The Panther Valley Anthracite Mining Museum, one of the best-kept secrets in Carbon County, celebrates the coal mining business on the second floor and the blacksmith shop of a coal mine blacksmith on the main floor. It is a tribute from a nephew who loves mining history to the uncle that taught him about mining and blacksmithing. It tells the story of what went on under Panther Valley. 

The Museum, at 221 E. Summit Avenue in Summit Hill, is open by appointment only, May through October. On Memorial Day, owners Robert and Nancy Henninger fire the forge and open the blacksmith shop and museum to the public. Then, Bob gives demonstrations of the shop’s vintage blacksmith and machine shop tools. 

The blacksmith shop was built in 1927 by Bob’s uncle, Noble Henninger. Noble worked as a blacksmith in the Lehigh Coal and Navigation anthracite mines #3, #4, #5, #6 and #9 from 1911, when he started as a water boy, until his retirement in 1954. Although he typically worked in the mines ten hours and five days a week, Noble enjoyed blacksmithing so much that he built this shop so that he could work on his own on his time off. 

After collecting mining artifacts and memorabilia for many years, in 1989 Bob tuned the second floor into the Panther Valley Anthracite Mining Museum. The museum exhibits teach about the miner’s trade. Areas are set aside covering blasting, miners’ lamps, head gear and coal boring tools. There is even a mine interior with a coal chute. 

To gain experience about the mine industry before it closed, Bob worked several weeks as a miner in his early 20s. He became a teacher of first history in the middle school and currently, social studies in the high school.  Although coal mining was physically strenuous work, sometimes Bob misses the contemplative isolation and lesser psychological challenge of the bygone days. 

Life of a Minesmith

Noble was one of 14 children in the Henninger family of Summit Hill. After starting as a water boy in the mines in November 1911, Noble received training as a laborer, blacksmith helper, and electrical helper in the #4, #5 and #6 mines, graduating to a blacksmith in the #4 mine in 1921. In 1929, he worked briefly in the #5 mine before settling for a career in the #9 mine on July 29, 1929. He worked there until he retired on April 30, 1954. 

As a mine blacksmith, or minesmith, Noble was responsible for sharpening steel picks and bars. He made hangers for the coal chutes in the  gangways. When the mines had mules, he was responsible for shoeing the mules. 

Noble didn’t have any children and Bob didn’t have any living grandparents. “Noble was the closest to a grandparent that I had,” says Bob. “We spent Saturdays in the shop. He taught me to sharpen and temper steel.” 

Noble’s Prized Blacksmith Shop

Early in Noble’s career, he decided to build his own blacksmith shop as both a hobby and to make extra money. Over the years, he installed a forge, grinder, lathe, air compressor, drill press, impact drill, and a potbelly stove. After Nobles death in 1981, Bob decided to keep the shop just the way it was during Noble’s life. The only change Bob made was to install fluorescent lighting. 

The forge is the heart of the blacksmith shop. Here, Noble heated steel bars in a coal fire until they glowed red-hot. Although anthracite was plentiful, he often used soft coal because it would come to temperature quicker, and he often didn’t run the forge for a long time. When he needed anthracite, Noble would pick the choice coal as the cars went by his blacksmith shop in the #9 mine. 

A hand cranked blower, often cranked by Bob as a youth, originally provided air to the forge. Later, Noble upgraded it with a 5-HP Curtis air compressor. 

Bob remembers cranking the forge’s blower when he helped Noble make a frame for a single shot .357 Magnum handgun. Noble wanted Bob to strike for him. 

“I found out what striking was,” says Bob. “As Noble held the red-hot round mild steel bar in tongs on the anvil, I pounded it with a two-foot long sledge hammer with a ten-pound head. He wanted me to pound the two-inch round rod down to three quarters of an inch flat.” 

In those days, there was minimal use of safety equipment. Noble and Bob didn’t wear gloves, eye protection or protective clothing. And the sparks did fly. After an afternoon of striking, Bob’s clothing was full of burned through holes from embers off the red-hot metal.

 

After a couple of blows, the rod cooled to a point where it stopped glowing. Noble returned the pounded rod to the forge and reheated it to a red-hot color. After many heats and poundings, the steel was at the correct size. Noble cut it to shape and laid the metal near the fire so it wouldn’t cool too quickly. The next day, he looked at it and it had cracked. 

In the shop are a variety of tools, some, like tongs and quenching tanks, helped in the forging, while others reflected Noble’s other hobbies. He was a collector of military shells and, during prohibition he made his own moonshine in the copper still on display. 

Mining Museum

The floor above Noble’s shop was built as a miner’s social center. The miners in the neighborhood would come there after work to play pool or cards. Later, it became the home of the Summit Hill Rifle Club. When WWII started, the club disbanded and closed in 1941. 

Bob has been collecting historical mining materials and wanted to start a museum. “There was nothing here that gave any credit to the men that worked in the mines,” notes Bob. So, on Memorial Day 1989, he opened the Panther Valley Anthracite Mining Museum in the former miners social center. 

The one room museum tries to educate the visitor about the coal industry and the life of a coal miner. It begins with a recreation of a gangway and coal chute. The wooden chute, on one side of the gangway or passageway, let gravity slide the lumps of coal from the vein and load them into waiting cars. 

An exhibit traces blasting from the early use of black powder with squibs to modern electric detonated dynamite blasting. In the early days of blasting, a trail of black powder was lit with an open flame. It resulted in misfires or hang fires, and the miner had to return to the face to check it out. 

Later, fuses were used. They burned slower, allowing the miner time to get further away from the blast. This was improved when another Noble, Alfred Noble (of the Noble Prize) invented dynamite. The final improvement was the introduction of electric blasting. 

In the early days, the miners created their own explosive cartridges. They wrapped paper around a pick handle, closed one end and poured black powder in. They pushed it into a drilled hole and use a non-sparking copper needle to puncture the cartridge. The needle would stay in place and clay was packed around the needle. Then the needle was removed and a pressed into the opening in the clay. When the squib fired, its blast raced through the hole and detonated the cartridge. 

The museum has a display of miners’ tools. These include: segmented drills, tamping sticks and scrapers. Holes could be drilled up to 100 feet into the coal vein by disconnecting drill sections and adding additional lengths. 

Other exhibits cover the United Mine Workers Union, mine telephones, and mules in the mine. One miner is quoted as saying, “My mule wouldn’t work unless I gave him a chew of tobacco.” 

An exhibit traces mine lighting from the use of candles to modern electric lamps. From candles, the lamps progressed to the teapot style—first using paraffin and later calcium carbide. The open flame caused explosions in certain concentrations of methane gas and sometimes caught the dry timber on fire. 

The Davey Safety Lamp eliminated the explosive hazard by placing a metal gauze around the open flame. Later, magnetically sealed wet cell batteries replaced open flame lamps and even later, dry cell batteries. 

The Davey Safety Lamp continued to be used as its flame changed shape in the presence of methane, giving warning to the miner of a potential for an explosion. The other method of checking for the presence of methane was the use of canaries. With their 1,000 heartbeats per minute, a slight amount of methane would cause a canary to fall off its perch. 

Bob loved the miner’s heritage and started the museum to preserve it for a generation that does not know about the mining industry of a generation ago. “Young people ride over tunnels and entrances to mines that they didn’t even know they were going over,” explains Bob. “They didn’t know what went underground in Panther Valley. There was nothing here in 1989. I wanted something.” 

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A Mining Intern

Bob Henninger’s dream of learning first hand about mining came true for a few weeks in 1971, when he was 21 years old. He worked in the #9 mine before it closed. 

“I was going to school but I wanted the experience of having worked in a mine,” says Bob.  “#9 mine was in the process of closing.” He knew the people at the mine and signed release papers to get some on-the-job-training. 

Wearing jeans, a plastic miner’s helmet, and rubber boots, and carrying an electric battery light and a safety lamp, Bob rode an electric tow motor several hundred feet into #9 Mine to work alongside the other miners. 

“They were still extracting coal,” explains Bob. “I drilled holes, used air hammers, and fired explosives. At the time I started, we were hitting clay and breaking into the stripping pit.” 

He used a pneumatic drill, boring six feet deep. He cleaned the hole using a scraper and prepared a shot by punching a hole in the two sticks of dynamite with a nail and using a tamping stick to put it into the hole. 

Then Bob went around the corner, checked for gas with the safety lamp and detonated the dynamite. “The explosion was a confined thud but you could feel the concussion.” 

“If you compare it to teaching, it’s not the kind of thing you would want to do for a living but there are times I wished I was in a mine where people would let you alone to do your thing,” Bob muses. “Psychologically, mining is easier than teaching.” 

Visits to the museum are May through October by appointment only. Call 570-645-7422 for information.