This marker stands on a piece of land not far from the Raleigh County Courthouse. It is a reminder…read moreof West Virginia's mining history that is full of tragedies.
The marker reads, "Five miles west at Eccles, on April 28, 1914, a gas explosion in No. 5 Mine in the Beckley seam killed 174 miners; another nine died in No. 6 Mine above from blackdamp. On March 8, 1926, 19 died in No. 5. In 1891, Royal Mine on New River was first to open in Raleigh County. From 1891 to 1991, county mines produced in excess of 791M tons of coal, while accidents claimed the lives of 2,121 miners." It was erected in 1994 by the Raleigh County Historical Society, West Virginia, Archives and History.
The Eccles explosions sit in a larger and more complicated story than the historical marker can hold, because the 1914 disaster grew out of a chain of small decisions inside a mine already known for gas, where a worker cut through a thin wall of coal to shorten his route and disrupted the ventilation, allowing methane to pool until another man entered with a flame lamp and set off a blast that tore through No. 5 and sent deadly afterdamp into No. 6 above, killing men who never saw the fire itself. Recovery took days, with families waiting at the mouth of the mine while rescuers fought heat, wreckage, and toxic air, and the governor himself descended underground in a rare gesture that showed how overwhelmed the community had become. Eccles was a company town tied to the New River Collieries Company, and the mine had been considered modern, which made the scale of the loss even more shocking and helped fuel later union organizing. The 1926 explosion in the same mine followed a different pattern, sparked by an electrical arc in an area where methane had not been tested and where coal dust had not been properly controlled, and although rescuers saved dozens, the wreckage trapped others for nearly a full day. Many victims in both disasters were immigrants or first generation Americans, and the town carried the weight of those losses long after the mine reopened and continued operating until 1928, a reminder of how deeply coal shaped Raleigh County and how quickly communities had to return to work even as they grieved.
[Review 14 of 2026 - 198 in West Virginia - 25205 overall]