MATUSKOWITZ, JOSEPHMiner. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to determine the proper names of illiterate foreigners who were accidentally killed at work in the coal industry. During the Polish invasion of the serpentine hard coal fields of Pennsylvania, for example, no story of a mining disaster would be complete without a bunch of wacky names for killed Polish coal miners. The infinite creativity of people in a rugged, mountainous coal belt the size of three islands, 500 square miles in all, was one of the wonders of Pennsylvania's coal crackers. It had no ending.
Over the years, I lost a lot of sleep looking for the names of Polish coal miners who lost their lives in one way or other. The account I wrote in 1950 on the Lattimer massacre, during which 14 unarmed Poles were shot outside a mine patch by deputy sheriffs on September 10, 1897, is well known. It wasn't before my research was done. It continues to attract college professors, even one in Poland, and history students. Google has digitized the list of names that I prepared for the site of the bloody affair.
Unfortunately, the Jeanesville mining disaster, about the same distance from Hazleton as Lattimer and mostly in the same township, has not caught the same attention. In 1891, the mine patch of Jeanesville, sitting on top of three coal veins between Hazleton and Beaver Meadows, had two coal breakers and three slopes, employing about 760 men, and usually shipped 1,200 tons of coal a day to market. The compound was known as Spring Mountain Colliery. The coal operators were James C. Haydon and Frank Robinson, who sank the first slope, built a breaker and a number of houses for themselves and employees, closely packed together. When the breaker, where lumps of coal were cracked and sorted for market, burned down in 1881, the company erected two more breakers.
The mine superintendent was David MacFarlene, who came from Coatbridge, Scotland, with his parents in 1866, when he was 14 years old, and immediately went to work in a coal breaker. When he was 18 years old, his father took him into the mines and taught him how to mine coal. Haydon made David Mac Farlane an inside foreman in 1874 and general mine superintendent in 1881. As both men were married -- Haydon to Ellen Newton in 1858 and MacFarlane to Alma Hamer in 1874 -- they lived with their wives and children in Jeanesville and developed a strong bond with the people who worked at the Spring Mountain Colliery.
As the population changed, the fresh blood from Poland and Austria-Hungary, vilified as Hungarians, sweated just as hard as the previous miners to bring black minerals out of the earth. The superintendent, however, was no Archie Bunker. Instead of denigrating Polish workers with a number, as mine bosses did when they couldn't spell a long Polish name, the boss at Jeanesville changed the name of a Polish miner to George Smith. Of course, the fellow bore it with pride.
One imagines that Joseph Matuskowitz, with whom George Smith worked in No. 1 slope was satisfied with the change in his name. It was probably made by a German as -itz is the German variant for the Polish suffix -icz. Whether it was originally either Matuskowicz or Matyskowicz, which came from Moses in Biblical times, Joseph Matuskowitz, as he was listed in the 1900 census, kept the variant of his real name and passed it on his children. The search for them led further afield.
The workers in Number I slope, 642 feet down in the bowels of the earth at Jeanesville, were very much in the news on February 4, 1891, and the days after, when they tried to save their lives from drowning in the gloomy caverns under their village. The mine horror began when a large body of water in an old slope, which had been started in 1842 and abandoned for five years, tore out of its reservoir with irresistible force and wrecked the timbers, cars, tracks, and other pieces of No. I slope. Without knowledge of the water, two miners drilled holes in a solid vein of coal and tapped it with black powder. After firing it, and the smoke cleared, one of the miners, using a pick and a long iron bar, tried to remove some loose pieces of coal at the top of the vein. To his horror, instead of coal, he had a heavy stream of water bulging at him. No one knew that a large body of water was so close to the two miners. They ran away as fast as they could and barely escaped with their lives. As they passed a mule driver who had stopped to pull out the wick of his lamp, they shouted, "Boy, for God's sake, run for your life!" Many men escaped by jumping into an air shaft and climbing to the surface.
The men working farther from the slope had an awful struggle to scramble to safety. For example, Tim Sully, who ran as he never ran before, told a newspaper reporter that he began to run when the roaring water was at his heels. Quickly it rose to his ankles. He fell over another man, whom he said was a Hungarian, who fell from exhaustion. Sully got up and continued to splash in the water until it touched his head. He didn't know who swam in the water and rescued him.
The news of the accident spread like wild fire throughout the little village on both sides of Luzerne and Carbon counties. Exactly how many of the 100 men in No I slope lost their life by drowning was still a mystery. The mouth of the slope was surrounded in less than half an hour by hundreds of men, women and children. Jeanesville was grief-stricken.
When the water was pumped out, percolated away, and removed as soon as possible, the mine superintendent organized rescue teams to go through the workings of Slope No. 1, from top to bottom, to look for seventeen missing men. One by one dead bodies were recovered. Everybody at the mouth of the slope wept. In time, after rats had chewed a lot of flesh off their bones, recognition of many men was almost impossible. No doubt neither Haydon nor MacFarlane would know who they were.
As many men were still missing, the superintendent led a team into a section of the mine that was not entirely filled with water. From all indications, the volume of the water that poured down the slope created air pressure where Matuskowitz mined coal and kept out a great deal of water. As a result, it gave Matuskowitz and his buddies a chance to build a hut out of brattice boards. The party also found a piece of chalk to mark the height of the water.
On February 20, the body of James Balack was found, face down, near the hut with an empty dinner pail clutched in one hand. Next to him, just outside the hut, kneeling as if in prayer, was the body of George Smith. One wonders whether he was buried and forgotten at St. Stanislaus cemetery in Hazleton, where the labor martyrs of Lattimer were laid in a mass grave in 1897. Two other bodies, lying side by side, despite the gnawing by rats, were identified as Larry Reed and Henry Ball.
On February 23, four more bodies were recovered. None were identified in my sources. All were in bad condition. Later the same day, when no sun lighted the scene, Superintendent MacFarlane and Caleb Williams, who had found dead bodies in previous days, were startled to hear a voice in the dark recesses of the mine. "My God," said the superintendent, "I believe there is a man alive down here!"
The rescuers stopped and listened for more sound. "Hello!" one of the two hollered.
"Hello," was the reply.
"Who are you?"
"I am Joe Matuskowitz." he said. "Wasil Finko, John Tomaskusky (Kozakowski), and John Barno (Benyo) are with me. We are not dead, but nearly so."
The first report of the mine disaster in The New York Times, Feb. 5, 1891, listed them among the dead Hungarians. Joseph Matuskowitz was listed as Joe Matzkwicsz; John Tomaskusky, Thomas Kosashowsky; John Brenno, Barno,or Benyo; and Wasil Franco, Mose Frenki.
The mine rescue party found the four men lying in various positions and huddled together. Their food was gone in ten days. They had no water to drink. The sulphur water was unfit to drink. The longer they remained in total darkness, with no food and water, the weaker they got. In a maddening moment, John Benyo, who was the strongest of them all, was asked by one of his companions, "You are not going to kill any of us for food, are you?" "No," Benyo replied, "I will starve first."
For hours each man groped around in the darkness, stretching their hands like beggars, hoping to find something to satisfy their hunger, but they touched nothing. At the same time, there were rats at their feet. As he got weaker, Benyo decided to catch a rat with a club and eat its legs. The others followed suit. For seven days their only food was rat's legs. It saved them from starvation.
As the superintendent prepared to bring the survivors to the surface, he directed men to go to his home for warm blankets and other necessities. Ellen Haydon, with whom James C, Haydon had two daughters, personally ministered, with the help of her daughters and servants, to the four survivors in her home. The men ate no solid food for ten days. Ellen Haydon fed them tea and broth for the most part. The company doctor provided medical aid. The day following their rescue sixty-five miners, dressed in their working clothes and bearing lighted lamps in front of their helmets, gathered on snow-covered ground and on the front porch of the Haydon residence, with the Haydon family in the middle of them, and sang religious hymns of praise. They also mourned the loss of thirteen men, Never before in the history of the Pennsylvania coal industry had four survivors displayed such stamina, fortitude, and endurance.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2011) -- [email protected]