Appalachian History Series – The Pancoast Mine Disaster: The Fire Beneath Throop
On the morning of April 7, 1911, the men of the Pancoast Mine went below the hills of Throop, Pennsylvania, into the anthracite workings that had shaped so much of life in Lackawanna County. They entered a world of rock, timber, lamps, rails, coal cars, and air currents. Above them were homes, churches, boarding houses, streets, and families waiting for the end of the shift. Below them was the China vein, where a fire that first seemed like a danger to property became one of the deadliest mine disasters in the history of Pennsylvania’s northern anthracite field.
The Pancoast Mine, also known as the Price-Pancoast Mine, was part of the hard coal world of northeastern Pennsylvania. Anthracite mining had drawn immigrant workers from Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary, Wales, England, Ireland, and other places into towns like Throop. The mine was not simply a workplace. It was the center of a community’s economy, its grief, and its daily risk.
By the time the disaster ended, seventy-three men were dead. Seventy-two were mine workers. The seventy-third was Joseph Evans, a government rescue worker who died while trying to reach the trapped men. The fire did not explode through the mine in a single blast. It moved by smoke, heat, air, and delay. That made the disaster even more haunting. Many of the men were not killed where the fire began. They were overtaken by the poison the fire sent through the workings.
The Fire in the Engine House
The official investigation found that the fire began in the North slope engine house in the No. 2 Dunmore vein. The engine house was not a safe stone chamber in the way a modern reader might imagine. It was an open space cut into the coal, supported by timber, with wooden materials close at hand. A hoisting engine stood there to move coal. Near it were empty mine cars and timber supports.
Around 8:30 that morning, fire started in or near that engine house. The exact cause was never firmly established. Men smelled smoke. Some thought it was a brake band heating. Others soon saw that the engine room was filled with smoke and flame. Workers tried to fight it with water lines and hose, but the fire had already found the materials that made it deadly.
The flame reached props, timber, and mine cars. As the fire burned, the mine’s ventilation carried smoke away from the engine house and toward the men working in the China vein. In a coal mine, air was life. On that morning, the same system that was supposed to move air through the workings helped carry poison into the places where men were cutting and loading coal.
Smoke in the China Vein
The official report included a map of the affected workings. It showed the engine house, the slope, the tunnel, air courses, doors, walls, and the route by which smoke traveled. The men farthest from the fire were not standing next to the flames. Some were hundreds or even thousands of feet from the engine house. Their danger came from the air itself.
When the fire grew, smoke passed into the tunnel and then through the China vein workings. The official report later stated that for most of the men, escape had become impossible except for those in Perry’s and Bolton’s gangways, where some were able to get out quickly. The report described how the smoke reached the men before they could make their way through the second openings.
This was the terrible trap of Pancoast. The mine had exits on paper. In the conditions of the disaster, many of those routes could not be reached in time. Smoke moved faster than men could organize, understand, and escape. The official report argued that the openings that might have helped in a cave-in or slight explosion were useless in this fire because the men could not reach them through the poisoned atmosphere.
Inside the mine, some men tried to warn others. Mine Foreman Walter Knight and Fire Boss Isaac Dawes were later found in positions suggesting that they had been moving toward danger or toward the men they hoped to save. John R. Perry, who knew the gangway well, also died. The locations of the bodies told part of the story. They were not men who had calmly waited for death. They had tried to get out.
The Question of Warning
After the fire, one of the hardest questions was whether the men had been warned soon enough. Company officials testified that warnings were sent. Some men said telephone messages had been made. The official testimony described efforts to notify workers in the tunnel and to fight the fire at the same time.
The coroner’s jury was not satisfied with management’s judgment. It did not say the fire had been deliberately caused. It did not claim that every death could be explained by one simple failure. But it criticized the handling of the emergency. The jury believed that too much attention had been placed on putting out the fire and not enough on warning every man in danger as quickly as possible.
That finding gives the disaster much of its lasting meaning. Pancoast was not only a story of fire underground. It was a story of decisions made in the first minutes of danger. At first, the fire may have looked like something that could be controlled. The men fighting it may have believed they could stop it before it harmed anyone deeper in the mine. But the mine did not give them time to be wrong.
The jury also believed that the loss of life might have been less severe, and perhaps avoided, if an engineer had been stationed continuously at the engine house where the fire began. It recommended stronger rules, better warning systems, more reliable communication, and the removal of combustible materials from engine rooms and pump rooms underground.
The Rescue Effort
When the disaster became known, rescue workers and officials came to Throop. Joseph Evans of the government rescue force entered the mine in an effort to reach the men trapped beyond the smoke. He was overcome while trying to rescue them. Doctors and rescuers worked over him, but he died without regaining consciousness.
The image of Evans remains one of the most painful parts of the story. He was not one of the Pancoast miners who began the day there as part of the crew. He came because others were in danger. In trying to save them, he became part of the death toll.
Recovery continued through the night and into the next morning. Bodies were carried from the workings and taken to the surface. Some were identified quickly. Others were laid in a temporary morgue until families and friends could identify them. By the morning after the fire, the dead had been removed from the mine.
The official report described the remains of the burned mine cars as twisted iron. The phrase is brief, but it helps show the force of the heat underground. Timber, cars, smoke, air, and human confusion had combined into a disaster that the community would never forget.
Throop Mourns Its Dead
The grief in Throop did not end when the bodies were brought out. It moved into homes, churches, cemeteries, relief committees, and legal records. Many of the dead were immigrants. Some were young men living as boarders. Others left widows and children behind.
Modern research using death certificates found that the victims ranged in age from sixteen to seventy. Some were teenagers. Many were listed as foreign-born or as aliens in the language of the records of the time. The largest number were Polish, but the dead also included Slovak, English, Magyar, Lithuanian, Irish, German, Welsh, American-born, and unknown victims.
The funerals came quickly. Throop buried its dead under the shadow of the coal industry that had taken them. In one of the most striking burial stories connected to the disaster, fourteen young immigrant miners were buried in a common grave at St. Joseph’s Lithuanian Cemetery. Their names were nearly lost to memory until later researchers worked through death certificates, cemetery records, newspaper accounts, and local knowledge to recover as much as could be known.
For the families, grief was joined by survival. Many households had lost the wage earner who kept food on the table. Relief money was raised across the region, and Throop Borough later remembered that a large fund was administered through the Anthracite Trust Company of Scranton. The money helped some families stay together rather than be forced apart by poverty. Even then, relief could not replace a father, husband, son, brother, or boarder whose labor had supported others.
The Coroner’s Jury and the Cause of Death
The coroner’s jury investigated the deaths of seventy-three persons at the Pancoast Mine. Its verdict found that the men died through inhalation of carbon monoxide. The immediate cause was the burning of the hoisting engine house at the head of the North slope in the No. 2 Dunmore vein. The flames reached nearby timbers, roof supports, and mine cars, sending large volumes of smoke into the China vein through the force of the air current from the fan.
The jury declared that the cause of the fire itself was unknown. Its strongest criticism was not about the spark that started the blaze, but about the response after it began. The jurors believed that overconfidence and the focus on extinguishing the fire contributed to the terrible scale of the loss. They also argued that mining law had proven inadequate.
In that way, Pancoast became more than a local tragedy. It became evidence that the rules of the anthracite industry had not kept pace with the dangers underground. A mine could appear well managed and still be fatally vulnerable. A system could technically comply with the law and still leave men unable to escape when the air turned poisonous.
A Disaster That Changed the Law
The Pancoast disaster helped push Pennsylvania toward stronger mine safety rules. On June 15, 1911, the state enacted legislation requiring inside buildings in coal mines to be built of incombustible material. The meaning of that law was written in the ruins of the Pancoast engine house. Wood, oil, timber, and enclosed underground fire hazards had proven too dangerous to ignore.
The law did not bring back the dead. It did not erase the grief of widows or the poverty of children who lost their fathers. But it showed that the disaster had forced the state to recognize a danger that miners had lived with every day. The fire at Pancoast made clear that underground buildings and equipment could not be treated as ordinary structures. In a mine, a burning room could become a moving wall of poison.
Remembering Pancoast
Today, the Pancoast Mine Disaster is remembered by a Pennsylvania historical marker in Throop and by the work of local historians, genealogists, cemetery researchers, and descendants. It belongs to the larger history of anthracite Appalachia, where coal towns were built by immigrant labor and where disasters often revealed the hidden cost of industrial power.
Pancoast was not the largest mine disaster in American history, but it was one of the defining disasters of the northern anthracite field. It stands with Avondale and other Pennsylvania tragedies as a reminder that the coal beneath the mountains was never only a fuel. It was a world of families, languages, churches, company decisions, safety laws, and men whose names deserve to be carried forward.
On April 7, 1911, Throop lost seventy-three men to fire and smoke. The mine took them underground in the morning, and by nightfall a community was changed forever. Their story remains in official reports, newspaper pages, cemetery stones, relief ledgers, and the memory of a borough that learned how quickly the work of a normal day could become a sorrow handed down for generations.
Sources & Further Reading
Pennsylvania Department of Mines. Annual Report of the Department of Mines of Pennsylvania for the Year 1911: Part I, Anthracite. Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1912. https://northernfield.info/Documents/doc01/1911.pdf
Pennsylvania Department of Mines. “Mine Fire at the Pancoast Mine.” In Annual Report of the Department of Mines of Pennsylvania for the Year 1911: Part I, Anthracite. Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1912. https://www.northernfield.info/Collieries/Pancoast/G%20Report%20on%201911%20Fire.pdf
Pennsylvania State Archives. “RG-45: Registers of Mine Accidents for the Anthracite Districts, 1899–1972.” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/dam/rg/di/r45_MineAccidentRegisters/r45-14AccidentRegistersInterface.htm
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “Coal Miner Records.” Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Pennsylvania State Archives. https://www.pa.gov/agencies/phmc/pa-state-archives/research-online/research-guides/coal-miner-records
Penn State University Libraries. “Pennsylvania Annual Report of Mines by Year: 1870–1979.” Penn State University. https://libraries.psu.edu/about/collections/pennsylvania-annual-report-mines-year-1870-1979
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “Anthracite Mine Disaster Historical Marker.” ExplorePAHistory.com. https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-EE
ExplorePAHistory.com. “Accounts of the Anthracite Mine Disaster, April 1911.” Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. https://explorepahistory.com/odocument.php?docId=1-4-4C
Throop Borough. “Community.” Throop Borough, Pennsylvania. https://www.throopboro.com/community
Lackawanna Historical Society. History Bytes 2, no. 2. Scranton, PA: Lackawanna Historical Society, 2018. https://www.lackawannahistory.org/HistoryBytes/HB_Vol2_No2.pdf
Rudzinski, Joe. “Pancoast Mine Fire: Common Grave.” In History Bytes 2, no. 2. Scranton, PA: Lackawanna Historical Society, 2018. https://www.lackawannahistory.org/HistoryBytes/HB_Vol2_No2.pdf
Conlogue, William. “Rallying Help for Pancoast Widows and Orphans.” In History Bytes 2, no. 2. Scranton, PA: Lackawanna Historical Society, 2018. https://www.lackawannahistory.org/HistoryBytes/HB_Vol2_No2.pdf
Keenan, Charles M. Historical Documentation of Major Coal-Mine Disasters in the United States Not Classified as Explosions of Gas or Dust, 1846–1962. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1963. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12768/
“Sixty-Two Perish in Mine Fire.” Scranton Tribune-Republican, April 8, 1911. Transcribed by Lackawanna PAGenWeb. https://www.lackawannapagenweb.com/history/pancoast.html
“Total of Pancoast Dead Is Seventy-Three.” Scranton Tribune-Republican, April 10, 1911. Transcribed by Lackawanna PAGenWeb. https://www.lackawannapagenweb.com/history/pancoast.html
“How Men Died in the Pancoast.” Scranton Tribune-Republican, April 10, 1911. Transcribed by Lackawanna PAGenWeb. https://www.lackawannapagenweb.com/history/pancoast.html
“73 Killed in Pennsylvania Mine Disaster.” San Francisco Call, April 9, 1911. California Digital Newspaper Collection. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SFC19110409.2.5
“Bodies Found in Mine Disaster in Pennsylvania Colliery.” Los Angeles Herald, April 9, 1911. California Digital Newspaper Collection. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LAH19110409.2.41
“Hostile Employers See Yourselves as Others Know You.” American Federationist, May 1911. Cornell University ILR School, Triangle Fire Primary Sources. https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/newspapersMagazines/af_0511.html
“Widows of Throop Disaster Are Paid Share of the Fund.” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, November 10, 1911. Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/
United States Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Throop Borough, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1910
Anthracite Heritage Museum. Anthracite Trust Company Records and Pancoast Relief Fund Materials. Scranton, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. https://www.anthracitemuseum.org/
Author Note: This article is written from official mine reports, newspaper accounts, and local historical research because the Pancoast dead deserve to be remembered through the record. If your family has a connection to Throop, the Price-Pancoast Mine, or the burial records, I hope this helps preserve another piece of that history.