By Stephen D. Bowling

February 26, 1939 – Providing for a family has always been hard work. In the early decades of the 20th century, Breathitt County families relied on what they could produce on their farms. Hog, corn, and children all had to be worked to grow. Most homes relied on wood cut on the farm to heat the home and to sustain a “cooking fire.”

By the 1930s, coal burning fire grates and stoves made keeping a family warm much easier. Farmers relied on small coal seams they owned to harvest small amounts of coal to heat the home. These seams, usually known as a coal bank, were often high sulphur and poor quality bituminous coal or hard packed “channel” coal that burned too hot for stoves. Miners crawled back into these small and damp openings in the hillside to gether coal.

Lying on their sides in water or on the damp floor of the shaft, amateur miners would use a small pick to undercut the coal by hacking out a six or eight inch tall seam that went back into the coal a foot or more. Using an auger to bore a hole in the top of the coal seam, a homemade stick of dynamite made of blasting powder rolled at home in newspapers was ignited by a long fuse, giving the miner time to scurry out before the small blast. The result would be large blocks of coal that could be transported to the coal pile near the home.

This process of “picking out” coal was dangerous and often resulted in injury or death to the miners who did not always use beams to safely “prop” the ceiling after a blast loosened the black rock. The Jackson Times, The Mountain Eagle, and The Hazard Herald are filled with many sad stories of men who did not make it out in time or died due to falling rocks or slate that crushed them.

One of those men who died while picking our coal on his family farm was 33 year-old farmer Edward “Neddie” Herald. The Jackson Times printed his sad story in 1939.

Slate Fall Kills Neddie Herald, 33

Neddie Herald, 33, son of Wm. and Ann Herald was killed instantly while picking out coal in a small mine near his home at Wolf Coal, February 26.  His five-year-old son and 12-year-old brother were with him at the time of the accident and summoned aid.  Harvey Turner with his NYA workers and other neighbors, assisted the family.

Mr. Herald’s father and an older brother and sister-in-law removed the fallen slate and rescued the body.

Funeral and burial services were held Monday, February 27, at the Buck Herald cemetery.  A wife and four children, his parents, five brothers, and three sisters survive.

The Jackson Times, March 2, 1939, page 1

Neddie Herald was one of the untold number of eastern Kentucky men who died in the side of a mountain working to provide for their families. Many more men died working in the coal industry for professional mines that were supposed to be safer for labor. Neddie Herald’s grave at the Buck Herald Cemetery has a new tombstone that does not mention the sad death that took him from this world, but does list the five reasons he was in the mine that day in February 1939.

© 2023 Stephen D. Bowling