I Love This Place: Mather

Stoney Point is where State Route 188 takes a deep breath before dropping around rocky ledges to Ten Mile Creek as it meanders to Jefferson. Turn at Stoney Point then take Reservoir Hill Road across Browns Run and up the hill. Mather, the old coal town that time forgot, sits on a flat stretch of land that suddenly appears, complete with signage to greet you. Welcome to Mather!

Look at the Greene County map and you’ll see Mather is across Ten Mile Creek from the Colonial town of Jefferson. But geographically and culturally speaking, these two little towns are worlds apart.

This is where Picklands-Mather of Cincinnati, Ohio opened a mine called Mather Collieries in 1917 and began building a town to go with it. Mather would have tidy one and two-story single-family homes with indoor plumbing on paved, tree-lined streets, a model for its day. With yards big enough for kids and gardens, and monthly prizes for the best-kept yards, the neighborhood was a far cry from the old mining camps and duplex houses crowded side by side in other coal patch towns.

There was a six-sided gazebo, aka the Liars Den, in the town square, with the church, post office, recreation building, theater, drug store, furniture store, barbershop, ice cream parlor and Hamilton Supply Company Store tucked in around it. The doctor lived on bosses row in the biggest house and attended to the miners and the many children who would be born in Mather.

As the roaring 20s kick-started the modern era, this was a great place to live and work. Mather’s mining operations were up to the standards of the day, safety-wise, and the seasoned, dependable workers knew from hard experience how dangerous methane laced bituminous coal can be.

That danger became a horrific reality on May 19, 1928, just as shifts were changing, on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

When the first muffled explosion was heard at 4:04 pm, followed a minute later by a much larger blast that combusted methane and coal dust into an inferno, there were 211 miners in the North Section shaft, 350 feet underground.

Within hours, the recreation building became a morgue. The last survivor was rescued at 3 a.m. Sunday morning, but it wouldn’t be until the following Thursday that rescue teams brought the last body to the surface from surrounding mines. Of the 211 men caught up in the explosion, only 37 survived. And each had a harrowing tale to tell.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster that claimed a quarter of the fathers and sons of Mather, Hamilton Supply Company Store and the Red Cross gave food and clothing to grieving families and men and women from Waynesburg College came to help at the morgue. Picklands-Mather advanced payday by a week and cut red tape to get insurance settlements  – $4000 per death – out in 10 days. Thanks to the new workman’s compensation amendment passed in 1927, widows were compensated between $10 and $15 a week, depending on children, for 300 weeks. Orphans’ benefits of $7.50 a week were extended beyond 300 weeks if the child was under age.

Within months, Mather Collieries reopened, regional miners filled every shift and all the survivors but one went back underground. The recommendations of the state safety report would lead to legislation for the “compulsory rock-dusting of the gaseous or dry bituminous coalmines within the Commonwealth…of such a standard that the flame from ignition of gas or other sources will be localized or confined to the immediate vicinity where ignition occurs.”

The depression years of the 1930s brought more empowerment to mine workers. The Roosevelt Administration’s New Deal, section 7a brought the National Industrial Recovery Act that guaranteed workers the right to “organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.”

After a mass meeting in the center of town that attracted 3,800 determined miners, Mather established a UMWA local chapter on June 30, 1934. Union miners now worked a seven-hour day, five days a week, with a minimum wage of five dollars a day.

In 1944, Picklands-Mather sold its houses and street maintenance became the responsibility of Morgan Township. Mather Collieries continued to mine coal, built new houses on 7th street, and more workers moved in. By 1947, Mather had taken over the water supply and added a road tax. The post-World War II era had arrived.

“Some of the original old maple trees are still standing,” Audrey Filby Duke, 91, told me when I stopped by her home on Second Street to hear about her lifetime of living here. When her family moved into a newly built house on 7th Street in 1946, she was 14 and ready to put down roots.

“My dad was a coal miner all his life. We moved around a lot. He came here to work and I’ve been here ever since.”

Love came for Audrey Filby when she was 16 and on her way to the post office. Donald Duke was home on leave and hanging out at the Liars Den. When Audrey walked by, “He followed me into the post office and I told him I’m 16 and ‘I’d sure like to learn how to drive.’ And he taught me!”

They married in 1950 as Don was drafted into the Korean War effort. The newlyweds spent years living between Mather and Ft. Bragg NC as three sons were added to the family. Daughter Susan Dains was just a few months old when the Dukes returned to Mather and bought their forever home on 2nd Street in 1963.

Picklands-Mathers closed the mine in 1964 with little notice but not without reason — Pittsburgh seam coal did not suit the standards at their new coke plants. That put 360 men out of work. But there were jobs available in nearby mines and other careers to pursue. Most families would stay because Mather was by now their hometown.

Susan remembers going to grade school here. “The school was down where Serenity Park is now, next to the playground by the gazebo. This was a great place to grow up. We were always outside up to something.”

Audrey’s stash of family photos includes her boys as leggy teens, painting the Liars Den on a sunny summer day.

It was a beautiful Mather Sunday as we walked along 2nd street to the corner where Don Duke’s Veteran’s flag hangs. Valery stepped into the grass, turned with a smile and put her arm around the pole. A massive maple reached for the sky behind her. A couple of neighbor kids stopped to watch. To her left was the post office where she first met Don, by the crossroads in the center of town. Turn left at the crossroads and you’re heading up the patch to 7th street. Go right and you’ll come to 1st street where an overgrown chain-link fence corrals the old mine bathhouse. Behind it, a wall of grassy earth swoops up, flattens out, and stretches along the horizon. It’s the reclaimed Mather gob pile that loomed for years above the mine and the town – three million tons of hazardous waste, covering 67 acres. For years, its highly acidic runoff ran directly into Ten Mile Creek, killing fish and other aquatic life and carrying toxins to the Monongahela River.

It was considered “the biggest single polluting factor in the single biggest watershed in Greene County.”

It would take funds from the federally managed Rural Abandoned Mine Project to do the eventual clean up that began in 1986.

I drove through town one last time to enjoy the many neighborly touches today’s Mather has going for it: the Mather Pantry that neighbors keep stocked for those who might be hungry, the level streets where kids roll their wheels, the big park, its playgrounds filled today with happy, noisy kids. With street housing numbers running into the 800s, Mather is a sizable town. I’ve missed bosses row to see the doctor’s big house Audrey told me about, but I found Serenity Park, dreamed into existence by Michael Mullen’s mom as a place to take time to find peace.

Standing in the warm sunlight, I soaked in the pattern of the painted path before me and the joyful sound of children playing.

Hello Mather! Glad to finally meet you.