Weird Western Maryland

"He led the world in mining coal," says the epitaph on the Finzel Cemetery tombstone of Lawrence Finzel (1873-1919), and that's no exaggeration. Eulogized as the "World Champion Coal Miner," Finzel was judged by Johns Hopkins doctors to be "the finest muscled man that ever came to the institution." In 1915-1916, when he was 43 years old, Finzel averaged 12 tons a coal a day single-handed, three times what was expected of anyone else. He earned $2,360.60 that year, equivalent to $60,000 today, a fabulous sum for a miner at the time. Understandably in demand, Finzel moved from place to place and set production records in Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, all while avoiding the accidents that crippled, maimed or killed so many -- including his oldest son, Bernard, who died in a February 1916 cave-in in Fayette County, West Virginia, age 14. What finally killed Finzel at the young age of 45, when he lived on Bowery Street in Frostburg, was not the ...

In his 1943 book Coal Dust on the Fiddle, Pennsylvania folklorist George Korson passes on " a curious tale about a Rip Van Winkle-like bat" reported "some years ago" by a mine engineer exploring "an abandoned old working in the Georges Creek region of Maryland." Here, verbatim, is the engineer's story, as quoted by Korson. Photo by Ann Froschauer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service "The mines in which I was making surveys were abandoned for over fifty years. The roof had fallen; rooms had been clogged shut; and only by the most circuitous routes, often entailing a creeping on one’s hands and knees for over a half mile, could we get to the unsurveyed part. Arrow marks of chalk were necessary to find one’s way out, and a full supply of oil, sufficient to last a day or two, was taken along. Back in the recesses of this cavern we wandered and we found colonies of bats. At first we did not know what they were. Welsh miners with the party enlightened us. I...