 1884 but not the county either is in. Whether the mine fire is burning in 2026 is not something either publisher states, and the county series has a gap between 1993, where Bulletin 72 stops, and 1996, where the coal directory begins.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• Ohio Chief Inspector of Mines, Annual reports of the chief inspector of mines, bound volume holding the Thirty-Fourth report for the year ending December 31, 1908 and the Thirty-Fifth for the year ending December 31, 1909, 1909-1910; read September 2026.
• United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places registration form, Hocking Valley Coal Company Town Historic District (Eclipse Company Town), Athens County, Ohio, reference number 07000579, 2007; read September 2026.
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey, Bulletin 72, History of the coal-mining industry in Ohio, by Douglas L. Crowell, 1995; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 1-5, Hocking Valley Railway, Athens County, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio History Central, New Straitsville Mine Fire, undated, read from a web.archive.org snapshot of March 8, 2016; read September 2026.
• United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places inventory-nomination form, Shawnee Historic District, Perry County, Ohio, reference number 76001507, 1976; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 11-64, Rendville, Breaking the Color Barrier, Perry County, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio History Central, Corning, Ohio, undated, read from a web.archive.org snapshot of September 5, 2015; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 3-5, Hisylvania Coal Company Mine No. 22, Athens County, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio History Central, Rendville, Ohio, undated, read from a web.archive.org snapshot of January 21, 2016; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 13-64, Knights of Labor Opera House, Shawnee, Perry County, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 6-5, The Hocking Valley Coal Strike 1884-1885, Athens County, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 9-64, Robinson's Cave, Perry County, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 16-64, Christopher Evans, Union Builder, Perry County, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Historical Marker program, Marker 12-64, World's Greatest Mine Fire, Perry County, undated; read September 2026.
• United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, Information Circular 6956, Coal-Mine Explosions in Ohio, 1874-1936, by C. W. Owings, October 1937; read September 2026.
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey, Ohio Coal Directory, 1996-2022 (mine-by-mine production workbook), undated; read September 2026.
• United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Wayne National Forest, About the Area, undated; read September 2026.
• United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Wayne National Forest home page, undated; read September 2026.
• Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Mineral Resources Management, History of Coal Mining and Regulation in Ohio, undated; read September 2026.

Common questions