About the only thing missing at Brice Rush’s Coal Mining Museum is the sign at the edge of the driveway inviting you in.
For those in the know, the old coal cars arranged on the front lawn are a dead giveaway. And then there’s the blue mine rescue capsule standing guard behind the coal car being pulled by a wooden mule. It was hewn from a log by Bob Varasko and its mission these days is greeting the traffic on State Rt. 88 as the road crests the hill above Carmichaels, then drops to the Paisley Intersection. Then on to the Monongahela River where tow boats and barges were once thick as flies, pushing coal from mines up and down the watery face of Greene County to Pittsburgh and beyond, to the furnaces and factories that made the steel that built America and the world.
Want to know more about coal mining? Just call Brice Rush and he’ll invite you in for a tour. His phone number is in the book. Yeah, he’s old school.
Collections of mining memorabilia—stickers, belt buckles, lunch buckets, hats, lanterns and many, many tools—can certainly add up. Home museums happen when collections outgrow the basement, take over the living room, and demand their own place to be better seen.
The house that Brice Rush built by hand in 1975 with help from father-in-law Bob Verasco Sr. is a museum in itself, with log beams from salvaged log cabins incorporated into its design.
When wife Linda pointed out there wasn’t another square inch of living space that could absorb another blast from the past, Brice, by then a card-carrying member of the log cabin restoration craze that saved so much of Greene County’s pioneer past in the 1970s and 80s, purchased the circa 1808 log cabin his high school math teacher lived in and reassembled it in the side yard for the overflow of artifacts.
“Everybody called her Ma Hartley, but not to her face!” Brice remembers. “She really knew her numbers. You learned something from her.”
Brice’s love of numbers and collecting shards of the past (from old canning jars to vintage glassware) was honed on the family farm in Khedive, going with his mom to auctions and keeping track of what she brought home.
After graduating Carmichaels High School in 1963, Brice attended California University of Pennsylvania for two years, joined the National Guard, then went to work for a local printing company. But it was his marriage to Linda Varesko, a coal miner’s daughter and granddaughter, that got him into the mines. It also eventually got him into the history of the industry, from the pick axes used in the 1800s to undercut a block of coal before blasting it free, to today’s continuous mining operations that chew through miles of coal seam under the steady hand of a highly trained operator.
The artifacts Brice has collected draw the visitor into the underground world of mining in gritty, sobering, electrifying, explosive detail, a world he lived for 31 years after father-in-law Bob got him a job at Robena’s Frosty Run Shaft.
The museum has been getting its share of out-of-town visitors lately. When Senator Bob Casey’s people visited recently, “I gave each one of the representatives a cardboard mine check book from World War II. They were usually metal, but they were on rations during the war.”
When I called to find out when the big model of the Bryant New Showboat would be delivered from storage in Brownsville for its debut at the King Coal Show, Brice was on the phone doing an interview, could I call back later?
The model arrived on a muggy July afternoon, delivered by Pete Jedlicka and his crew of artifact hunters from the American Industrial Mining Co. Museum in Brownsville. A crowd, including me, had gathered for the big event. Brice’s face had the look of a kid about to get a new toy.
The hefty nine foot model of the showboat barge that once entertained the crowds at river towns from West Virginia to Huntington, Ohio, just fit through the door of the museum’s newest addition—a high-ceilinged display center behind the house that Brice began building during Covid lockdown.
The walls and most of the floor space are filled with displays, neatly catalogued, arranged just right and ready for viewing. There was enough space to set up two tables for the Bryant to rest on, beside a model of the Crucible towboat that Brice will also take to the coal show. There would be plenty of time after the showboat was in place for Pete and his crew to help start the reassembly process with Brice, retrieving the gangplanks and the captain’s house from the interior, stopping to peer at the displays surrounding them, talk mining machinery and restoration rescues then talk some more before heading back to work. Their museum at 222 Spring Rd. Brownsville is getting ready for its upcoming three day show Aug. 11-13 that includes the dedication of its newest exhibit, a remote controlled Joy 14CM Continuous miner. And Brice will be there with his extensive collection of stickers given out over the years by companies in the mining industries.
A week later, Brice will bring his Crucible exhibit to Cumberland Township Fire Hall, where his passion for collecting all things coal began, when “me and Barry Nelson started the sticker swap in 1983 at the King Coal Show.”
See you there!