On the road again – with Cornerstone Genealogical Society. How far will history lovers travel to attend a monthly CGS meeting that sometimes turns into a field trip?
“It takes me two and a half hours but I come for every one!” Franklin Boner of Newark, Ohio tells me. “Bonar Avenue is named after my family.”
It’s September 12, almost 6 p.m., and members and friends have come to the place where it happened to hear the story of the Mather Mine Disaster of May 19, 1928. The projection screen is up in the ball field pavilion behind the Liars Den in the heart of Greene County’s most memorialized mining town. Cars are pulling in, and the picnic table seating is filling up fast. There’s a bowl of pepperoni rolls on the table beside the sign-in sheet and bottles of water are in the cooler. “They’re not homemade, I bought them,” West Greene High School history teacher and society vice president Zack Patton cheerfully admits. The rolls, he adds are symbolic of the kind of finger food miners were known to have in their dinner buckets back then, along with water and whatever else their wives and mothers would have made for them for their shifts.
We’re here to revisit the tragedy that started with a muffled boom at 4:07 p.m. on a rainy Saturday as the day shift was changing. It was followed a minute later by a blast that rattled the town and set a firestorm of pressure, heat, flames and deadly gas into the affected tunnel, collapsing ceilings and walls and killing nearly a quarter of the working age miners in town. “194 PARISH [sic] IN MATHER COLLIERIES” made the headlines of the Waynesburg Republican that was rushed to press that evening. It was a headline that would travel around the world.
For some who came to hear the program, their American family tree began with the second big immigration at the turn of the last century when bituminous coal became the driver of the industrial age and workers were recruited from Europe to work in the mines and mills of Western Pennsylvania.
Zack holds up a small, darkly bound book, The Mather Mine Disaster, written and self-published by Tony Bubka (1914-1982) some decades later. His obituary on file at Cornerstone notes he was “a graduate of Bethany College, did graduate work at UCLA, Southern Cal. and Columbia University. He was a journalism research worker and had also written a book on the Mather Mine explosion.” It also notes that one of his four brothers, Benjamin, lived in Mather.
“This is very rare – I found it online and Cornerstone also has a copy. Anything I find online about the Jacktown Fair and the Mather mine disaster I buy! It has all the newspaper articles written about it, firsthand stories, the investigation later – it was front page news all over the world. I consider this the most famous event in Greene County history based on the media coverage it got. I think it’s important that it’s not forgotten.”
There are people in the audience who have come to share their own family ties to the explosion and its aftermath. Longtime CGS member Jon Osso made his own copy of Tony Bubka’s book available as a PDF file in 2013. This evening he is here with his mom Jean Matlock Osso. Jon tells us his grandfather Charles Matlock injured his foot in the mine the day before and stayed home. But Charles’s father Charles Sr. and brother-in-law Edmond Bardon went to work that day and died. “Needless to say, had he gone to work, my mother would never have been born and I wouldn’t be here either!”
Zack has on the Mather baseball team shirt that belonged to his great-grandfather Carl Doney, his own family connection to Mather. “I didn’t put on the whole outfit because it’s wool and too hot! I never lived here and I’m not a coal miner, but I love sports, especially baseball. And soccer. Mather had a soccer team, which is understandable since many of the miners brought the game with them when they moved here.”
The Doney family, “were coal miners from Ireland who ended up in Mather. ” Zack’s mom Marla Doney Patton tells me a few days later when I stop by CGS’s historic log cabin courthouse and modern research room on 144 E. Greene St. in Waynesburg. October is Family History Month and this story is aimed at those of you who have yet to stop by to see what part of your family tree might be tucked away in the archives, or accessible online through the genealogy programs CGS subscribes to so you don’t have to. For family history newbies, the history loving folks who volunteer here will get you started.
When Greene County was created by state decree in 1796, the town of Waynesburg was surveyed and a log cabin courthouse was “hastily erected” at the corner of Greene Street (tip of the hat to Mad Anthony) and Whiskey Alley (tip of the hat to the frontier’s biggest cash crop). Visit that same old, beautifully restored courthouse today and you’ll find the story of its rescue in the front room with its original log walls, reconstructed turkey breast fireplace and heirloom furnishings and artifacts. This is where judges, sheriffs, landowners and lawyers did business until a brick courthouse was built on High Street in 1800. This is where monthly CGS meetings featuring speakers sharing their favorite historical subjects happen, when field trips aren’t on the agenda.
Step through the back door and you find yourself not in the old jail but in the reference room where family histories reach back to those frontier days, then forward into the everyday present that is added on as it happens. Some amazing tidbits of the past can be found in those countless books, albums, folders, microfilm rolls, newspaper clippings, obituary lists and faded photographs that have been donated and collected by your history loving neighbors.
Today, Marla is here to answer the phone when inquiries come in. “People call from all over the country looking for information on their families. You can start looking up one thing on microfilm and something else catches your eye and you’ll be lost for hours!”
She also fills me in on some of the genealogy of her son’s love for baseball and for the past. “Zack loved collecting baseball cards and history. He wanted to teach history ever since he was little. He and his dad would go to cemeteries when we went on vacation and now he and his students clean cemeteries in West Greene.”
His love for collecting everything Jacktown Fair can trace its roots back to the Burns family of Wind Ridge and their generational commitment to keeping America’s longest running country fair alive. Zack met Kayla Burns when they were playing church league ball for Fairview Methodist Church, Marla tells me. What happened next is their family history, happily shared with their children who are growing up helping out at CGS outings and being part of the crew at the Jacktown Fair.
Today’s other volunteer, Carol Peters got into local genealogy when researching the land she and husband Ken bought when they moved here from Michigan in 2012. Their historic log house, listed as White Cottage on the Caldwell map of 1876, was the residence of Peter Grimes, who lived there and managed a post office and store in his front yard by the road that ran west to the Ohio River.
“But it was you who got me to come to Cornerstone when you wrote about Valley Chapel Church!” Carol told me with a grin.
I’ll admit to anyone who asks – this state of the art reference library, staffed by volunteers who know where the past is stashed is a great place to sit with my laptop and notebook, getting the backstory for the stories I write about Greene County. If you love sleuthing history and you haven’t stopped by CGS, do drop in.
CGS member Glenn Toothman, who filmed the Mather presentation for members who couldn’t make it, wants to get the word out that CGS’s upcoming 50th Anniversary fundraiser is all about digitizing the newspapers now saved on microfilm. This will allow for “optical character recognition, so plugging any name into the search engine will reveal all available references within the entire collection, something that would take years of research hours using old methods.”
Cornerstone has already purchased the copyright and film negatives of the entire Waynesburg Republican (1870-1992). This $7000 investment is the first step in making this collection “freely available to the research community.”
Donations can be made to the 501c3 nonprofit by check to PO Box 547, Waynesburg, PA 1530 or online CornerstoneGenealogy.com using the donate button.
Or just stop by and say hello when you make your donation and stay to look around. Tell them Colleen sent you!
Hours currently are Monday through Friday 1 pm- 4pm. FMI, call 724-637-5653 during these hours.