Coal briquettes were very popular in Europe, especially in Germany where brown coal (lignite), bituminous or higher ranks of coal dust could be compressed with clay, tar or pitch binders into a useable slow burning fuel, ideal for stoves. Manchester Collieries made them from around 1929 to 1946, 'MC' stamped on them, no I don't have one.

Deutschland / Thüringen - Barbarossahöhle

 

The Barbarossa Cave (German: Barbarossahöhle) is an anhydrite cave (gypsum cave) in the Kyffhäuser Hills near Rottleben in the east German state of Thuringia. It is a cave with large caverns, grottos and lakes. The anhydrite has formed gypsum on the surface due to the air moisture in the cave and, as a result, has increased in volume. The resulting layers of gypsum gradually separate from the underlying rock and hang like wallpaper from the walls and ceilings of the underground caverns.

 

It was discovered in 1865 as a gallery was being driven during prospecting work for kupferschiefer, a copper-bearing shale or bituminous marl. By 1866 it had been developed and opened as a show cave under the name of Falkenburg Cave (Falkenburger Höhle). It has a floor area of about 25,000 m². Of interest to visitors are the underground lakes whose gypsum content gives them an iridescent green colour, and a human made stone construction, known as Barbarossa's Table and Chair (Tisch und Stuhl von Barbarossa).

 

Its location in the Kyffhäuser Hills gave rise to its link with the Barbarossa Legend and its proximity to the Kyffhäuser Monument led to it being renamed the Barbarossa Cave (Barbarossahöhle) at the end of the 19th century. According to the legend, Frederick Barbarossa will sleep in an underground palace until Germany is unified. His beard is growing around a round table. To date, it has gone around the table twice, but when it has encircled the table a third time, the end of the world will begin or Barbarossa will awaken and begin his reign anew. According to the legend, until then, there will be no other good emperors.

 

The Barbarossa Cave lies on the Karst Trail.

 

(Wikipedia)

 

Die Barbarossahöhle ist eine Schlotte im Anhydrit (Gips) im Kyffhäuser bei Rottleben (Thüringen). Die Höhle umfasst weite Hohlräume, Grotten und Seen. Der Anhydrit wandelt sich durch die Luftfeuchtigkeit in der Höhle oberflächlich zu Gips um und nimmt dabei an Volumen zu. Die so entstehenen Gipsschichten lösen sich allmählich vom Untergrund ab und hängen ähnlich wie abfallende Tapeten an den Decken und Wänden der unterirdischen Hohlräume. Sie werden als Gipslappen bezeichnet. Es besteht eine hydraulische Verbindung zum Arensbrunnen.

 

Die Barbarossahöhle liegt am Karstwanderweg.

 

Die Barbarossahöhle wurde 1865 beim Vortrieb eines Stollens für den Kupferschieferbergbau entdeckt und 1866 als Schauhöhle mit dem Namen Falkenburger Höhle ausgebaut und eröffnet. Sie hat eine Grundfläche von etwa 25.000 m². Für Besucher interessant sind die durch den Gipsgehalt grün schimmernden unterirdischen Seen sowie der sogenannte Tisch und Stuhl von Barbarossa.

 

Ihre Lage im Kyffhäusergebirge begründet ihre Verbindung zur Barbarossasage, und die Nähe zum Kyffhäuserdenkmal führte Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts zur Umbenennung in Barbarossahöhle. Der Sage nach soll Kaiser Friedrich I. Barbarossa in einem unterirdischen Schloss solange schlafen, bis Deutschland geeint ist. Sein Bart wächst um einen runden Tisch. Bis jetzt reicht er zweimal herum, doch wenn er die dritte Runde beendet hat, beginnt das Ende der Welt oder Barbarossa wacht auf und beginnt seine Herrschaft erneut. Und es heißt, bis dahin werde kein guter Kaiser mehr kommen.

 

Das Brettspiel Barbarossa und die Rätselmeister greift die Sage um die Höhle als Spielthema auf.

 

(Wikipedia)

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

The Contentment Historical Complex, headquarters for the Fayette County Historical Society includes a historical museum and restored one-room schoolhouse. Ansted is a town in Fayette County West Virginia. It is situated on high bluffs along U.S. Route 60 on a portion of the Midland Trail a National Scenic Byway near Hawk's Nest overlooking the New River. The town with seams of high grade bituminous coal nearby prospered from coal mining in the mid to late 1800's. Print Size 13x19 inches.

This is the tipple at the Atlas Coal Mine.

 

From the official web site:

 

Coal was not hard to discover in the area that is now Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. Seams of coal show up as black stripes in the badlands of the Red Deer River Valley.

 

The Blackfoot and Cree knew about the black rock that burned, but they didn’t like to use it. Later, three white explorers reported coal in the area: Peter Fidler in 1792, Dr. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition in 1857, and Joseph Tyrrell in 1884.

 

In the years that followed, a handful of ranchers and homesteaders dug coal out of river banks and coulees to heat their homes. However, the first commercial coal mine did not open until Sam Drumheller started the coal rush in the area that now bears his name.

 

The rush started when Sam bought land off a local rancher named Thomas Greentree. Sam turned around and sold this land to Canadian National Railway, to develop a townsite. Sam also registered a coal mine. Before his mine opened, however, Jesse Gouge and Garnet Coyle beat him to it, and opened the Newcastle Mine. CN laid tracks into town, and the first load of coal was shipped out of Drumheller in 1911.

 

Once the railway was built, people poured in. Hundreds, then thousands, of people came to dig coal. The greatest numbers came from Eastern Europe, Britain, and Nova Scotia. More mines opened. By the end of 1912, there were 9 working coal mines, each with its own camp of workers: Newcastle, Drumheller, Midland, Rosedale, and Wayne. In the years that followed, more mines and camps sprang up: Nacmine, Cambria, Willow Creek, Lehigh, and East Coulee.

 

Coal mining was hard, dirty, dangerous work. Mining in the Drumheller Valley, however, was less hard, dirty, and dangerous than it was in many other coal mining regions in Canada. This was due to both lucky geology and lucky timing.

 

The geology of the Drumheller coal field results in flat lying seams, which are much safer to mine than the steeply pitching seams of the mountain mines. In addition, the coal produced in Drumheller is sub-bituminous. This grade of coal is “immature” which means it hasn’t had time to build up a strong concentration of gas. Methane gas is the biggest killer in coal mines around the world.

 

The timing of the Drumheller mine industry was lucky, too. By the time the Newcastle opened in 1911, the right to better working conditions had been fought for and won by miners’ unions in North America. As a result, miners were provided with wash houses, better underground ventilation, and higher safety standards. When the Newcastle opened, there were laws in place to prohibit child labour, so boys under 14 were no longer allowed underground. The worst of the worst coal mining days were over, at least in North America.

 

Nevertheless, early mine camps around Drumheller were called “hell’s hole” because miners lived in tents, or shacks, with little sanitation and little comfort. It was a man’s world, with drinking, gambling, and watching fistfights common forms of recreation. As shacks gave way to little houses, and women joined the men and started families, life improved. Hockey, baseball, music, theatre, and visiting friends enriched peoples’ lives. Going downtown Saturday night was a huge event, with every language in Europe spoken by the crowds spilling off the sidewalks. No longer “hell’s hole,” Drumheller became “the wonder town of the west!” and “the fastest growing town in Canada, if not in North America!”

 

Sub-bituminous coal is ideal for heating homes and cooking food. People all over western Canada heated their homes, schools, and offices with Drumheller coal. Long, cold winters were good for Drumheller, because everyone needed lots of coal. In these years, miners had of money in their pockets. Short, mild winters were difficult. A miner might only work one day a week, and get laid off in early spring. He got through the summer by growing a big garden, catching fish, and working for farmers.

 

Between 1911 and 1979, 139 mines were registered in the Drumheller valley. Some mines didn’t last long, but 34 were productive for many years. Between 1912 and 1966, Drumheller produced 56,864,808 tons of coal, making it one of the major coal producing regions in Canada.

 

The beginning of the end for Drumheller’s mining industry was the Leduc Oil Strike of 1948. After this, natural gas became the fuel of choice for home heating in western Canada. To the mine operators, it seemed that people switched from messy coal stoves to clean gas furnaces as fast as they could. As the demand for coal dropped, mines closed. As mines closed, people moved away and communities suffered. Some communities, like Willow Creek, completely vanished. Others, like East Coulee, went from a boomtown of 3800 to a ghost town of 180. When the Atlas #4 Mine shipped its last load of coal in 1979, the coal years of Drumheller were over.

 

The Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site preserves the last of the Drumheller mines. The Atlas recalls the time when Coal was King, and “mining the black” brought thousands of people to this lonely valley. The nearby East Coulee School Museum interprets the life of children and families in a bustling mine town.

 

This 360° High Dynamic Range panorama was stitched from 66 bracketed photographs with PTGUI Pro, tone-mapped with Photomatix, processed in Color Efex, and finally touched up in Aperture.

 

Original size: 20000 × 10000 (200.0 MP; 1.03 GB).

 

Location: East Coulee, Alberta, Canada

Deutschland / Thüringen - Barbarossahöhle

 

The Barbarossa Cave (German: Barbarossahöhle) is an anhydrite cave (gypsum cave) in the Kyffhäuser Hills near Rottleben in the east German state of Thuringia. It is a cave with large caverns, grottos and lakes. The anhydrite has formed gypsum on the surface due to the air moisture in the cave and, as a result, has increased in volume. The resulting layers of gypsum gradually separate from the underlying rock and hang like wallpaper from the walls and ceilings of the underground caverns.

 

It was discovered in 1865 as a gallery was being driven during prospecting work for kupferschiefer, a copper-bearing shale or bituminous marl. By 1866 it had been developed and opened as a show cave under the name of Falkenburg Cave (Falkenburger Höhle). It has a floor area of about 25,000 m². Of interest to visitors are the underground lakes whose gypsum content gives them an iridescent green colour, and a human made stone construction, known as Barbarossa's Table and Chair (Tisch und Stuhl von Barbarossa).

 

Its location in the Kyffhäuser Hills gave rise to its link with the Barbarossa Legend and its proximity to the Kyffhäuser Monument led to it being renamed the Barbarossa Cave (Barbarossahöhle) at the end of the 19th century. According to the legend, Frederick Barbarossa will sleep in an underground palace until Germany is unified. His beard is growing around a round table. To date, it has gone around the table twice, but when it has encircled the table a third time, the end of the world will begin or Barbarossa will awaken and begin his reign anew. According to the legend, until then, there will be no other good emperors.

 

The Barbarossa Cave lies on the Karst Trail.

 

(Wikipedia)

 

Die Barbarossahöhle ist eine Schlotte im Anhydrit (Gips) im Kyffhäuser bei Rottleben (Thüringen). Die Höhle umfasst weite Hohlräume, Grotten und Seen. Der Anhydrit wandelt sich durch die Luftfeuchtigkeit in der Höhle oberflächlich zu Gips um und nimmt dabei an Volumen zu. Die so entstehenen Gipsschichten lösen sich allmählich vom Untergrund ab und hängen ähnlich wie abfallende Tapeten an den Decken und Wänden der unterirdischen Hohlräume. Sie werden als Gipslappen bezeichnet. Es besteht eine hydraulische Verbindung zum Arensbrunnen.

 

Die Barbarossahöhle liegt am Karstwanderweg.

 

Die Barbarossahöhle wurde 1865 beim Vortrieb eines Stollens für den Kupferschieferbergbau entdeckt und 1866 als Schauhöhle mit dem Namen Falkenburger Höhle ausgebaut und eröffnet. Sie hat eine Grundfläche von etwa 25.000 m². Für Besucher interessant sind die durch den Gipsgehalt grün schimmernden unterirdischen Seen sowie der sogenannte Tisch und Stuhl von Barbarossa.

 

Ihre Lage im Kyffhäusergebirge begründet ihre Verbindung zur Barbarossasage, und die Nähe zum Kyffhäuserdenkmal führte Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts zur Umbenennung in Barbarossahöhle. Der Sage nach soll Kaiser Friedrich I. Barbarossa in einem unterirdischen Schloss solange schlafen, bis Deutschland geeint ist. Sein Bart wächst um einen runden Tisch. Bis jetzt reicht er zweimal herum, doch wenn er die dritte Runde beendet hat, beginnt das Ende der Welt oder Barbarossa wacht auf und beginnt seine Herrschaft erneut. Und es heißt, bis dahin werde kein guter Kaiser mehr kommen.

 

Das Brettspiel Barbarossa und die Rätselmeister greift die Sage um die Höhle als Spielthema auf.

 

(Wikipedia)

Three RJ Corman SD40-2's begin their journey back to Clearfield on a beautiful October afternoon with a train load of Bituminous Coal. A local railfan pulled up just minutes before to catch the EMD's on their way out of town.

 

October 2018

Hasta el momento en que Fortuny recibió el encargo, en 1860, de la Diputación de Barcelona para ir a Marruecos a retratar las hazañas de los ejércitos españoles, y especialmente de los destacamentos catalanes al mando del general Prim, sobre la contienda norteafricana, había sido un aprendiz formado en primer lugar en Reus con el pintor Domènec Soberano (1825-1909) y, más tarde, a partir de 1852, en la Escuela de Llotja de Barcelona, donde se introdujo en la órbita del nazarenismo al convertirse en discípulo de Claudio Lorenzale (1815-1889).

Al margen de estas circunstancias, la estancia en Tetuán le descubrió el mundo islámico, que le llevaría al cultivo de la pintura de género orientalista. Además, como le sucedió a Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), a Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876) y a muchos otros artistas, la luz meridional afectó a su estilo, hasta aquel momento aún un tanto académico y de tonalidades neutras, algo bituminosas. A partir de entonces se transformó gradualmente en un lenguaje más vigoroso y expresivo, de colores más luminosos y de claroscuros acentuados. Ayudó al cambio, sin duda, el continuado y perseverante ejercicio diario de captar la realidad in situ para poder trasladarla posteriormente al cuadro, en su estudio. Los apuntes tomados del natural le obligaban a adentrarse, mediante la observación atenta, en los matices y las peculiaridades visuales de aquellas tierras y lo conducirían a dejar de lado muchas fórmulas de taller.

En realidad, la obra se convirtió en un reto fallido para su autor, en un desengaño que no llegó nunca a finalizar. En todo caso, resulta una obra embriagadora por su movimiento, colorido y la manera de introducir al espectador en una batalla de la que se vuelve casi partícipe; por no hablar de la economía de medios, ya que con simples “brochazos”, casi esbozos, y una pincelada esponjosa es capaz de transmitir un realismo inmediato.

______________

Until the moment when Fortuny received the commission, in 1860, from the Diputación de Barcelona to go to Morocco to portray the exploits of the Spanish armies, and especially of the Catalan detachments under the command of General Prim, on the North African conflict, had been an apprentice trained first in Reus with the painter Domènec Soberano (1825-1909) and later, from 1852, at the Llotja School in Barcelona, where he was introduced to the orbit of Nazareneism by becoming a disciple of Claudio Lorenzale (1815-1889).

Apart from these circumstances, his stay in Tetouan discovered for him the Islamic world, which would lead him to the cultivation of orientalist painting. Moreover, as happened to Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876) and many other artists, the southern light affected his style, which up to that time was still somewhat academic and of neutral, somewhat bituminous tones. From then on it gradually became a more vigorous and expressive language, with brighter colours and accentuated chiaroscuro. The continuous and persevering daily exercise of capturing reality in situ in order to be able to transfer it later to the painting, in his studio, helped the change. The notes taken from nature forced him to enter, through careful observation, the nuances and visual peculiarities of those lands and would lead him to leave aside many workshop formulas.

In reality, the work became a failed challenge for its author, a disappointment that never came to an end. In any case, it is an intoxicating work because of its movement, colour and the way it introduces the spectator into a battle in which he becomes almost a participant; not to mention the economy of means, since with simple "brushstrokes", almost sketches, and a spongy brushstroke he is capable of transmitting an immediate realism.

 

This is the tipple at the Atlas Coal Mine.

 

From the official web site:

 

Coal was not hard to discover in the area that is now Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. Seams of coal show up as black stripes in the badlands of the Red Deer River Valley.

 

The Blackfoot and Cree knew about the black rock that burned, but they didn’t like to use it. Later, three white explorers reported coal in the area: Peter Fidler in 1792, Dr. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition in 1857, and Joseph Tyrrell in 1884.

 

In the years that followed, a handful of ranchers and homesteaders dug coal out of river banks and coulees to heat their homes. However, the first commercial coal mine did not open until Sam Drumheller started the coal rush in the area that now bears his name.

 

The rush started when Sam bought land off a local rancher named Thomas Greentree. Sam turned around and sold this land to Canadian National Railway, to develop a townsite. Sam also registered a coal mine. Before his mine opened, however, Jesse Gouge and Garnet Coyle beat him to it, and opened the Newcastle Mine. CN laid tracks into town, and the first load of coal was shipped out of Drumheller in 1911.

 

Once the railway was built, people poured in. Hundreds, then thousands, of people came to dig coal. The greatest numbers came from Eastern Europe, Britain, and Nova Scotia. More mines opened. By the end of 1912, there were 9 working coal mines, each with its own camp of workers: Newcastle, Drumheller, Midland, Rosedale, and Wayne. In the years that followed, more mines and camps sprang up: Nacmine, Cambria, Willow Creek, Lehigh, and East Coulee.

 

Coal mining was hard, dirty, dangerous work. Mining in the Drumheller Valley, however, was less hard, dirty, and dangerous than it was in many other coal mining regions in Canada. This was due to both lucky geology and lucky timing.

 

The geology of the Drumheller coal field results in flat lying seams, which are much safer to mine than the steeply pitching seams of the mountain mines. In addition, the coal produced in Drumheller is sub-bituminous. This grade of coal is “immature” which means it hasn’t had time to build up a strong concentration of gas. Methane gas is the biggest killer in coal mines around the world.

 

The timing of the Drumheller mine industry was lucky, too. By the time the Newcastle opened in 1911, the right to better working conditions had been fought for and won by miners’ unions in North America. As a result, miners were provided with wash houses, better underground ventilation, and higher safety standards. When the Newcastle opened, there were laws in place to prohibit child labour, so boys under 14 were no longer allowed underground. The worst of the worst coal mining days were over, at least in North America.

 

Nevertheless, early mine camps around Drumheller were called “hell’s hole” because miners lived in tents, or shacks, with little sanitation and little comfort. It was a man’s world, with drinking, gambling, and watching fistfights common forms of recreation. As shacks gave way to little houses, and women joined the men and started families, life improved. Hockey, baseball, music, theatre, and visiting friends enriched peoples’ lives. Going downtown Saturday night was a huge event, with every language in Europe spoken by the crowds spilling off the sidewalks. No longer “hell’s hole,” Drumheller became “the wonder town of the west!” and “the fastest growing town in Canada, if not in North America!”

 

Sub-bituminous coal is ideal for heating homes and cooking food. People all over western Canada heated their homes, schools, and offices with Drumheller coal. Long, cold winters were good for Drumheller, because everyone needed lots of coal. In these years, miners had of money in their pockets. Short, mild winters were difficult. A miner might only work one day a week, and get laid off in early spring. He got through the summer by growing a big garden, catching fish, and working for farmers.

 

Between 1911 and 1979, 139 mines were registered in the Drumheller valley. Some mines didn’t last long, but 34 were productive for many years. Between 1912 and 1966, Drumheller produced 56,864,808 tons of coal, making it one of the major coal producing regions in Canada.

 

The beginning of the end for Drumheller’s mining industry was the Leduc Oil Strike of 1948. After this, natural gas became the fuel of choice for home heating in western Canada. To the mine operators, it seemed that people switched from messy coal stoves to clean gas furnaces as fast as they could. As the demand for coal dropped, mines closed. As mines closed, people moved away and communities suffered. Some communities, like Willow Creek, completely vanished. Others, like East Coulee, went from a boomtown of 3800 to a ghost town of 180. When the Atlas #4 Mine shipped its last load of coal in 1979, the coal years of Drumheller were over.

 

The Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site preserves the last of the Drumheller mines. The Atlas recalls the time when Coal was King, and “mining the black” brought thousands of people to this lonely valley. The nearby East Coulee School Museum interprets the life of children and families in a bustling mine town.

 

This 360° High Dynamic Range panorama was stitched from 66 bracketed photographs with PTGUI Pro, tone-mapped with Photomatix, processed in Color Efex, and finally touched up in Aperture.

 

Original size: 20000 × 10000 (200.0 MP; 1.03 GB).

 

Location: East Coulee, Alberta, Canada

Piles of Wyoming's finest sub-bituminous coal dwarf a Sheboygan coal train, bringing another 135 loads of fuel to the Edgewater Generating Station.

From a very fine 1962 publication issued by Thomas W Ward of Sheffield showing recent activities amongst the Ward Group of Companies. The company was founded in Sheffield in 1898 and during the 20th century it grew to acquire a multiplicity of allied companies and activities. I suspect they are best recalled for railway engineering works and shipbreaking. The Group was restructed in the late 1970s and the bulk of the company was acquired by RTZ in 1982.

This book is a tremendous record of the group and is beautifully produced although very annoyingly no printer or publisher is shown. The company commissioned the photographer Walter Nurnberg to take the vast majority of the near 200 images. Nurnberg was an acknowledged and accomplished photographer of the industrial landscape.

 

This is a cracking shot of a road surfacing machine laying tarmacadam - registered PWA 28, I think this urban northern scene is possibly Saltaire in West Yorkshire,

Heavily rusted remains of the "SS LAWRENCE"

 

The "LAWRENCE" was a 160ft.two-masted twin-screw iron steamer. She was built in 1884 by Kish, Boolds & Co. of Sunderland, England, and launched originally as "BORTONIUS".

The following year, coal was discovered in the tiny West Coast hamlet of Mokihinui (the first high-grade bituminous coal to be mined in New Zealand), and the Mokihinui Coal Company was established. A second coal seam was soon found, even larger than the first, and in 1889 the flourishing business purchased the LAWRENCE [victoriancollections.net.au/items/555577b3998fc21654210829].

Good fortune continued to smile on the young company, and in early 1891 it won a contract to supply coal to the NZ Railways.

But the good fortune ran out on April 28, 1891. From the up-river wharf where the Mokihinui Coal Co.’s one-mile tramway delivered the coal from the mines, the LAWRENCE set sail at about noon. She became lodged in the sandbar at the river mouth, managed to break free but, owing to her damaged propeller blades, she then drifted onto the beach. The next day she broke her back in heavy weather and was declared a total loss [paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ODT18910430.2.22].

As the LAWRENCE was its only ship, the Mokihinui Coal Co. was subsequently forced to hand over its newly-acquired rail contract to the Grey Valley Coal Company...

==========

In 1935 a ship’s bell was found near Westport, about 40km south of the Mokihinui River. It caused considerable local speculation because, at first, no-one recognised the name inscribed on the bell: BORTONIUS.

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Rhondda Heritage Park is a tourist attraction which offers an insight into the life of the coal mining community that existed in the area until the 1980s.

Visitors can experience the life of the coal miners on a guided tour through one of the mine shafts of the Lewis Merthyr colliery. Tours are led by former colliery workers. Rhondda Heritage Park is an Anchor Point of ERIH, The European Route of Industrial Heritage.

Rhondda Heritage Park exists on the site of the former Lewis Merthyr Colliery as a testament to the coal mining history of the Rhondda Valleys, which until the end of the 20th century was one of the most important coal mining areas in the world - in an area only 16 miles (26 km) long, Rhondda alone had over 53 working collieries at one time.

Although coal was mined as early as the seventeenth century in the Rhondda for domestic purposes, the earliest recorded opening and mining of a safe coal level was in 1790 by Dr Richard Griffiths, who was also responsible for bringing the first tram road into the Rhondda. Subsequently, Walter Coffin opened and sunk the first pits paving the way for the discovery of rich and prosperous steam coal seams with many more lines to follow.

Two pits were opened in 1850 on what was to become the Lewis Merthyr site:

•Hafod by two brothers David and John Thomas

•Coed Cae by Edward Mills

Both pits had to be abandoned early on due to the conditions of the workings.

In the mid-1870s William Thomas Lewis (later Lord Merthyr) purchased and reopened the two pits, mining the upper bituminous (household) coal seams, until Hafod closed around 1893 and Coed Cae in the 1930s.

By 1880 WT Lewis had sunk the Bertie shaft, and in 1890 the Trefor shaft (both named after his sons), by which time the company had become known as the Lewis Merthyr Consolidated Collieries Ltd, employing some 5,000 men and producing almost a million tons of coal annually. The two headframes and associated colliery buildings are now Grade II* listed buildings.

In 1904 the company sunk the Lady Lewis Colliery one mile (1.6 km) to the north east in the Rhondda Fach. In 1905 the company acquired Universal Colliery at Senghenydd, which was later to suffer the worst ever mining disaster in British history. In 1929 the colliery became part of the Powell Dyffryn Group, and in the same year Coed Cae stopped winding coal. Hafod No 2 followed, and Hafod No 1 in 1933. The colliery was nationalised in 1947.

In 1958 Lewis Merthyr Colliery and the neighbouring Ty Mawr Colliery merged and all coal winding ceased at Lewis Merthyr, with coaling continuing via Ty Mawr and men and supplies only at Lewis Merthyr. By 1969 the Colliery had become the Ty Mawr/Lewis Merthyr Colliery. As many as thirteen seams have been worked at the Lewis Merthyr using the advanced longwall method of working with most of the coal being won with pneumatic picks and hand loaded onto conveyors.

Until the 1950s the coal industry maintained a steady level of production and employment, but since that time there has been a continuing decline in the number of miners in employment. Most of the pits which have been closed have still left coal to mine, but with oil and coal available more cheaply from abroad the demise of the industry has been inevitable. Nowhere has the decline of the coal industry been more dramatic than in the South Wales Coal Field.[citation needed] At Lewis Merthyr production came to an end on the 14 March 1983 with production continuing in the four feet seam until July when coaling ceased forever at Ty Mawr/Lewis Merthyr.

By 1990 not one productive colliery existed in the Rhondda but Rhondda's past has been captured and preserved as an historic landmark at the Lewis Merthyr Colliery now the Rhondda Heritage Park

   

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today however we are northwest of Lettice’s flat, in the working-class London suburb of Harlesden where Edith, Lettice’s maid’s, parents live in a small, two storey brick terrace house which opens out directly onto the street. Edith’s father, George, works at the McVitie and Price biscuit factory in Harlesden, and her mother, Ada, takes in laundry at home, although with her husband’s promotion as a Line Manager, she no longer needs to do it quite so much to supplement their income. Whilst far removed from the grandeur of Lettice’s Mayfair flat, the Harlesden terrace has always been a cosy and welcoming home for Edith and her seafaring brother, Bert.

 

We find ourselves in Ada’s kitchen, the heart of the Watsford’s little home. Even before she walked through the glossy black painted front door today, Edith could smell the familiar scent of her mother’s delicious baking, and as she walked into the terrace’s kitchen at the rear of the house, she found Ada making one of her favourite seasonal treats: hot cross buns* for Easter.

 

Edith is sitting at her usual perch on a tall ladderback chair drawn up to the round table, worn and scarred by years of heavy use that dominates the cluttered, old fashioned kitchen as her mother withdraws a tray of four large and delicious looking hot cross buns from the baking oven on the left-hand side of the old kitchen range that dominates the far wall of the kitchen. The air of the kitchen is injected with the sweet, mouthwatering smell of cooked currants, cinnamon, nutmeg and a hint of orange. Holding the battered metal baking tray with a thick yellow cloth with red edging, Ada slips it onto the kitchen table with a clatter, making the four golden brown hot cross buns rattle around.

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith gasps with admiration as she looks at the perfectly baked buns with glistening raisins poking out of the dough like jewels, decorated with their creamy white flour paste crosses. “They look perfect!”

 

“They smell perfect too!” pipes up George, who, being a Sunday, is sitting in his chair by the range, enjoying his Sunday Express crossword** as he absorbs its cosy heat.

 

“Thank you, both of you.” Ada remarks with a satisfied smile, placing her hands on her fleshy hips as she admires her own handiwork with twinkling caramel brown eyes. “They aren’t bad, even if I do say so myself.”

 

“Mum!” Edith exclaims again. “They are far better than that! I can never get my hot cross buns to be as light and fluffy as yours.”

 

“Do you give it a good knead like I’ve told you to, Edith love?” Ada asks her daughter.

 

“I do, Mum.” Edith nods.

 

“And you remember my saying?” Ada continues.

 

“Yes Mum: ‘make fresh today and bake fresh tomorrow’. I make sure I let the dough rest and rise the day before, just like you’ve told me to do.” Edith replies. “I never bake hot cross buns with dough I’ve made the same day, and they still don’t come out as light and fluffy as yours.”

 

“Well, I know what I think it is, Edith love.” Ada says, tapping her nose knowingly with a careworn finger.

 

“What is it, Mum?”

 

“You won’t like it, Edith love.”

 

‘Oh, please tell me, Mum!” Edith pleads. “Is it something I’m doing wrong?”

 

“Oh no!” Ada retorts, quickly reassuring her daughter. “I wouldn’t say that. I think it’s your equipment.”

 

“But Miss Lettice’s kitchen is lovely and up-to-date, Mum! She even has a beautiful gas stove to bake in.”

 

“And therein lies the problem.” Ada replies, standing up straight and reaching over, tapping the cool black leaded top of her range with affection, smiling beatifically as she does. “Nothing beats these good old coal ranges when it comes to baking.”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith exclaims aghast. “You’re so… so…”

 

“Old fashioned, Edith love?” Ada asks.

 

“Traditional, Mum!” Edith assures her.

 

“I told you, you wouldn’t like my reason,” Ada replies. “But there it is nonetheless, Edith love. They may be a bit old hat***, dirty, and somewhat problematic and recalcitrant at times, but nothing beats a good old coke**** range for baking.”

 

“Your Mum has a point, Edith love.” George remarks, looking over the top of his newspaper, his blue pencil clutched between his right index and middle finger peering around the edge of the printed sheets. “I can’t say there is anything she has baked in that oven that hasn’t come out looking and smelling wonderful.”

 

“You just want a freshly baked hot cross bun, George love.” Ada says, eyeing her husband knowingly and wagging a finger at him.

 

“Well,” George remarks, folding his newspaper crisply in half and casting it and his pencil onto the kitchen table as he drags his Windsor chair across the flagstones and sits at the table opposite his daughter. ‘Now that you mention it, I wouldn’t say no to one.” He rubs his stomach, enwrapped in an argyle patterned***** knitted vest, indicating his hungriness. “No-one makes hot cross buns as nicely as you do, Ada my love.”

 

“Oh you!” Ada flaps her red trimmed yellow cloth at him playfully, before leaning forward with a groan to kiss her husband tenderly on the lips. “You always know how to wrangle what you want out of me.”

 

“Flattery never fails.” George admits with a gormless grin.

 

“Alright Edith love.” Ada says with a sigh, albeit a happy one as she happily gives in to her husband’s indulgence. “Will you be a help and fetch down the tea things and some plates, whilst I fill the Brown Betty******.”

 

“Yes Mum!” Edith replies with eagerness, anxious to enjoy and savour the delight of one of her mother’s home made hot cross buns.

 

A short while later the table is set with a selection of Ada’s mismatched china pieces, all market finds she has made by her over the years, taken down from the shelves of the great, dark Welsh dresser behind Edith’s ladderback chair. George has a pretty blue and white floral sprigged Royal Doulton******* cup, whilst Ada has a pink, yellow and blue floral Colclough******** one, and Edith has her favourite yellow rose Royal Albert********* teacup with its dainty fluted sides and gilt edge. The Brown Betty sits gleaming between them, steam rising in delicate curlicues from her spot, flanked by a pretty Victorian milk jug and sugar bowl which is missing its lid.

 

“Right then!” Ada says cheerfully as she picks up a plate. “One for you George.” She picks up a hot cross bun and plops it on the plate and hands it to her husband, who accepts it gratefully with wide, hungry eyes. “And one for you, Edith love.” She picks up a second bun and places it on a plate which she then hands to her daughter. “And lastly one for me.” She adds one to her own plate. ‘Please help yourself to butter.” She indicates with an open hand to the small square of butter sitting in a gleaming clear glass dish.

 

“I wonder who will get the last one?” George asks, eyeing the remaining hot cross bun on the silver baking tray.

 

“Yes, I wonder.” Ada says sarcastically with raised eyebrows, knowing full well, as does Edith, that George will claim the last one for himself.

 

“You know the story of how your mum and I met, don’t you Edith love?” George asks as he cuts his bun in half with a knife.

 

Edith rolls her eyes. “Of course I do, Dad!” she replies with a good natured smile. “You have told Bert and I more times than I can count how you met Mum at the young people’s social picnic in Roundwood Park********** organised by the Vicar of All Souls***********. You tell us that Mum wouldn’t have been nearly as attractive if she hadn’t been carrying a tin of her best biscuits at the time.”

 

“Pshaw!” Ada scoffs as she butters her own hot cross bun before handing the dish to her husband.

 

“It’s true.” He accepts the butter dish. “Your mum knows the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and it certainly is mine.”

 

“Pshaw!” Ada repeats. “You mean you weren’t attracted to me anyway?” She turns back to her daughter. “I looked very fetching that day. I was wearing my new Sunday best dress for spring which I’d made especially for the picnic. It was made of cotton decorated with sprigs of pink roses, and it had leg-of-mutton sleeves************. I was wearing my best Sunday hat too, made of straw with the dried flowers around the brim.”

 

“Yes,” George replies, clearing his throat awkwardly. “You were as lovely as a summer’s day, Ada.”

 

Ada giggles rather girlishly, an unusual thing for Edith to witness and pushes a few loose strands of her mousy brown hair flecked with grey that has come loose from her bun behind her ear. “Your father was too shy to talk to me. It was only because I thought he looked rather handsome in his Sunday best suit and I asked him if he’d like a biscuit that we even spoke.”

 

“I say, steady on, old girl!” George retorts, clearing his throat awkwardly again. “That’s not how I remember it.”

 

“Men seldom remember the truth of things in the aftermath.” Ada winks at her daughter conspiratorially. “They are very good at inventing their own history.”

 

“Well, anyway,” George blusters as his cheeks redden with embarrassment, suggesting there is more than a little truth to his wife’s story. “What I wanted to ask you, Edith,” He focusses his attention on his daughter, trying to ignore his wife’s smug smile, pausing his buttering of his hot cross bun “Was, did I ever tell you about the first Easter Sunday picnic we had after your mother and I had been stepping out together?”

 

“No.” Edith replies, accepting the butter dish as he passes it to her, sitting more upright in her seat as she pays close attention. “I don’t think so.”

 

“Do you remember that picnic, Ada love?” George asks, smiling at his wife, his eyes sparkling with happiness and love.

 

Ada pauses for a moment, her buttered bun paused between her plate and her mouth. Her brow crumples over her eyes as she concentrates. “I remember the crocuses were out. The lawns near the old Lodge House Café************* were a sea of purple and lilac, with a smattering of orange.”

 

“As they are every spring, Ada love.” George remarks.

 

Edith bites into one half of her hot buttered hot cross bun and sighs with happiness, savouring the taste of the freshly baked and lightly spiced dough and warm, juicy currants as she chews.

 

“Do you remember anything else, Ada love?” George asks his wife as he bites into his own hot cross bun, washing the mouthful down with a swig of tea from his cup.

 

“I obviously must have made hot cross buns.” Ada adds hopefully, but the doubt in her voice demonstrates clearly that she doesn’t remember. “Or you wouldn’t have brought this reminiscence up.”

 

George chuckles, snoring through his nose as he finishes his mouthful of hot cross bun. “I’ll say you did!” he manages to say jovially as he chews.

 

Edith swallows her mouthful of bun and deposits the remainder on her plate. Picking up her teacup she asks before sipping its contents, “Well don’t keep me in suspense, Dad!” She swallows her tea. “What happened?”

 

“Yes, what did happ…” Ada begins, before halting mid-sentence and starting again. “Am I going to want our daughter to hear whatever you’re about to share, George Watsford?” She returns her untouched half of her bun to her plate and looks sharply at her husband.

 

“Goodness Ada, how suspicious you are.” George chuckles good naturedly. He turns to his daughter. “That’s marriage for you. Are you sure you want to marry Frank?” he adds jokingly.

 

“Oh Dad!” Edith laughs, flapping her hand dismissively at him.

 

“What are you going to tell our daughter, George?” Ada persists.

 

“I was simply going to tell Edith about how popular your hot cross buns were that day.” George elucidates.

 

“Oh well, that’s alright then.” Ada replies, heaving a sigh of relief, easing her tensed shoulders and settling back into the round spindled back of her Windsor chair. Picking up the half a hot cross bun she gives her permission by nodding and saying, “Go ahead.” She then takes a bite of her bun and sighs happily.

 

After quickly scoffing the remainder of his first half of his hot cross bun, George rubs his buttery fingers together before steepling them over his plate and staring at his daughter who returns his gaze with alert eyes, anxious to know what transpired. “Well Edith, as you know at these sorts of occasions, once again being a young people’s Easter Sunday picnic organsied by the Vicar, everyone knew everyone else.”

 

George pauses and looks at his wife to see if she remembers the picnic, however her face remains passive, her eyes inquisitive.

 

“Go on Dad.” Edith says with anticipation.

 

“And of course that meant that everyone also knew about your mum’s baking prowess.” George goes on.

 

“Oh George!” Ada gasps, blushing at her husband’s compliment.

 

“What happened, Dad?” Edith asks.

 

“Well, on the day of the Easter Sunday picnic, your mum had baked me a basket of fresh hot cross buns that we were able to share, but when we sat down,” He turns his attentions back to his wife. “Lilian and Ernie Pyecroft, who were of course only young lovers a-courting then too and not married, came and joined us.” George chuckles as he remembers. “Your mum offered them a freshly baked hot cross bun each, which they took. And then your Aunt Maud arrived with your Uncle Sydney and she offered them a bun each, and then the Vicar and his wife walked past, so she offered them one each.”

 

“It was the right and Christian thing to do, George,” Ada defends herself. “To offer the Vicar and his wife a hot cross bun each! I could hardly have not! I would have looked stingy.”

 

“Aha!” George laughs, pointing at his wife. “You do remember then, Ada!”

 

“Of course I remember, George love.” Ada replies, her face flushing with embarrassment.

 

“Well, what was so wrong with offering the Vicar and his wife a hot cross bun, Dad?” Edith asks. “I’d have done the same.”

 

“Of course you would, Edith love.” Ada purrs. “I’m proud of you.”

 

“Because,” George explains with a loud guffaw. “By the time she had done that, she’d given away all the hot cross buns she’s made for us, and I didn’t get to have a one that day!”

 

“Oh Mum!” Edith replies as she starts to giggle.

 

“I was just trying to be a good, Christian soul.” Ada defends herself again, folding her arms akimbo, but blushing bright red as she does.

 

“You were that,” George laughs harder. “To my detriment!”

 

Then even Ada starts to laugh at the tale of that Easter many springs ago before the war. “At least I made you some more the next Sunday when we had a picnic, George Watsford! And you were able to have as many as you wanted.”

 

George’s laughs start to subside, and he concurs with this wife.

 

“What did you eat then, if all the hot cross buns were gone?” Edith asks her parents.

 

“Oh don’t worry, Edith love. I knew your father had a good appetite, so I’d also made a nice cherry cobbler, which we made short work of.”

 

“We did that.” George agrees.

 

The family trio continue to enjoy their hot buttered fresh hot cross buns, chuckling away at George’s tale as they finish them off. The kitchen feels warm and cosy filled with the smell of Ada’s hot cross buns and the sound of their gentle enjoyment of them. True to his usual form, George scoffs the last of his first hot cross bun, and then helps himself to the last one on the tray between them all. Ada and Edith smile at him indulgently as they watch him enjoy it like a little boy.

 

“More tea, Edith love?” Ada asks, picking up the Brown betty and proffering its tilted spout towards her daughter’s teacup.

 

“Yes please, Mum.” Edith replies, lifting up her cup.

 

As Ada fills her daughter’s cup, a thoughtful look crosses Edith’s face.

 

“Mum, I’ve just had the loveliest idea.” she says looking up at her mother.

 

“What’s that, Edith love?” Ada asks.

 

“Well, why don’t we have a picnic on Easter Sunday in Roundwood Park: you Dad, me and Frank!” Edith enthuses. “You can bake hot cross buns and I’ll make some sandwiches. It will give me a good excuse to use the wonderful picnic basket Bert brought back from Australia for me.”

 

“What about Mrs. McTavish, Edith?” George asks.

 

“Oh, she’s gone to stay with her brother in Aberdeen, as she does every year at Easter, Dad, so it’s just Frank on his own.”

 

“Well, I think that sounds like a capital idea, Edith.” Ada agrees. “Let’s do it! What do you think, George?”

 

“I’m happy to, Ada love, but only on one condition though.” George adds.

 

“What?” Ada and Edith ask at the same time.

 

“That there are to be no giving of hot cross buns to any passenger vicars.” Georg says with a definite nod as he eats the last of his second hot cross bun.

 

*A hot cross bun is a spiced bun, usually containing small pieces of raisins and orange peel, marked with a cross on the top, which has been traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, India, Pakistan, Malta, the United States and the Commonwealth Caribbean. They are available all year round in some countries now, including the United Kingdom and Australia. The bun marks the end of the season of Lent and different elements of the hot cross bun each have a specific meaning, such as the cross representing the crucifixion of Jesus, the spices inside signifying the spices used to embalm him and sometimes also orange peel reflecting the bitterness of his time on the cross.

 

**The Sunday Express became the first newspaper to publish a crossword in November 1924.

 

***The term “old hat”, meaning out-of-date or old fashioned, is a relatively new saying, dating from 1911, taken quite literally from the words “old” and “hat”.

 

****Coke is a grey, hard, and porous coal-based fuel with a high carbon content. It is made by heating coal or petroleum in the absence of air. Coke is an important industrial product, used mainly in iron ore smelting today, but was also commonly used as a cheap fuel in stoves and forges in the Victorian and Edwardian eras before the and even in the immediate years after the Second World War. The unqualified term "coke" usually refers to the product derived from low-ash and low-sulphur bituminous coal by a process called coking.

 

*****An argyle pattern features overlapping diamonds with intersecting diagonal lines on top of the diamonds. They are traditionally knit, not woven, using an intarsia technique. The pattern was named after the Seventeenth Century tartan of Clan Campbell of Argyll in western Scotland.

 

******A Brown Betty is a type of teapot, round and with a manganese brown glaze known as Rockingham glaze. In the Victorian era, when tea was at its peak of popularity, tea brewed in the Brown Betty was considered excellent. This was attributed to the design of the pot which allowed the tea leaves more freedom to swirl around as the water was poured into the pot, releasing more flavour with less bitterness.

 

*******Royal Doulton is an English ceramic manufacturing company dating from 1815. Operating originally in Vauxhall, London, later moving to Lambeth, in 1882 it opened a factory in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, in the centre of English pottery. From the start the backbone of the business was a wide range of utilitarian wares, mostly stonewares including storage jars, tankards and the like, and later extending to pipes for drains, lavatories and other bathroom ceramics. From 1853 to 1902 its wares were marked Doulton & Co., then from 1902, when a royal warrant was given, Royal Doulton. It always made some more decorative wares, initially still mostly stoneware, and from the 1860s the firm made considerable efforts to get a reputation for design, in which it was largely successful, as one of the first British makers of art pottery. Initially this was done through artistic stonewares made in Lambeth, but in 1882 the firm bought a Burslem factory, which was mainly intended for making bone china tablewares and decorative items. It was a latecomer in this market compared to firms such as Royal Crown Derby, Royal Worcester, Wedgwood, Spode and Mintons, but made a place for itself in the later 19th century. Today Royal Doulton mainly produces tableware and figurines, but also cookware, glassware, and other home accessories such as linens, curtains and lighting. Three of its brands were Royal Doulton, Royal Albert and (after a post-WWII merger) Mintons. Royal Doulton is one of the last great British bone china manufacturers still in existence.

 

******** Colclough Bone China was founded in Staffordshire in 1890 by Herbert J. Colclough, the former mayor of Stoke-on-Trent. Herbert loved porcelain and loved the ordinary working man. One of his desires was to bring fine bone china, a preserve of the upper and middle classes, to the working man. He felt that it would give them aspirations and dignity to eat off fine bone china. Colclough Bone China received a Royal Warrant from King George V in 1913. Colclough went on to innovate the production of fine bone china for the mass market in the 1920s and 1930s. They produced the backstamp brands Royal Vale and Royal Stanley. Colclough Bone China merged with Booth’s Pottery and later acquired Ridgeway China. Eventually they amalgamated with Royal Doulton in the 1970s.

 

*********In 1896, Thomas Clark Wild bought a pottery in Longton, Stoke on Trent, England, called Albert Works, which had been named the year before in honor of the birth of Prince Albert, who became King George VI in 1936. Using the brand name Albert Crown China, Thomas Wild and Co. produced commemorative bone-china pieces for Queen Victoria's 1897 Diamond Jubilee, and by 1904 had earned a Royal Warrant. From the beginning, Royal Albert's bone china dinnerware was popular, especially its original floral patterns made in rich shades of red, green, and blue. Known for incredibly fine, white, and pure bone china, Royal Albert was given to the sentimental and florid excesses of Victorian era England, making pattern after pattern inspired by English gardens and woodlands. With designs like Serena, Old English Roses, and Masquerade and motifs inspired by Japanese Imari, the company appealed to a wide range of tastes, from the simplest to the most aristocratic. In 1910, the company created its first overseas agency in New Zealand. Soon it had offices in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Willing to experiment with the latest in industrial technologies, the company was an early adopter of kilns fuelled by gas and electricity. Starting in 1927, Royal Albert china used a wide variety of more stylized backstamps, some with the crown, some without, and others stylized with script and Art Deco lettering. Some of these marks even had roses or other parts of the pattern in them. Patterns from the years between the wars include American Beauty, Maytime, Indian Tree, Dolly Varden, and Lady-Gay. The '40s saw patterns like Fragrance, Teddy's Playtime, Violets for Love, Princess Anne, Sunflower, White Dogwood, Mikado, Minuet, Cotswold, and the popular Lady Carlyle. Royal Albert incorporated as a limited company in 1933, and in the 1960s it was acquired by Pearson Group, joining that company's Allied English Potteries. By 1970, the porcelain maker was completely disassociated with its T.C. Wild & Sons origins and renamed Royal Albert Ltd. Pearson Group also acquired Royal Doulton in 1972, putting Royal Crown Derby, Royal Albert, Paragon, and the Lawleys chain under the Royal Doulton umbrella, which at this point included Minton, John Beswick, and Webb Corbett. In 1993, Royal Doulton Group was ejected from Pearson Group, for making less money than its other properties. In 2002, Royal Doulton moved the production of Royal Albert china from England to Indonesia. A few years later, Waterford Wedgwood absorbed Royal Doulton Group and all its holdings, which currently makes three brands, Royal Doulton, Minton, and Royal Albert, including the Old Country Roses pattern, which is Royal Albert’s most popular design.

 

**********Roundwood Park takes its name from Roundwood House, an Elizabethan-style mansion built in Harlesden for Lord Decies in around 1836. In 1892 Willesden Local Board, conscious of a need for a recreation ground in expanding Harlesden, started the process of buying the land for what is now Roundwood Park. Roundwood Park was built in 1893, designed by Oliver Claude Robson. He was allocated nine thousand pounds to lay out the park. He put in five miles of drains, and planted an additional fourteen and a half thousand trees and shrubs. This took quite a long time as he used local unemployed labour for this work in preference to contractors. Mr. Robson had been the Surveyor of the Willesden Local Board since 1875. As an engineer, he was responsible for many major works in Willesden including sewerage and roads. The fine main gates and railings were made in 1895 by Messrs. Tickner & Partington at the Vulcan Works, Harrow Road, Kensal Rise. An elegant lodge house was built to house the gardener; greenhouses erected to supply new flowers, and paths constructed, running upward to the focal point-an elegant bandstand on the top of the hill. The redbrick lodge was in the Victorian Elizabethan style, with ornamented chimney-breasts. It is currently occupied by council employees although the green houses have been demolished. For many years Roundwood Park was home to the Willesden Show. Owners of pets of many types, flowers and vegetables, and even 'bonny babies' would compete for prizes in large canvas tents. Art and crafts were shown, and demonstrations of dog-handling, sheep-shearing, parachuting and trick motorcycling given.

 

***********The parish of All Souls, Harlesden, was formed in 1875 from Willesden, Acton, St John's, Kensal Green, and Hammersmith. Mission services had been held by the curate of St Mary's, Willesden, at Harlesden institute from 1858. The parish church at Station Road, Harlesden, was built and consecrated in 1879. The town centre church is a remarkable brick octagon designed by E.J. Tarver. Originally there was a nave which was extended in 1890 but demolished in 1970.

 

************A gigot sleeve is a sleeve that was full at the shoulder and became tightly fitted to the wrist. It was more commonly known as a leg-of-mutton sleeve.

 

*************Oliver Claude Robson who designed Roundwood Park decided that a café would be a good addition to the park, so in 1897 a suitable building was designed and constructed by council employees. It was made of brick and timber with a steeply pitched slate roof and gables, with a verandah surrounding it. Various owners succeeded one another. In 1985, a new building was constructed because the old one became run down.

 

This cluttered, yet cheerful domestic scene is not all it seems to be at first glance, for it is made up of part of my 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures collection. Some pieces come from my own childhood. Other items I acquired as an adult through specialist online dealers and artists who specialise in 1:12 miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

The hot cross buns on the silver baking tray on the kitchen table have been made in England by hand by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. The Brown Betty teapot, made of real glazed pottery, comes from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom. various odd china pieces all come from online stockists of miniatures on E-Bay. The newspaper which features an image of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Elizabeth and one day Queen Mother, is a copy of a real Daily Mail newspaper from 1925 and was produced to high standards in 1:12 by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. The pencil on top of it is a 1:12 miniature as well, acquired from Melody Jane Dolls’ House Suppliers. It is only one millimetre wide and two centimetres long.

 

Edith’s handbag handmade from soft leather is part of a larger collection of hats and bags that I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel, including Ada’s tan soft leather handbag seen resting against her basket at the right of the picture.

 

Edith’s black dyed straw hat with purple roses and black feathers was made by an unknown artisan. 1:12 size miniature hats made to such exacting standards of quality and realism are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that it would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, it is an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable. This hat is part of a larger collection I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel.

 

In the background you can see Ada’s dark Welsh dresser cluttered with household items. Like Ada’s table, the Windsor chair and the ladderback chair to the left of the photo, I have had the dresser since I was a child. The shelves of the dresser have different patterned crockery and silver pots on them which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. There are also some rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters and a bread tin in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green. Aged on purpose, these artisan pieces I acquired from The Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom. There are also tins of various foods which would have been household staples in the 1920s when canning and preservation revolutionised domestic cookery. Amongst other foods on the dresser are a jar of Bovril, a tin Bird’s Golden Raising Powder, some Ty-Phoo tea, a tin of S.P.C. canned fruit and some Oxo stock cubes. All these items are 1:12 size artisan miniatures made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire, with great attention to detail paid to their labels and the shapes of their jars and cans.

 

Bovril is the trademarked name of a thick and salty meat extract paste similar to a yeast extract, developed in the 1870s by John Lawson Johnston. It is sold in a distinctive bulbous jar, and as cubes and granules. Bovril is owned and distributed by Unilever UK. Its appearance is similar to Marmite and Vegemite. Bovril can be made into a drink ("beef tea") by diluting with hot water or, less commonly, with milk. It can be used as a flavouring for soups, broth, stews or porridge, or as a spread, especially on toast in a similar fashion to Marmite and Vegemite.

 

In 1863, William Sumner published A Popular Treatise on Tea as a by-product of the first trade missions to China from London. In 1870, William and his son John Sumner founded a pharmacy/grocery business in Birmingham. William's grandson, John Sumner Jr. (born in 1856), took over the running of the business in the 1900s. Following comments from his sister on the calming effects of tea fannings, in 1903, John Jr. decided to create a new tea that he could sell in his shop. He set his own criteria for the new brand. The name had to be distinctive and unlike others, it had to be a name that would trip off the tongue and it had to be one that would be protected by registration. The name Typhoo comes from the Mandarin Chinese word for “doctor”. Typhoo began making tea bags in 1967. In 1978, production was moved from Birmingham to Moreton on the Wirral Peninsula, in Merseyside. The Moreton site is also the location of Burton's Foods and Manor Bakeries factories. Typhoo has been owned since July 2021 by British private-equity firm Zetland Capital. It was previously owned by Apeejay Surrendra Group of India.

 

Bird’s were best known for making custard and Bird’s Custard is still a common household name, although they produced other desserts beyond custard, including the blancmange. They also made Bird’s Golden Raising Powder – their brand of baking powder. Bird’s Custard was first formulated and first cooked by Alfred Bird in 1837 at his chemist shop in Birmingham. He developed the recipe because his wife was allergic to eggs, the key ingredient used to thicken traditional custard. The Birds continued to serve real custard to dinner guests, until one evening when the egg-free custard was served instead, either by accident or design. The dessert was so well received by the other diners that Alfred Bird put the recipe into wider production. John Monkhouse (1862–1938) was a prosperous Methodist businessman who co-founded Monk and Glass, which made custard powder and jelly. Monk and Glass custard was made in Clerkenwell and sold in the home market, and exported to the Empire and to America. They acquired by its rival Bird’s Custard in the early Twentieth Century.

 

S.P.C. is an Australian brand that still exists to this day. In 1917 a group of fruit growers in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley decided to form a cooperative which they named the Shepperton Fruit Preserving Company. The company began operations in February 1918, canning pears, peaches and nectarines under the brand name of S.P.C. On the 31st of January 1918 the manager of the Shepparton Fruit Preserving Company announced that canning would begin on the following Tuesday and that the operation would require one hundred and fifty girls or women and thirty men. In the wake of the Great War, it was hoped that “the launch of this new industry must revive drooping energies” and improve the economic circumstances of the region. The company began to pay annual bonuses to grower-shareholders by 1929, and the plant was updated and expanded. The success of S.P.C. was inextricably linked with the progress of the town and the wider Goulburn Valley region. In 1936 the company packed twelve million cans and was the largest fruit cannery in the British empire. Through the Second World War the company boomed. The product range was expanded to include additional fruits, jam, baked beans and tinned spaghetti and production reached more than forty-three million cans a year in the 1970s. From financial difficulties caused by the 1980s recession, SPC returned once more to profitability, merging with Ardmona and buying rival company Henry Jones IXL. S.P.C. was acquired by Coca Cola Amatil in 2005 and in 2019 sold to a private equity group known as Shepparton Partners Collective.

 

Oxo is a brand of food products, including stock cubes, herbs and spices, dried gravy, and yeast extract. The original product was the beef stock cube, and the company now also markets chicken and other flavour cubes, including versions with Chinese and Indian spices. The cubes are broken up and used as flavouring in meals or gravy or dissolved into boiling water to produce a bouillon. Oxo produced their first cubes in 1910 and further increased Oxo's popularity.

 

The large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of the coal fed Phoenix Kitchen Range. A mid-Victorian model, it has hinged opening doors, hanging bars above the stove and a little bass hot water tap (used in the days before plumbed hot water).

NS 7209 SD80MAC slowly leads the NS Y90 downgrade towards Altoona with a train of bituminous coal bound for export via Baltimore, MD. Horseshoe Curve is still a great place to bring your family and see a few trains tackle the Allegheny Mountains!

This is the tipple at the Atlas Coal Mine.

 

From the official web site:

 

Coal was not hard to discover in the area that is now Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. Seams of coal show up as black stripes in the badlands of the Red Deer River Valley.

 

The Blackfoot and Cree knew about the black rock that burned, but they didn’t like to use it. Later, three white explorers reported coal in the area: Peter Fidler in 1792, Dr. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition in 1857, and Joseph Tyrrell in 1884.

 

In the years that followed, a handful of ranchers and homesteaders dug coal out of river banks and coulees to heat their homes. However, the first commercial coal mine did not open until Sam Drumheller started the coal rush in the area that now bears his name.

 

The rush started when Sam bought land off a local rancher named Thomas Greentree. Sam turned around and sold this land to Canadian National Railway, to develop a townsite. Sam also registered a coal mine. Before his mine opened, however, Jesse Gouge and Garnet Coyle beat him to it, and opened the Newcastle Mine. CN laid tracks into town, and the first load of coal was shipped out of Drumheller in 1911.

 

Once the railway was built, people poured in. Hundreds, then thousands, of people came to dig coal. The greatest numbers came from Eastern Europe, Britain, and Nova Scotia. More mines opened. By the end of 1912, there were 9 working coal mines, each with its own camp of workers: Newcastle, Drumheller, Midland, Rosedale, and Wayne. In the years that followed, more mines and camps sprang up: Nacmine, Cambria, Willow Creek, Lehigh, and East Coulee.

 

Coal mining was hard, dirty, dangerous work. Mining in the Drumheller Valley, however, was less hard, dirty, and dangerous than it was in many other coal mining regions in Canada. This was due to both lucky geology and lucky timing.

 

The geology of the Drumheller coal field results in flat lying seams, which are much safer to mine than the steeply pitching seams of the mountain mines. In addition, the coal produced in Drumheller is sub-bituminous. This grade of coal is “immature” which means it hasn’t had time to build up a strong concentration of gas. Methane gas is the biggest killer in coal mines around the world.

 

The timing of the Drumheller mine industry was lucky, too. By the time the Newcastle opened in 1911, the right to better working conditions had been fought for and won by miners’ unions in North America. As a result, miners were provided with wash houses, better underground ventilation, and higher safety standards. When the Newcastle opened, there were laws in place to prohibit child labour, so boys under 14 were no longer allowed underground. The worst of the worst coal mining days were over, at least in North America.

 

Nevertheless, early mine camps around Drumheller were called “hell’s hole” because miners lived in tents, or shacks, with little sanitation and little comfort. It was a man’s world, with drinking, gambling, and watching fistfights common forms of recreation. As shacks gave way to little houses, and women joined the men and started families, life improved. Hockey, baseball, music, theatre, and visiting friends enriched peoples’ lives. Going downtown Saturday night was a huge event, with every language in Europe spoken by the crowds spilling off the sidewalks. No longer “hell’s hole,” Drumheller became “the wonder town of the west!” and “the fastest growing town in Canada, if not in North America!”

 

Sub-bituminous coal is ideal for heating homes and cooking food. People all over western Canada heated their homes, schools, and offices with Drumheller coal. Long, cold winters were good for Drumheller, because everyone needed lots of coal. In these years, miners had of money in their pockets. Short, mild winters were difficult. A miner might only work one day a week, and get laid off in early spring. He got through the summer by growing a big garden, catching fish, and working for farmers.

 

Between 1911 and 1979, 139 mines were registered in the Drumheller valley. Some mines didn’t last long, but 34 were productive for many years. Between 1912 and 1966, Drumheller produced 56,864,808 tons of coal, making it one of the major coal producing regions in Canada.

 

The beginning of the end for Drumheller’s mining industry was the Leduc Oil Strike of 1948. After this, natural gas became the fuel of choice for home heating in western Canada. To the mine operators, it seemed that people switched from messy coal stoves to clean gas furnaces as fast as they could. As the demand for coal dropped, mines closed. As mines closed, people moved away and communities suffered. Some communities, like Willow Creek, completely vanished. Others, like East Coulee, went from a boomtown of 3800 to a ghost town of 180. When the Atlas #4 Mine shipped its last load of coal in 1979, the coal years of Drumheller were over.

 

The Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site preserves the last of the Drumheller mines. The Atlas recalls the time when Coal was King, and “mining the black” brought thousands of people to this lonely valley. The nearby East Coulee School Museum interprets the life of children and families in a bustling mine town.

 

This 360° High Dynamic Range panorama was stitched from 66 bracketed photographs with PTGUI Pro, tone-mapped with Photomatix, processed in Color Efex, and finally touched up in Aperture.

 

Original size: 20000 × 10000 (200.0 MP; 1.03 GB).

 

Location: East Coulee, Alberta, Canada

A coal train of coal-gas bituminous for Eastman Chemical in Kingsport, TN is loading at Steer Branch, VA (Dixiana).

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Copper was discovered at Kuridala in 1884 and the Hampden Mine commenced during the 1890s. A Melbourne syndicate took over operations in 1897 and with increasing development of the mine in 1905 - 1906 the Hampden Cloncurry Limited company was formed. The township was surveyed as Hampden in 1910 (later called Friezland, and finally Kuridala in 1916). The Hampden Smelter operated from 1911 to 1920 with World War I being a particularly prosperous time for the company. After the war, the operations and the township declined and the Hampden Cloncurry Limited company ceased to exist in 1928. Tribute mining and further exploration and testing of the ore body has continued from 1932 through to the present day.

 

The Kuridala Township and Hampden Smelter are located approximately 65km south of Cloncurry and 345m above sea level, on an open plain against a background of rugged but picturesque hills.

 

The Cloncurry copper fields were discovered by Ernest Henry in 1867 but lack of capital and transport combined with low base metal prices precluded any major development. However, rising prices, new discoveries in the region and the promise of a railway combined with an inflow of British capital stimulated development. Additionally, Melbourne based promoters eager to develop another base metal bonanza like Broken Hill led to a resurgence of interest, especially in the Hampden mines.

 

The copper deposits at Kuridala (initially named Hampden) were discovered by William McPhail and Robert Johnson on their pastoral lease, Eureka, in January 1884. The Hampden mine was held by Fred Gibson in the 1890s and acquired in 1897 by a Melbourne syndicate comprising the 'Broken Hillionaires' - William Orr, William Knox, and Herman Schlapp. They floated the Hampden Copper Mines N. L. with a capital of £100,000 in £100 shares of which 200 were fully paid up. With this capital, they commenced a prospecting and stockpiling program sending specimens to Dapto and Wallaroo for testing. Government Geologist, W.E. Cameron's report on the district in 1900 discouraged investors as he reported that few of the lodes, other than the Hampden Company's main lode at Kuridala, were worth working.

 

A world price rise in copper in 1905, combined with a government decision in 1906 to extend the Townsville railway from Richmond to Cloncurry, stimulated further development. The Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited was registered in Victoria in March 1906 to acquire the old company's mines. However, the company only had a working capital of £35,000 after distributing vendor's shares and buying the Duchess mines. During this period there were over 20 companies investing similarly on the Cloncurry field.

 

The township was surveyed by the Mines Department around 1910 and was first known as Hampden after the mines discovered in the 1880s. By 1912 it was called Friezland, however was officially renamed Kuridala in October 1916 to minimise confusion with another settlement in Queensland. The reason for this change was considered to be linked to German names being unpopular at the outbreak of World War I.

 

Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited and its competitor, Mount Elliott, formed a special company in 1908 to finance and construct the railway extension from Cloncurry through Malbon, to Kuridala, and Mount Elliott. The company reconstructed in July 1909 by increasing its capitalisation, and concluding arrangements for a debenture issue to be secured against its proposed smelters. Its smelters were not fired until March 1911 and over the next three years 85,266 tons of ore were treated with an initial dividend of £140,000 being declared in 1913. In one month in 1915 the Hampden Smelter produced 813 tons of copper, an Australian record at that time.

 

Concern over the dwindling reserves of high grade ore led to William Corbould, the general manager of Mount Elliott mines, negotiating an amalgamation with Hampden Cloncurry to halt the fierce rivalry. But the latter was uninterested having consolidated its prospects in 1911 by acquiring many promising mines in the region, and enlarging its smelters and erecting new converters. In 1913, following a fire in the Hampden Consol's mine, Corbould convinced his London directors to reopen negotiations for a joint venture in the northern section of the field which still awaited a railway. Although Corbould and Huntley, the Hampden Cloncurry general manager, inspected many properties, the proposal lapsed.

 

The railway reached the township by 1910. A sanitary system was installed in 1911, after a four month typhoid epidemic, and a hospital erected by 1913, run by Dr. Old. It was described as the best and most modern hospital in the northwest. At its height, the town supported six hotels, five stores, four billiard saloons, three dance halls, and a cinema, two ice works, and one aerated waters factory, and Chinese gardens along the creek. There were also drapers, fruiterer, butcher, baker, timber merchant, garage, four churches, police station, court house, post office, banks, and a school with up to 280 pupils. A cyclone in December 1918 damaged the town and wrecked part of the powerhouse and smelter.

 

A comprehensive description of the plant and operations of the Kuridala Hampden mines and smelters was given by the Cloncurry mining warden in the Queensland Government Mining Journal of the 14th of September 1912. Ore from other company-owned mines (Duchess, Happy Salmon, MacGregor, and Trekelano) was railed in via a 1.2km branch line to the reduction plant bins, while the heavy pyrites ore from the Hampden mines was separated at the main shaft into coarse and fine products and conveyed to separate 1,500 ton capacity bins over a standard gauge railway to the plant.

 

A central power plant was installed with three separate Dowson pressure gas plants powered by three tandem type Kynoch gas engines of 320hp and two duplex type Hornsby gas engines of 200hp. Two Swedish General Electric Company generators of 1,250kw and 56kw running at 460 volts, supplied electricity to the machines in the works, fitting shops and mine pumps. Electric light for the mine and works was supplied by a British Thompson-Houston generator of 42kw, running at 420 volts. The fuel used in the gas producers was bituminous coal, coke or charcoal, made locally in the retorts.

 

The reduction plant consisted of two water-jacket furnaces, 2.1m by 1m and 4.2m by 1m, with dust chambers and a 52m high steel stack. There were two electrically driven converter vessels, each 3.2m by 2.3m. The molten product ran into a 3.7m diameter forehearth, while the slag was drawn off into double ton slag pots, run to the dump over 3 foot gauge, 42lb steel rail tracks. The copper was delivered from the forehearth to the converters. A 1.06m gauge track ran under the converters and carried the copper mould cars to the cleaning and shipping shed, at the end of which was the siding for railing out the cakes of blister copper.

 

The war conferred four years of prosperity on the Cloncurry district despite marketing, transport, and labour difficulties. The Hampden Cloncurry Company declared liberal dividends during 1915 - 1918: £40,000, £140,000, £52,500 and £35,000 making a total disbursement since commencing operations of £437,500. Its smelters treated over a quarter of a million tons of ore in this period, averaging over 70,000 tons annually. The company built light railways to its mines (e.g. Wee MacGregor and Trekelano) to ensure regular ore supplies and to reduce transport costs. In order to improve its ore treatment, Hampden Cloncurry installed a concentration plant in 1917. In 1918 an Edwards furnace was erected to pre-roast fine sulphide concentrates from the mill before smelting.

 

The dropping of the copper price control by the British government in 1918 forced the company into difficulties. Smelting was postponed until September 1919 and the company lost heavily during the next season and had to rely on ores from the Trekelano mine. Its smelter treated 69,598 tons of ore in 1920, but the company was forced to halt all operations after the Commonwealth Bank withdrew funds on copper awaiting export.

 

Companies and mines turned to the Theodore Labor Government for assistance but they were unsympathetic to the companies, even though they alone had the capacity to revive the Cloncurry field. More negotiations for amalgamation occurred in 1925 but failed, and in 1926 Hampden Cloncurry offered its assets for sale by tender and Mount Elliott acquired them all except for the Trekelano mine. The company was de-listed in 1928.

 

The rise and decline of the township reflected the company's fortunes. In 1913 there were 1,500 people increasing to 2,000 by 1920, but by 1924 this had declined to 800. With the rise of Mount Isa, Kaiser's bakehouse, the hospital, courthouse, one ice works, and a picture theatre, moved there in 1923 followed by Boyds' Hampden Hotel (renamed the Argent) in 1924. Other buildings including the police residence and Clerk of Petty Sessions house were moved to Cloncurry.

 

In its nine years of smelting Hampden Cloncurry had been one of Australia's largest mining companies producing 50,800 tons of copper (compared with Mount Elliott's 27,000), 21,000 ounces of gold and 381,000 ounces of silver. A more permanent achievement was its part in creating the metal fabricating company, Metal Manufacturers Limited, of which it was one of the four founders in 1916. Much of the money which built their Port Kembla works into one of the country's largest manufacturers came from the now derelict smelters in north-west Queensland.

 

In 1942 Mount Isa Mines bought the Kuridala Smelters for £800 and used parts to construct a copper furnace which commenced operating in April 1943 in response to wartime demands. The Tunny family continued to live at Kuridala as tributers on the Hampden and Consol mines from 1932 until 1969 and worked the mines down to 15.25m. A post office operated until 1975 and the last inhabitant, Lizzy Belch, moved into Cloncurry about 1982.

 

Further exploration and testing of the Kuridala ore body has occurred from 1948 up until the present with activities being undertaking by Mount Isa Mines, Broken Hill South, Enterprise Exploration, Marshall and James Boyd, Australian Selection, Kennecott Exploration, Carpentaria Exploration, Metana Minerals, A.M. Metcalfe, Dampier Mining Co Ltd, Newmont Pty Ltd, Australian Anglo American, Era South Pacific Pty Ltd, CRA Exploration Pty Ltd, BHP Minerals Ltd, Metana Minerals and Matrix Metals Ltd.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

Copper was discovered at Kuridala in 1884 and the Hampden Mine commenced during the 1890s. A Melbourne syndicate took over operations in 1897 and with increasing development of the mine in 1905 - 1906 the Hampden Cloncurry Limited company was formed. The township was surveyed as Hampden in 1910 (later called Friezland, and finally Kuridala in 1916). The Hampden Smelter operated from 1911 to 1920 with World War I being a particularly prosperous time for the company. After the war, the operations and the township declined and the Hampden Cloncurry Limited company ceased to exist in 1928. Tribute mining and further exploration and testing of the ore body has continued from 1932 through to the present day.

 

The Kuridala Township and Hampden Smelter are located approximately 65km south of Cloncurry and 345m above sea level, on an open plain against a background of rugged but picturesque hills.

 

The Cloncurry copper fields were discovered by Ernest Henry in 1867 but lack of capital and transport combined with low base metal prices precluded any major development. However, rising prices, new discoveries in the region and the promise of a railway combined with an inflow of British capital stimulated development. Additionally, Melbourne based promoters eager to develop another base metal bonanza like Broken Hill led to a resurgence of interest, especially in the Hampden mines.

 

The copper deposits at Kuridala (initially named Hampden) were discovered by William McPhail and Robert Johnson on their pastoral lease, Eureka, in January 1884. The Hampden mine was held by Fred Gibson in the 1890s and acquired in 1897 by a Melbourne syndicate comprising the 'Broken Hillionaires' - William Orr, William Knox, and Herman Schlapp. They floated the Hampden Copper Mines N. L. with a capital of £100,000 in £100 shares of which 200 were fully paid up. With this capital, they commenced a prospecting and stockpiling program sending specimens to Dapto and Wallaroo for testing. Government Geologist, W.E. Cameron's report on the district in 1900 discouraged investors as he reported that few of the lodes, other than the Hampden Company's main lode at Kuridala, were worth working.

 

A world price rise in copper in 1905, combined with a government decision in 1906 to extend the Townsville railway from Richmond to Cloncurry, stimulated further development. The Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited was registered in Victoria in March 1906 to acquire the old company's mines. However, the company only had a working capital of £35,000 after distributing vendor's shares and buying the Duchess mines. During this period there were over 20 companies investing similarly on the Cloncurry field.

 

The township was surveyed by the Mines Department around 1910 and was first known as Hampden after the mines discovered in the 1880s. By 1912 it was called Friezland, however was officially renamed Kuridala in October 1916 to minimise confusion with another settlement in Queensland. The reason for this change was considered to be linked to German names being unpopular at the outbreak of World War I.

 

Hampden Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited and its competitor, Mount Elliott, formed a special company in 1908 to finance and construct the railway extension from Cloncurry through Malbon, to Kuridala, and Mount Elliott. The company reconstructed in July 1909 by increasing its capitalisation, and concluding arrangements for a debenture issue to be secured against its proposed smelters. Its smelters were not fired until March 1911 and over the next three years 85,266 tons of ore were treated with an initial dividend of £140,000 being declared in 1913. In one month in 1915 the Hampden Smelter produced 813 tons of copper, an Australian record at that time.

 

Concern over the dwindling reserves of high grade ore led to William Corbould, the general manager of Mount Elliott mines, negotiating an amalgamation with Hampden Cloncurry to halt the fierce rivalry. But the latter was uninterested having consolidated its prospects in 1911 by acquiring many promising mines in the region, and enlarging its smelters and erecting new converters. In 1913, following a fire in the Hampden Consol's mine, Corbould convinced his London directors to reopen negotiations for a joint venture in the northern section of the field which still awaited a railway. Although Corbould and Huntley, the Hampden Cloncurry general manager, inspected many properties, the proposal lapsed.

 

The railway reached the township by 1910. A sanitary system was installed in 1911, after a four month typhoid epidemic, and a hospital erected by 1913, run by Dr. Old. It was described as the best and most modern hospital in the northwest. At its height, the town supported six hotels, five stores, four billiard saloons, three dance halls, and a cinema, two ice works, and one aerated waters factory, and Chinese gardens along the creek. There were also drapers, fruiterer, butcher, baker, timber merchant, garage, four churches, police station, court house, post office, banks, and a school with up to 280 pupils. A cyclone in December 1918 damaged the town and wrecked part of the powerhouse and smelter.

 

A comprehensive description of the plant and operations of the Kuridala Hampden mines and smelters was given by the Cloncurry mining warden in the Queensland Government Mining Journal of the 14th of September 1912. Ore from other company-owned mines (Duchess, Happy Salmon, MacGregor, and Trekelano) was railed in via a 1.2km branch line to the reduction plant bins, while the heavy pyrites ore from the Hampden mines was separated at the main shaft into coarse and fine products and conveyed to separate 1,500 ton capacity bins over a standard gauge railway to the plant.

 

A central power plant was installed with three separate Dowson pressure gas plants powered by three tandem type Kynoch gas engines of 320hp and two duplex type Hornsby gas engines of 200hp. Two Swedish General Electric Company generators of 1,250kw and 56kw running at 460 volts, supplied electricity to the machines in the works, fitting shops and mine pumps. Electric light for the mine and works was supplied by a British Thompson-Houston generator of 42kw, running at 420 volts. The fuel used in the gas producers was bituminous coal, coke or charcoal, made locally in the retorts.

 

The reduction plant consisted of two water-jacket furnaces, 2.1m by 1m and 4.2m by 1m, with dust chambers and a 52m high steel stack. There were two electrically driven converter vessels, each 3.2m by 2.3m. The molten product ran into a 3.7m diameter forehearth, while the slag was drawn off into double ton slag pots, run to the dump over 3 foot gauge, 42lb steel rail tracks. The copper was delivered from the forehearth to the converters. A 1.06m gauge track ran under the converters and carried the copper mould cars to the cleaning and shipping shed, at the end of which was the siding for railing out the cakes of blister copper.

 

The war conferred four years of prosperity on the Cloncurry district despite marketing, transport, and labour difficulties. The Hampden Cloncurry Company declared liberal dividends during 1915 - 1918: £40,000, £140,000, £52,500 and £35,000 making a total disbursement since commencing operations of £437,500. Its smelters treated over a quarter of a million tons of ore in this period, averaging over 70,000 tons annually. The company built light railways to its mines (e.g. Wee MacGregor and Trekelano) to ensure regular ore supplies and to reduce transport costs. In order to improve its ore treatment, Hampden Cloncurry installed a concentration plant in 1917. In 1918 an Edwards furnace was erected to pre-roast fine sulphide concentrates from the mill before smelting.

 

The dropping of the copper price control by the British government in 1918 forced the company into difficulties. Smelting was postponed until September 1919 and the company lost heavily during the next season and had to rely on ores from the Trekelano mine. Its smelter treated 69,598 tons of ore in 1920, but the company was forced to halt all operations after the Commonwealth Bank withdrew funds on copper awaiting export.

 

Companies and mines turned to the Theodore Labor Government for assistance but they were unsympathetic to the companies, even though they alone had the capacity to revive the Cloncurry field. More negotiations for amalgamation occurred in 1925 but failed, and in 1926 Hampden Cloncurry offered its assets for sale by tender and Mount Elliott acquired them all except for the Trekelano mine. The company was de-listed in 1928.

 

The rise and decline of the township reflected the company's fortunes. In 1913 there were 1,500 people increasing to 2,000 by 1920, but by 1924 this had declined to 800. With the rise of Mount Isa, Kaiser's bakehouse, the hospital, courthouse, one ice works, and a picture theatre, moved there in 1923 followed by Boyds' Hampden Hotel (renamed the Argent) in 1924. Other buildings including the police residence and Clerk of Petty Sessions house were moved to Cloncurry.

 

In its nine years of smelting Hampden Cloncurry had been one of Australia's largest mining companies producing 50,800 tons of copper (compared with Mount Elliott's 27,000), 21,000 ounces of gold and 381,000 ounces of silver. A more permanent achievement was its part in creating the metal fabricating company, Metal Manufacturers Limited, of which it was one of the four founders in 1916. Much of the money which built their Port Kembla works into one of the country's largest manufacturers came from the now derelict smelters in north-west Queensland.

 

In 1942 Mount Isa Mines bought the Kuridala Smelters for £800 and used parts to construct a copper furnace which commenced operating in April 1943 in response to wartime demands. The Tunny family continued to live at Kuridala as tributers on the Hampden and Consol mines from 1932 until 1969 and worked the mines down to 15.25m. A post office operated until 1975 and the last inhabitant, Lizzy Belch, moved into Cloncurry about 1982.

 

Further exploration and testing of the Kuridala ore body has occurred from 1948 up until the present with activities being undertaking by Mount Isa Mines, Broken Hill South, Enterprise Exploration, Marshall and James Boyd, Australian Selection, Kennecott Exploration, Carpentaria Exploration, Metana Minerals, A.M. Metcalfe, Dampier Mining Co Ltd, Newmont Pty Ltd, Australian Anglo American, Era South Pacific Pty Ltd, CRA Exploration Pty Ltd, BHP Minerals Ltd, Metana Minerals and Matrix Metals Ltd.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

Distributed by Wilbur Evans Co., 4310 Mayfield Rd., Cleveland Ohio.

Curteichcolor 3-D Natural Color Reproduction.

 

Built 1969 following the merger of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad into the Penn Central Transportation Company. The conveyor enabled the transfer of coal and taconite between the formerly competing dock areas.

 

Here is how Norfolk-Southern currently describes the facility:

Ashtabula Coal Pier (Idled), Ashtabula, OH

The currently idled coal dock at Ashtabula, Ohio is a modern coal transshipping facility located on Lake Erie. It serves as a transload point for coals destined to electric generating utilities and cement producers in Canada and the Great Lakes Basins. The dock can handle all lake-sized vessels. Annual throughput capacity is seven million tons.

 

Bituminous coals from Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia origins arrive at Ashtabula in unit trains where it is then rotary dumped from the rail cars and either stored on the ground or loaded directly into self-unloading vessels for further shipment to Canadian and domestic destinations.

 

Group storage is available for up to 1.2 million tons, thus permitting year-round dumping. This allows producers to ship coal during the winter months when the lakes are closed.

 

goo.gl/maps/s2ZbcEHrtcNSM44VA

 

goo.gl/maps/j5UCBqLEAmgjhe9R6

 

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Bituminous coal from the Cretaceous of Utah, USA.

 

Coal is a carbon-rich, biogenic sedimentary rock. It forms by the burial and alteration of organic matter from fossil land plants that lived in ancient swamps. Coal starts out as peat. With increasing burial and diagenetic alteration, peat becomes lignite coal, sub-bituminous coal, and then bituminous coal. Bituminous coals tend to break and weather in a blocky fashion, are relatively sooty to the touch, and are harder and heavier than lignite coal (but still relatively soft and lightweight). Discernible plant fossil fragments may be present on bituminous coal bedding planes - sometimes in abundance. Bituminous coals commonly have irregular patches of shiny, glassy-textured organic matter (vitrain).

----------------------------------

Info. from public signage at Wittenberg University's Geology Department (Springfield, Ohio, USA):

 

Origin of Coal

 

Coal is formed from accumulated vegetation that grew in peat-forming swamps on broad lowlands that were near sea level. Cyclothems indicate that the land must have been at a "critical level" since the change from marine to non-marine sediments shows that the seas periodically encroached upon the land.

 

Formation of Coal

 

The change from plant debris to coal involves biochemical action producing partial decay, preserval of this material from further decay, and later dynamochemical processes. The biochemical changes involve attack by bacteria which liberate volatile constituents, and the preserval of the residual waxes and resins in the bottom of the swamps where the water is too toxic for the decay-promoting bacteria to live. The accumulated material forms "peat bogs". The dynamochemical process involves further chemical reactions produced by the increased pressure and temperature brought about by the weight of sediment that is deposited on top of it. These reactions are also ones in which the volatile constituents are driven off.

 

Rank of Coal

 

The different types of coal are commonly referred to in terms of rank. From lowest upward, they are peat (actually not a coal), lignite, bituminous, and anthracite. The rank of the coal is the result of the different amounts of pressure and time involved in producing the coal.

 

Bituminous

 

Bituminous coal is a dense, dark, brittle, banded coal that is well jointed and breaks into cubical or prismatic blocks and does not disintegrate upon exposure to air. Dull and bright bands and smooth and hackly layers are evident. It ignites easily, burns with a smoky yellow flame, has low moisture contnet, medium volatile content, and fixed carbon and heating content is high. It is the most used and most desired coal in the world for industrial uses.

 

In the United States, the Northern Appalachian fields lead in production, followed by the interior fields of the Midwest.

----------------------------------

This sample comes from Utah's Bronco Mine, which reportedly started in the 1880s. The coal ranks as high-volatile C bituminous coal, which means it gives off less heat than high-volatile A or B bituminous coals. The former gives off about 11,500 British thermal units (Btu) of heat per pound of coal. The latter two give off about 14,000 and 13,000 Btu per pound, respectively.

 

Stratigraphy: coal horizon in the Ferron Sandstone Member, Mancos Shale, Upper Cretaceous

 

Locality: Bronco Mine (= Emery Deep Mine), Emery County, central Utah, USA

 

Rockwell Kent, American

b. 1882; d. 1971

Medium: Oil on canvas

 

A god-like figure holds out a piece of coal, shielding his eyes from the lightening that emerges. The flash strikes a generator below, from which cables spread the power. People are shown tiny in comparison, but the man's role is expressed as vital in transferring coal into energy.

 

This is from a series commissioned by the Bituminous Coal Institute and the Benton & Bowles Advertising Agency. Featured in advertisements in Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek and Liberty, the purpose was to strengthen the reputation of the coal industry and help secure coal as the principal energy source for a modern, post-war society.

 

Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio

DSCF6981

 

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Undated photo from the Madison County Highway Department archives. I suspect the photo is around 1950.

 

Anyone thinking in-place pug mill/batch plant paving is a recent concept need look no further to this beast of a machine. On board bituminous asphalt is mixed with stone and laid on the road bed in a mobile process. Note the coarse grade of stone being used and that they are paving a dirt road. Also note the large crew manning the big machine.

 

The make of the machine is unknown. There is a logo on the side of it but I can't make it out. Anyone recognize it? It would be self-propelled but the power plant is also unknown but likely gasoline. (Updated: identified as an H&B or Hetherington & Berner).

 

The truck unloading into the pug mill hopper is one of the county's 1-1/2 to 2-ton Chevy WB dumps, probably early 1940's vintage and powered by a 216 cubic inch six cylinder engine.

 

Photo courtesy of Madison County archives.

Richmond, Virginia USA

THE CITY OF RICHMOND ADOPTED AN ORDINANCE ON NOV. 29, 1848 THAT CREATED THE “COMMITTEE ON LIGHT”, “TO HAVE CONSTRUCTED SUITABLE WORKS FOR THE MANUFACTURE AND DISTRIBUTION OF CARBURETED HYDROGEN GAS FROM BITUMINOUS COAL FOR THE PURPOSE OF ILLUMINATION THROUGH THE STREETS, LANES, AND ALLEYS OF THE CITY. OPERATIONS BEGAN ON THE SITE IN 1851 WITH 627 PRIVATE USERS WHICH INCREASED TO 937 IN THE SECOND YEAR, OUT GROWING THE PLANT IN ONLY TWO YEARS

From a very fine 1962 publication issued by Thomas W Ward of Sheffield showing recent activities amongst the Ward Group of Companies. The company was founded in Sheffield in 1898 and during the 20th century it grew to acquire a multiplicity of allied companies and activities. I suspect they are best recalled for railway engineering works and shipbreaking. The Group was restructed in the late 1970s and the bulk of the company was acquired by RTZ in 1982.

This book is a tremendous record of the group and is beautifully produced although very annoyingly no printer or publisher is shown. The company commissioned the photographer Walter Nurnberg to take the vast majority of the near 200 images. Nurnberg was an acknowledged and accomplished photographer of the industrial landscape.

 

This is a lovely view of an urban northern street having a bituminous tarmacadam surface laid and rolled by a Road Marshall road roller, registered 9532 WB. The location is, I think, Saltaire in West Yorkshire.

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Sandsend Ness is an old alum quarrying site close to Whitby in North Yorkshire, England.

 

Beneath extensive deposits of grey pyritic shale a thin band of sideritic mudstone is present at this site and there is a further 6 metres of almost non-bituminous shale beneath it. This geological configuration, along with its proximity to the port of Whitby, offered Sandsend near-ideal conditions for the rapidly expanding alum industry from the early 17th century onwards.

 

So wide-scale and prolonged were these activities, that significant areas of the Yorkshire coast were permanently altered.

 

The double sulphate of aluminium and either potassium or ammonia is commonly known as alum. This material was of great importance through to the late 19th century in leather tanning and in the wool dying industry. Even today it is still used in some places as a mordant (dye fixative).

 

Fossils are present in large numbers in the deposits, including ammonites such as Hildoceras bifrons and Dactylioceras bifrons and also Ichthyosaur and Plesiosaur remains, though the latter are nowadays much less commonly found. In fact, the ammonite Hildoceras is named after an early Christian saint, the Abbess of Whitby St. Hild or Hilda (614-680). It was believed that such ammonite fossils were the snakes which had been miraculously turned into stone by St. Hilda. It was not unknown for local “artisans” to carve snakes' heads onto ammonites, and sell these “relics” as proof of the miracle. The coat of arms of nearby Whitby actually include three such 'snakestones'.

May 1986 Portsmouth registered Foden S108 bitumen tanker in the distinctive orange livery of Bituminous Road Facilities, with G-cab Leyland in the background, at the firm's yard on Gibbs Marsh Trading Estate. Does anyone know when the firm ceased operations?

Part of equipment in Atlas No. 3 Mine sub-bituminous coal sorting and loading facility. Built in 1936 and 210-foot high, it is the last wooden 'tipple' still standing.

----

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Coal_Mine

----

Nikon Nikkor 18-200mm 1:3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF-S VR DX

 

_DSC1142 Anx2 Q90

Today was a sad day for me. I've always loved trains and railways. When I was a lad in the UK I used to go trainspotting. Writing down all the numbers of the locomotives that would go by. Then when the Intercity 125 was introduced, that was really awesome!! I have a photo of me in front of one at a station when I was about 6.

Today, driving through Drumheller, the city has ripped up all of the old railway lines that used to span from the North, and then east/west through the city. Little to my surprise after seeing that, when I visited Wayne, today, they had torn up the railway tracks and ties there too. It's sad to see such a historical piece of railway just be torn up and thrown away. It probably cost them more to tear it up and eventually dispose of everything, that it would have been to keep it down.....it's sad, to me.

 

Here's a write-up of the Atlas Coal Mine and other surrounding area mines and what the railway lines really meant to them. I hope you enjoy the history I'm posting today related to my photos from these historic areas. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find anything specific in regards to the railway for Wayne, but below is information on the general area.

 

Coal Mining in the Drumheller Valley

Coal was not hard to discover in the area that is now Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. Seams of coal show up as black stripes in the badlands of the Red Deer River Valley.

The Blackfoot and Cree knew about the black rock that burned, but they didn't like to use it. Later, three white explorers reported coal in the area: Peter Fidler in 1792, Dr. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition in 1857, and Joseph Tyrrell in 1884.

In the years that followed, a handful of ranchers and homesteaders dug coal out of river banks and coulees to heat their homes. However, the first commercial coal mine did not open until Sam Drumheller started the coal rush in the area that now bears his name.

The rush started when Sam bought land off a local rancher named Thomas Greentree. Sam turned around and sold this land to Canadian National Railway, to develop a townsite. Sam also registered a coal mine. Before his mine opened, however, Jesse Gouge and Garnet Coyle beat him to it, and opened the Newcastle Mine. CN laid tracks into town, and the first load of coal was shipped out of Drumheller in 1911.

Once the railway was built, people poured in. Hundreds, then thousands, of people came to dig coal. The greatest numbers came from Eastern Europe, Britain, and Nova Scotia. More mines opened. By the end of 1912, there were 9 working coal mines, each with its own camp of workers: Newcastle, Drumheller, Midland, Rosedale, and Wayne. In the years that followed, more mines and camps sprang up: Nacmine, Cambria, Willow Creek, Lehigh, and East Coulee.

Coal mining was hard, dirty, dangerous work. Mining in the Drumheller Valley, however, was less hard, dirty, and dangerous than it was in many other coal mining regions in Canada. This was due to both lucky geology and lucky timing.

The geology of the Drumheller coal field results in flat lying seams, which are much safer to mine than the steeply pitching seams of the mountain mines. In addition, the coal produced in Drumheller is sub-bituminous. This grade of coal is "immature" which means it hasn't had time to build up a strong concentration of gas. Methane gas is the biggest killer in coal mines around the world.

The timing of the Drumheller mine industry was lucky, too. By the time the Newcastle opened in 1911, the right to better working conditions had been fought for and won by miners' unions in North America. As a result, miners were provided with wash houses, better underground ventilation, and higher safety standards. When the Newcastle opened, there were laws in place to prohibit child labour, so boys under 14 were no longer allowed underground. The worst of the worst coal mining days were over, at least in North America.

Nevertheless, early mine camps around Drumheller were called "hell's hole" because miners lived in tents, or shacks, with little sanitation and little comfort. It was a man's world, with drinking, gambling, and watching fistfights common forms of recreation. As shacks gave way to little houses, and women joined the men and started families, life improved. Hockey, baseball, music, theatre, and visiting friends enriched peoples' lives. Going downtown Saturday night was a huge event, with every language in Europe spoken by the crowds spilling off the sidewalks. No longer "hell's hole," Drumheller became "the wonder town of the west!" and "the fastest growing town in Canada, if not in North America!"

Sub bituminous coal is ideal for heating homes and cooking food. People all over western Canada heated their homes, schools, and offices with Drumheller coal. Long, cold winters were good for Drumheller, because everyone needed lots of coal. In these years, miners had of money in their pockets. Short, mild winters were difficult. A miner might only work one day a week, and get laid off in early spring. He got through the summer by growing a big garden, catching fish, and working for farmers.

Between 1911 and 1979, 139 mines were registered in the Drumheller valley. Some mines didn't last long, but 34 were productive for many years. Between 1912 and 1966, Drumheller produced 56,864,808 tons of coal, making it one of the major coal producing regions in Canada.

The beginning of the end for Drumheller's mining industry was the Leduc Oil Strike of 1948. After this, natural gas became the fuel of choice for home heating in western Canada. To the mine operators, it seemed that people switched from messy coal stoves to clean gas furnaces as fast as they could. As the demand for coal dropped, mines closed. As mines closed, people moved away and communities suffered. Some communities, like Willow Creek, completely vanished. Others, like East Coulee, went from a boomtown of 3800 to a ghost town of 180. When the Atlas #4 Mine shipped its last load of coal in 1979, the coal years of Drumheller were over.

The Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site preserves the last of the Drumheller mines. The Atlas recalls the time when Coal was King, and "mining the black" brought thousands of people to this lonely valley. The nearby East Coulee School Museum interprets the life of children and families in a bustling mine town.

The Miners' Memorial commemorates the men who lost their lives digging the black in the Drumheller coalfield. Located on Centre Street in downtown Drumheller, the memorial comprises a sculpture by James Smith and a mural by Marcel Deschenes. Along with interpretive panels in a park setting, the memorial is a fascinating reminder of the blood tax paid in Drumheller's history.

Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.

 

Wath can be traced to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads, the latter a branch of Ryknield Street. North of the town was a ford across the River Dearne. The name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath (ford or wading place). The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair, but these were soon discontinued. The market was revived in 1814.

 

Until local government reorganization in 1974, Wath was in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Until the mid-19th century, the town had a racecourse of regional importance, linked to the estate at nearby Wentworth. This fell into disuse, but traces of it can be seen between Wath and Swinton and it is remembered in street names. There was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, but it was overshadowed by the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton. About the turn of the 19th century, the poet and newspaper editor James Montgomery, resident at the time, called it "the Queen of Villages". This rural character changed rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as coal mining developed.

 

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled, and local infrastructure developed round the coalmining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

 

The Dearne and Dove Canal opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley. This wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair. Much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

 

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries – Wath Main and Manvers Main were the two usually mentioned. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

 

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal. Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

 

Wath once had three railway stations: Wath Central in Moor Road, Wath (Hull and Barnsley) and Wath North both in Station Road. Wath North, the most distant, was the last to close in 1968, under the Beeching Axe. There has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield–Wakefield–Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.

 

The local coal industry succumbed to a dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had knock-on effects on many subsidiary local industries and caused local hardship.

 

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village often seen as part of Wath. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. It made the area more rural, as much land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks. This regeneration of what was still classified as brownfield land has involved building it over with industrial and commercial parks. Large housing developments have also been started.

 

Wath upon Dearne centres on Montgomery Square, with the town's main shops, the library and the bus station. To its west is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, on a small leafy green, with Wath Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College. The several town-centre pubs include a branch of Wetherspoons and Wath Tap, Rotherham's first micro-pub specialising in locally brewed real ale. From 1892 to 1974 Wath Hall served as the local seat of government for Wath upon Dearne.

 

Today Wath is still emerging from the coal-industry collapse, although jobs and some low-level affluences have returned. After a hiatus between the clearing of former colliery land and recent redevelopment, when the area felt rather rural, the construction of large distribution centres to the north of the town is restoring an industrial feel, but without the pollution issues of coal. Several distribution warehouses for the clothing chain Next have opened. Much new housing is being built on reclaimed land.

 

Wath Festival, held round the Early May Bank Holiday, is a folk and acoustic music and arts festival founded by members of the Wath Morris Dancing Team in 1972. It has grown to host known names on the folk, acoustic and world music scene. While festival events occur across the town, most larger concerts are held at the Montgomery Hall Theatre and Community Venue. Those appearing have included Dougie MacLean, Fairport Convention, Martin Simpson, John Tams, Frances Black, John McCusker, Stacey Earle and Eddi Reader.

 

The festival marked its 40th anniversary in 2012. Wath won Village Festival of the Year in the 2013 FATEA Awards.[11] The festival has been a supporter of young artists such as Lucy Ward, and Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar. It has also hosted the Wath Festival Young Performers' Award, founded by the Sheffield-based musician Charlie Barker in 2011, who handed it over to a festival committee in 2014. Winners have included Luke Hirst & Sarah Smout, Sunjay, Rose Redd and Hannah Cumming.

 

The event includes dancing by local morris and sword-dancing groups, street performances, workshops, children's events and a Saturday morning parade from Montgomery Hall through Montgomery Square and back to St James's Church, for a traditional throwing of bread buns from the parish church tower. Local schools, organisations and local Labour MP John Healey have joined in festival activities.

 

The RSPB's Old Moor nature reserve lies a mile to the north-west of the town. It occupies a "flash", where mining-induced subsidence of land close to a river has created wetlands.

 

Wath Athletic F.C. served the community from the 1880s to the Second World War, playing in the Midland League and reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup in 1926. No senior team has represented the settlement since the 1950s, and Wath remains one of the largest places in Yorkshire without one. However, it has a Rugby Union team that plays in the Yorkshire Division 2.

Corner of 3rd & Main.

 

Jellico lies in the heart of Tennessee’s coal mining region. The Jellico Coalfield was famous for its high quality bituminous coal. Mining firms owned eighty percent of the land in Campbell and Claiborne counties, providing most of the jobs in this impoverished area of northern Tennessee between 1880 and 1930.

 

In 1906, a railroad car packed with dynamite exploded in Jellico, killing eight and destroying part of the town. The town quickly recovered, however, and many of the buildings in the Main Street area dated from this period.

 

DSCF4675-Edit

This is the tipple at the Atlas Coal Mine.

 

From the official web site:

 

Coal was not hard to discover in the area that is now Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. Seams of coal show up as black stripes in the badlands of the Red Deer River Valley.

 

The Blackfoot and Cree knew about the black rock that burned, but they didn’t like to use it. Later, three white explorers reported coal in the area: Peter Fidler in 1792, Dr. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition in 1857, and Joseph Tyrrell in 1884.

 

In the years that followed, a handful of ranchers and homesteaders dug coal out of river banks and coulees to heat their homes. However, the first commercial coal mine did not open until Sam Drumheller started the coal rush in the area that now bears his name.

 

The rush started when Sam bought land off a local rancher named Thomas Greentree. Sam turned around and sold this land to Canadian National Railway, to develop a townsite. Sam also registered a coal mine. Before his mine opened, however, Jesse Gouge and Garnet Coyle beat him to it, and opened the Newcastle Mine. CN laid tracks into town, and the first load of coal was shipped out of Drumheller in 1911.

 

Once the railway was built, people poured in. Hundreds, then thousands, of people came to dig coal. The greatest numbers came from Eastern Europe, Britain, and Nova Scotia. More mines opened. By the end of 1912, there were 9 working coal mines, each with its own camp of workers: Newcastle, Drumheller, Midland, Rosedale, and Wayne. In the years that followed, more mines and camps sprang up: Nacmine, Cambria, Willow Creek, Lehigh, and East Coulee.

 

Coal mining was hard, dirty, dangerous work. Mining in the Drumheller Valley, however, was less hard, dirty, and dangerous than it was in many other coal mining regions in Canada. This was due to both lucky geology and lucky timing.

 

The geology of the Drumheller coal field results in flat lying seams, which are much safer to mine than the steeply pitching seams of the mountain mines. In addition, the coal produced in Drumheller is sub-bituminous. This grade of coal is “immature” which means it hasn’t had time to build up a strong concentration of gas. Methane gas is the biggest killer in coal mines around the world.

 

The timing of the Drumheller mine industry was lucky, too. By the time the Newcastle opened in 1911, the right to better working conditions had been fought for and won by miners’ unions in North America. As a result, miners were provided with wash houses, better underground ventilation, and higher safety standards. When the Newcastle opened, there were laws in place to prohibit child labour, so boys under 14 were no longer allowed underground. The worst of the worst coal mining days were over, at least in North America.

 

Nevertheless, early mine camps around Drumheller were called “hell’s hole” because miners lived in tents, or shacks, with little sanitation and little comfort. It was a man’s world, with drinking, gambling, and watching fistfights common forms of recreation. As shacks gave way to little houses, and women joined the men and started families, life improved. Hockey, baseball, music, theatre, and visiting friends enriched peoples’ lives. Going downtown Saturday night was a huge event, with every language in Europe spoken by the crowds spilling off the sidewalks. No longer “hell’s hole,” Drumheller became “the wonder town of the west!” and “the fastest growing town in Canada, if not in North America!”

 

Sub-bituminous coal is ideal for heating homes and cooking food. People all over western Canada heated their homes, schools, and offices with Drumheller coal. Long, cold winters were good for Drumheller, because everyone needed lots of coal. In these years, miners had of money in their pockets. Short, mild winters were difficult. A miner might only work one day a week, and get laid off in early spring. He got through the summer by growing a big garden, catching fish, and working for farmers.

 

Between 1911 and 1979, 139 mines were registered in the Drumheller valley. Some mines didn’t last long, but 34 were productive for many years. Between 1912 and 1966, Drumheller produced 56,864,808 tons of coal, making it one of the major coal producing regions in Canada.

 

The beginning of the end for Drumheller’s mining industry was the Leduc Oil Strike of 1948. After this, natural gas became the fuel of choice for home heating in western Canada. To the mine operators, it seemed that people switched from messy coal stoves to clean gas furnaces as fast as they could. As the demand for coal dropped, mines closed. As mines closed, people moved away and communities suffered. Some communities, like Willow Creek, completely vanished. Others, like East Coulee, went from a boomtown of 3800 to a ghost town of 180. When the Atlas #4 Mine shipped its last load of coal in 1979, the coal years of Drumheller were over.

 

The Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site preserves the last of the Drumheller mines. The Atlas recalls the time when Coal was King, and “mining the black” brought thousands of people to this lonely valley. The nearby East Coulee School Museum interprets the life of children and families in a bustling mine town.

 

This 360° High Dynamic Range panorama was stitched from 66 bracketed photographs with PTGUI Pro, tone-mapped with Photomatix, processed in Color Efex, and finally touched up in Aperture.

 

Original size: 20000 × 10000 (200.0 MP; 1.03 GB).

 

Location: East Coulee, Alberta, Canada

Sapeurs du 850th Engineer Aviation Bn (EAB) du IX Engineer Command de la Ninth Air Force posant du Hessian Mat avec une P.B.S. Laying machine Pullen dite " Stamp Licker " sur l'ALG A-23C.

Construction du 30 juin au 6 juillet 1944. Creusé de fossés et fortement miné, le terrain a dû être remis en état, la piste de 905 m allongée à 1400m.

Ancien aérodrome français, utilisé par la Luftwaffe ; à partir du 13 juillet 1944 par le Detachment 27 Air Transpt Gp

ALG utilisé par l'USAAF jusqu'au 8 août 1945, ensuite devient une base de la Marine Nationale Française.

D'autres vues de cet ALG

www.flickr.com/photos/mlq/4113849527/

www.footnote.com/image/42265131/querqueville/

La photo comporte des marques de censure : installations radars ? résultat de la censure :

www.flickr.com/photos/mlq/4118823879/

A noter sur le GMC le train avant doublé pour diminuer la pression au sol et ainsi éviter d'abimer le PBS (Prefabricated Bituminous Surfacing)

Voir ici un reportage sur la pose du PBS :

www.flickr.com/photos/mlq/4117305418/

Another one from my extensive file of Charlotte local job documentation. This is NS E27, the “Camp Greene” job, a 15:30 local turn that services industries between Charlotte Yard and Paw Creek (near the Charlotte-Douglas airport.) In this 2022 image, the Camp Greene is working what used to be the largest industry on their route, Charlotte Pipe & Foundry. You could always bet on the Camp Greene to spend a good chunk of time here switching out cars of bituminous coke, lime, scrap steel, and finished pipe. Since this photo was taken, Charlotte Pipe has moved this operation to Oakboro, NC where it is served by the ACWR. The shutdown of CP&F’s Charlotte plant almost took the Camp Greene job with it, leaving only a couple of customers along their route. These days, the Camp Greene will typically be through with their work order in a few hours. After that they’ll be at the mercy of the Charlotte yardmaster who will no doubt have a few more hours of extracurricular switching chores for them to perform. Ask me how I know! Charlotte, NC, 3/25/2022.

The mines in the Drumheller area provided sub-bituminous coal, chiefly used for home heating and cooking. The flat-lying seams were easier to mine than those found in more mountainous areas, with lower levels of methane gas. The coal-mining era lasted from 1911 to 1979, when the Atlas No. 3 and 4 mines closed. The Atlas No. 3 Mine structures were preserved and form the basis of the National Historic Site, administered by the Atlas Mine Historical Society.

The mine features the last wooden coal tipple in Canada. Built in 1936, the tipple is a coal loading and sorting machine. At over 40 feet tall the tipple now serves as a reminder of the rich mining history of the Drumheller Valley. Old mining equipment, including a working 1936 battery powered locomotive and several buildings including the wash house, supply house, lamp house, and mine office still stand at the site. The site preserves the stories and artifacts of the men who once mined the black. The Atlas is the last of 139 mines that once ruled the valley.

 

This monument is to the 139 miners who paid the blood tax and died working in the mines. Roughly 4 people died for every 1000 tons of coal extracted.

On our trip down south, February 24, 2018. We stopped at Shag Point/Matakaea as I had never been there before. Matakaea is the name of the pa (fortified village). We have left Dunedin and going to stay in Timaru for a night before heading back to Christchurch.

 

Shag Point/Matakaea has a rich history, from early Ngai Tahu settlement to historic coalmining. The area has diverse marine life. It has interesting flora, is great for wildlife viewing, and is geologically fascinating.

 

Flat rock platforms provide an easy haul-out site for New Zealand fur seals, and cliff-top viewing areas allow you to observe seal behaviour without disturbing their rest.

 

Whalers discovered the first bituminous coal in New Zealand here in the 1830s. By 1862 the exposed coal seams were found to be commercially viable and were successfully mined until 1972, when flooding eventually closed shafts that extended under the coast. Evidence of coal mining is still obvious throughout the reserve.

 

Matakaea is jointly managed by DOC and Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu. Matakaea has Topuni status. The mana (authority) and rangatiratanga (chieftainship) of Ngai Tahu over the area is recognised publicly by this status. Ngai Tahu takes an active role in managing the natural and cultural values of the area.

For More Info: www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/otago/p...

Vellore (formerly known as Rayavelur or Vellaimaanagar) is a sprawling city and the administrative headquarters of Vellore District in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Located on the banks of the Palar River in the north-eastern part of Tamil Nadu, the city has been ruled, at different times, by the Pallavas, Medieval Cholas, Later Cholas, Vijayanagar Empire, Rashtrakutas, Carnatic kingdom, and the British. Vellore has four zones (totally 60 wards) which cover an area of 87.915 km2 and has a population of 423,425 based on the 2001 census. It is located about 135 kilometres west of Chennai and about 210 kilometres east of Bengaluru. Vellore is about (100) Km South West of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. It is Hotspot City Of Bengaluru - Chennai National Highway. Vellore is administered by Vellore Municipal Corporation under a mayor. Vellore is part of Vellore (State Assembly Constituency) and Vellore (Lok Sabha constituency).

 

Vellore City is the home of two of India's top ten educational institutions, Christian Medical College & Hospital and VIT University. It is also a major centre for medical tourism in India.

 

Vellore region is the top exporter of finished leather goods in the country. Vellore leather accounts for more than 37% of the country's export of leather and leather-related products. Vellore is also home to several manufacturing and automobile companies such as Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, MRF Limited, TVS-Brakes India, Tamil Nadu Industrial Explosives Limited, Greaves Cotton, ArcelorMittal Dhamm Processing, SAME Deutz-Fahr (Italy), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Japan) and KRAMSKI (Germany).

 

Vellore Fort, Government Museum, Science Park, Vainu Bappu Observatory, Amirthi Zoological Park, Religious places such as Jalakandeswarar Temple, Balamathi Hills [Murugan Temple)Vallimalai (Murugan Temple) Rathnagiri (Murugan temple) [Sripuram|Srilakshmi Golden Temple]], Big Mosque and St. John's Church and Yelagiri Hill station are the among top tourist attractions in and around Vellore.

 

The Government of India has released the next round of smart cities project list. The Tamil Nadu state district Vellore also got a place on the list of 27 cities in the project.

 

ETYMOLOGY

In Tamil, the word vel means spear that is seen as the weapon of Hindu god Murugan and oor means place. As per Hindu legend, Murugan is seen as a tribal hunter who appeared in a lotus pond with his weapon to attack the enemies. Thus "Vellore" is seen as the place where Murugan appeared.

 

As per another legend, the region was surrounded by Velan trees (Babul trees), resulting in the place to be called Vellore.

 

HISTORY

The recorded history of Vellore dates back to the ninth century, as seen from a Chola inscriptions in the Annamalaiyar Temple in Tiruvannamalai. Further inscriptions made before the ninth century indicate the rule of Pallava kings, whose capital was Kanchipuram.

 

The Chola Kings ruled over the region from 850 to 1280.[citation needed] After the rule of Cholas, it came under the Rashtrakutas, the later Cholas, Reddy's and Vijayanagar kings. The Vellore Fort was built during the time of Chinna Bommi reddy, a subordinate of the Vijayanagar kings Sadasivaraya and Srirangaraya during the third quarter of the 16th century.

 

During the 17th century, Vellore came under the dominion of the Nawab of the Carnatic. As the Mughal empire came to an end, the Nawab lost control of the town, with confusion and chaos ensuing after 1753. Subsequently, there were periods of Hindu and Muslim stewardship of the region. The poligars opposed British rule but were subdued. During the first half of the 19th century, the town came under British rule.

 

GEOGRAPHY AND CLIMATE

Vellore is at 12.92°N 79.13°E, 220m above the mean sea level. The city has a semi-arid climate with high temperatures throughout the year and relatively low rainfall. It is in Vellore district of the South Indian state, Tamil Nadu, 135 km west of the state capital Chennai. Vellore lies in the Eastern Ghats region and Palar river basin. The topography is almost plain with slopes from west to east. There are no notable mineral resources. Black loam soil is found in parts of Vellore Taluk. The other type of soil in the city is chiefly gravelly, stony and sandy of the red variety.

 

Vellore experiences a tropical savanna climate (Köppen climate classification Aw). The temperature ranges from a maximum of 39.4 °C to a minimum of 18.4 °C. Like the rest of the state, April to June are the hottest months and December to January are the coldest. Vellore receives 1,034.1 mm of rainfall every year. The southwest monsoon, with an onset in June and lasting up to September, brings rainfall of 517.1 mm, with September being the rainiest month. The northeast monsoon which lasts from October to December brings rainfall of 388.4mm. The humidity ranges from 40%–63% during summer and 67%–86% during winter.

 

DEMOGRAPHICS

According to 2011 census, Vellore had a population of 185,803 with a sex-ratio of 1,034 females for every 1,000 males, much above the national average of 929. A total of 19,898 were under the age of six, constituting 10,093 males and 9,805 females. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes accounted for 14.16% and .18% of the population respectively. The average literacy of the city was 77.15%, compared to the national average of 72.99%. The city had a total of 42598 households. There were a total of 70,257 workers, comprising 297 cultivators, 395 main agricultural labourers, 4,387 in house hold industries, 59,281 other workers, 5,897 marginal workers, 59 marginal cultivators, 74 marginal agricultural labourers, 667 marginal workers in household industries and 5,097 other marginal workers. As per the religious census of 2011, Vellore had 70.09% Hindus, 24.28% Muslims, 4.79% Christians, 0.02% Sikhs, 0.03% Buddhists, 0.51% Jains, 0.26% following other religions and 0.02% following no religion or did not indicate any religious preference.

 

As of 2001, out of the total area, 69.88% of the land was marked developed and 31.12% of the city remained undeveloped. Out of the developed area, 55.76% was used for residential purposes, 8.34% for commercial, 1.58% for industrial, 3.3% for educational, 16.46% for public and semi public and 10.12% for transport and communication. The population density is not uniform: It is high in areas like Arugandhampoondi and lower in the peripheral areas such as Poonthottam. The average density of the city is 241 persons per hectare.

 

ADMINISTRATION AND POLITICS

Vellore is the headquarters of the Vellore District. The town was constituted as a third-grade municipality in 1866, promoted to first-grade during 1947, selection-grade from 1970 and a municipal corporation from 1 August 2008. The Vellore municipal corporation has 60 wards and there is an elected councillor for each of those wards. The functions of the municipal corporation are devolved into six departments: general administration/personnel, Engineering, Revenue, Public Health, city planning and Information Technology (IT). All these departments are under the control of a Municipal Commissioner who is the executive head. The legislative powers are vested in a body of 60 members, one each from the 60 wards. The legislative body is headed by an elected Mayor assisted by a Deputy Mayor.

 

Vellore is a part of the Vellore & Katpadi and it elects 2 members to the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly once every five years. From the 1977 elections, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) won the assembly seat once (in 1977 elections), four times by Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (in 1980, 1984 and 1989), twice by Indian National Congress (INC) (in 1991 and 2001 elections) and twice by Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) (in 1996 and 2001 elections). The current MLA of Vellore constituency is P.Karthikeyan from DMK party.

 

Vellore is a part of the Vellore Lok Sabha constituency & Arakkonam_Lok_Sabha_constituency. It had the following six assembly constituencies before 2009 delimitation: Katpadi, Gudiyatham, Pernambut (SC), Anaicut Village, Vellore and Arni. After delimitation, it is currently composed of Vellore, Anaicut Village, Kilvazhithunaiankuppam (SC), Gudiyatham, Vaniyambadi and Ambur

 

From 1951, the Vellore parliament seat was held by the Indian National Congress for four times during 1957, 1962, 1989 and 1991 elections, AIADMK twice during 1984 and 2014 elections, CWL once during 1951 elections, and independent once during 1980 elections, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam five times during the 1967, 1971, 1996, 2004 and 2009 elections, once each by NCO during 1977 elections, and twice by Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) during 1998 and 1999 elections. The current Member of Parliament from the constituency is B. Senguttuvan from the AIADMK party.

 

Law and order is maintained by the Vellore subdivision of the Tamil Nadu Police headed by a deputy superintendent. There are four police stations in the town, with one of them being an all-women station. There are special units like prohibition enforcement, district crime, social justice and human rights, district crime records and special branch that operate at the district level police division headed by a superintendent of police.

 

ECONOMY

According to Indian Census of 2001, the urban workforce participation rate of Vellore is 43.64%. Vellore, being the headquarters of the district, has registered growth in the tertiary sector activities, with a corresponding decrease in the primary sector. Major employment is provided by the leather industry, agricultural trading and industries in and around the city. Approximately 83.35% of the workforce is employed in tertiary sector comprising transport, services and commerce. The secondary sector activities like manufacturing and household industries employs 13.52% of the workforce. Male workers participation (43.64%) is high compared to the female work participation (24.39%).

 

Hundreds of leather and tannery facilities are around Vellore and nearby towns, such as Ranipet, Ambur and Vaniyambadi. The Vellore district is the top exporter of finished leather goods in the country. Vellore leather accounts for more than 37% of the country's export of leather and leather-related products (such as finished leathers, shoes, garments and gloves). Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) is one of the nine major government owned enterprises in the nation. The Boiler Auxiliaries Plant of BHEL in Ranipet is the industrial hub of Vellore. Chemical plants in the Ranipet-SIPCOT economic zone are a major source of income to the residents of Vellore. EID Parry is a sanitary-ware manufacturing company with 38% of the world's market share in bathroom accessories. Tirumalai Chemicals and Greaves are among the international brands that have their manufacturing units in the city. Automobile and mechanical companies of global Brands, including SAME Deutz-Fahr, TVS–Brakes India, Mitsubishi, Greaves Cotton and MRF have their manufacturing units in the area. Brakes India Sholingur's foundry division is located at Vellore-Sholingur and is a major employer in the area. Vellore is known as the Leather hub of India.

 

Asia's biggest explosives manufacturing company, Tamil Nadu Explosives Limited (TEL), is in Vellore at Katpadi. This is India's only government explosives company with more than a thousand employees.[clarification needed] The company is headed by a senior Indian Administrative Service officer. Kramski Stamping and Molding India Pvt Ltd, a German precision metal and plastic integrated-component manufacturing company with automotive, telecommunications, electronics and medical applications is in Erayankadu, near Vellore. Major businesses in the city center are on Officer's Line, Town Hall Road, Long Bazaar and Bangalore, Scudder, Arni, Gandhi and Katpadi Roads. Many boarding and lodging houses are in and around Scudder and Gandhi Roads. Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd. announced the launch of 14 Microsoft Innovation Centers (MICs) in India. Trichy, Vellore, Coimbatore, Madurai and Salem in Tamil Nadu.

 

Christian Medical College & Hospital (CMCH), on Ida Scudder Road in the heart of the city, is Vellore's largest private employer and has a large floating population from other parts of India and abroad. Lodging, hospitals and allied businesses are among the major sources of income generated in the central part of the city. The Government Vellore Medical College and Hospital (VMCH) is located at Adukamparai in Vellore. With the advent of hospitals such as Apollo KH Hospital in Melvisharam and Sri Narayani Hospital & Research Centre in Sripuram, coupled with colleges such as CMC & VIT and other engineering and science colleges, the health care industry is growing rapidly.

 

The mainstay for people in the rural areas, more than agriculture, is industries such as weaving, beedi and matchstick rolling. The Indian Army has a number of recruits from the Vellore district (especially from Kammavanpet, which is known as "the military village") and military spending is a major sources of income.

 

EDUCATION

Vellore is considered a prominent destination for medical and technological education in India. It has a state-government university, a private technological university, one government and one private medical school and several engineering and arts and science colleges.

 

The country's first stem-cell translational research centre was established in Vellore in December 2005. The central government's biotechnology department selected the Christian Medical College (CMC) as the first in a series of centers, since it already had world-class clinical hematology and biochemistry departments. The college has made a breakthrough which attracted the attention of the country's medical and scientific community: the Centre for Stem Cell Research at the Christian Medical College succeeded in reprogramming cells from adult mice to make them function like stem cells found in the human embryo. The agricultural research station at Virinjipuram is in the Northeastern Zone of Tamil Nadu. It is one of 32 research stations of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU). The Government of India-sponsored National Watershed Development Project for Rainfed Areas (NWDPRA) scheme has been in operation since October 1997, with the main objective being trials of conservation measures conducted in water and soil of 18 watersheds in the Vellore and Tiruvannamalai districts.

 

Thiruvalluvar University was split off from the University of Madras, previously in the Vellore Fort campus. Nearly all the government-run arts and science colleges in Vellore, Tiruvannamalai, Villupuram and Cuddalore districts are affiliated with Thiruvalluvar University. Thanthai Periyar Government Institute of Technology is the only government engineering college in Vellore. The Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) has been ranked best private engineering university in India by the magazine India Today.

 

Christian Medical College & Hospital (CMCH), one of the largest hospitals in India and Asia, is based out of Vellore. It is a major health care provider for the surrounding districts.

 

Auxilium Women's College (founded in 1954) is the first women's college in Vellore district; Other arts and sciences colleges in the city are the Dhanabakyam Krishnaswamy Mudhaliar Women's College (DKM) near Sainathapuram and the Muthurangam Government Arts College (MGAC) in Otteri, near Bagayam. Voorhees College (founded 1898) is the oldest college in the district and known as the institution where S. Radhakrishnan (former president of India) studied; a commemorative stamp for the centenary of the college was issued by the government of India. C. Abdul Hakeem College is in Melvisharam. Arignar Anna Arts College for Women(AAA) is located in Walajapet.

 

The Government Law College, Vellore was established in 2008. It offers a three-year Bachelor of Laws (BL) degree with an annual intake of 80 students. The college is in Katpadi, Vellore. There are several Arabic colleges in Vellore such as the Madrasa Al-Baqiyathus Salihath, popularly known as Baaqiyaath, founded by A'la Hadrat Maulana Shah Abdul Wahab, which is the second oldest Arabic college in India after Darul Uloom Deoband in Uttar Pradesh.

 

TOURISM

Vellore Fort is the most prominent landmark in the city. During British rule, Tipu Sultan's family and the last king of Sri Lanka, Vikrama Rajasinha, were held as royal prisoners in the fort. The fort houses a church, a mosque and a Hindu temple, the latter known for its carvings. The first rebellion against British rule erupted at this fort in 1806, and it witnessed the massacre of the Vijayanagara royal family of Emperor Sriranga Raya. The fortifications consist of a main rampart, broken at irregular intervals by round towers and rectangular projections. The main walls are built of massive granite stones, surrounded by a broad moat fed with water by subterranean pipes from the Suryagunta reservoir.

 

Within the fort is the similarly aged Jalakanteswara Temple. It is a noteworthy example of military architecture in South India. The fort houses the Tipu Mahal where Tipu Sultan is believed to have stayed with his family during the war with the British; the graves of Tipu's sons are found at Vellore. It is administered by the Archaeological Survey of India. Vellore Fort has been declared a Monument of National Importance and is a noted tourist attraction.

 

The State Government Museum is inside the fort. It was opened to the public in 1985. It consists of objects of art, archaeology, prehistory, weapons, sculptures, bronzes, wood carvings, handicrafts, numismatics, philately, botany, geology and zoology. Historical monuments of the erstwhile composite North Arcot District are contained in the gallery. Special exhibits include a bronze double sword from Vellore Taluk dating to 400 BC, stone sculptures from the late Pallava to Vijayanagar periods, ivory chess boards and coins used by the last Kandian King of Sri Lanka, Vikrama Raja Singha. Educational activities at the museum include an art camp for school students and the study of inscriptions and iconography for college students.

 

Jalakandeswarar Temple, Srilakshmi Golden Temple, and the Wallajapet Dhanvantri Temple and Ponnai Navagraha Kottai Temple are among the temples in Vellore. Sri Lakshmi Temple, popularly known as Golden Temple, is a newly built temple and spiritual park in Thirumalaikodi, Vellore. It is approximately 8 km from the Vellore bus terminus. The temple covers an area of 100 acres and has been constructed by Vellore-based Sri Narayani Peedam headed by Sakthi Amma. It has intricate carvings, hand-made by hundreds of gold artisans specializing in temple architecture. The exterior is laid with gold sheets and plates, with construction reported to have cost Rs.300 crores (US$65 million). About 1,500 kg of gold was used, the largest amount in the world.

 

Ratnagiri Murugan Temple is another prominent Hindu temple in the city.Virinjipuram, 17 km from Vellore is noted for its 1000-year-old ancient Margabandeeshwarar Shiva temple.

 

Assumption Cathedral and the 150-year-old St. John's Church inside the fort are among the churches in Vellore. The Big Mosque, in the heart of the city, contains the largest Arabic college in India. The city is also houses over 50 mosques some of which are over 100 years old.

 

TRANSPORT

The Vellore municipality maintains 104.332 km of roads. It has 50.259 km concrete roads, 6.243 km kutcha roads and 47.88 km bituminous road. The National Highways passing through Vellore are NH 46 (Bangalore - Chennai road), NH 234 (Mangalore to Viluppuram) and NH 4 from Ranipet to Chennai and the Cuddalore-Chittoor. Vellore is connected with major cities in the states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Bus service is available to Chennai, Coimbatore, Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram, Tirupathi, Kadapa, Anantapur, Salem, Chittoor, Kuppam, Kolar, Kolar Gold Fields, Madanapalle, Vijayawada, Hyderabad, Mangalore, Karur, Pallapatti (Karur), Aranthangi, Mannargudi, Nagapattinam, Goa, Hosur, Nagercoil, Marthandam, Thoothukudi, Thiruchendur, Sengottai, Cuddalore, Kurnool, Trichy, Thuraiyur, Thammampatti, Thiruvannamalai, Tindivanam, Pondicherry, Kallakkurichi, Viluppuram, Kanyakumari, Arani, Madurai, Tirunelveli, Kanchipuram, Tiruttani, Kalpakkam, Pallikonda, Gudiyatham, Dharmapuri, Erode, Tirupur, Palakkad, Krishnagiri, Gingee and other major towns and cities in South India. Vellore is served by a city bus service, which connects the city, suburbs and other places of interest. The bus service extends about 30 km from the city center. There are two bus terminals: the Town Bus Terminus (opposite the fort and near CMC Hospital) and the Central Bus Terminus (Near Green Circle). Other bus terminals are located at Chittor Bus Stand (near VIT Road), Bagayam and Katpadi(Junction bus stop). The bus stands are maintained by the Vellore Municipal Corporation.

 

Vellore has three main railway stations: Katpadi junction, Vellore Cantonment and Vellore Town. The largest is Vellore-Katpadi Junction, 5 km north of CMC hospital. This is a major railway junction on the Chennai-Bangalore broad-gauge line running to Chennai, Bangalore, Tirupati and Trichy. There are direct rail links to Vijayawada Junction, Tirupati, Bhubaneswar, Nagpur, Bangalore, Bhopal Junction, Mumbai, Mangalore, Tiruchchirapalli, Bilaspur, Korba, Patna, Ernakulam, Trivandrum, Kanniyakumari, Shirdi, Kanpur, Gaya, Dhanbad, Jammu Tawi, Madurai, Bhilai, Gwalior, Chennai Central, Howrah Station, New Delhi Railway Station, Coimbatore, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Kozhikode, Jaipur and other major cities. More than 150 trains cross the Vellore-Katpadi Junction daily.

 

Vellore Cantonment is in Suriyakulam on the Viluppuram-Tirupati broad gauge line, 8 km from Katpadi Junction. EMU and passenger trains to Tirupati, Chennai and Arakonnam depart from here. The 150-km broad gauge line was extended to Villupuram in January 2010 and connects Vellore and South Tamil Nadu; however, as of October 2010 it was not serviced by passenger trains. The line was opened for goods trains in June 2010. An EMU from Vellore Cantonment to Chennai Central was introduced on December 22, 2008. Vellore Town Station is in Konavattam on the line connecting Katpadi Junction with Viluppuram Junction via Tiruvannamalai.

 

The city has an airstrip near Abdullapuram; as of 2010 it was not open to the public and was used for aeronautical training programmes. The nearest international airports are Chennai International Airport (130 km) and Bengaluru International Airport (230 km); the nearest domestic airport is Tirupati Airport (100 km).

 

UTILITY SERVICES

Electricity supply to Vellore is regulated and distributed by the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board (TNEB). The city and its suburbs forms the Vellore Electricity Distribution Circle. A chief distribution engineer is stationed at the regional headquarters. Water supply is provided by the Vellore municipal corporation from the Palar river through Palar headworks and Karungamputhur headworks and distributed through ten overhead tanks. As of 2005, there were 16,371 connections against 33,772 households. In 2000–2001, a total of 7.4 million litres of water was supplied daily for households in the city. The other sources of water are Otteri Lake, Sathuvancheri town panchayat, Ponnai and street bore wells.

 

As per the municipal data for 2011, about 83 metric tonnes of solid waste were collected from Vellore every day by door-to-door collection. The source segregation and dumping was carried out by the sanitary department of the Vellore municipal corporation. The municipal corporation covered 16 wards for waste collection as of 2001. There is no underground drainage system and the sewerage system for disposal of sullage is through septic tanks, open drains and public conveniences. The municipal corporation maintained 145 km of storm water drains in 2011. As of 2011, 24 government and private hospitals and one veterinary hospital take care of the health care needs of the citizens. As of 2011, the municipal corporation maintained 5,241 street lamps: 735 sodium lamps, 73 mercury vapour lamps, 4,432 tube lights and one high mast beam lamp. The municipal corporation operates the Nethaji Daily Market that caters to the needs of the city and the rural areas around it.

 

WIKIPEDIA

The passers-by are largely oblivious.

 

They speed through the weekend morning on their way to the green spaces and trailheads that weave about the pastoral splendor of the Colorado foothills, doing so in an effort to find respite from the migraine of jammed lanes along a weekday I-25 commute to whatever occupation pays the bills.

 

Their Jeeps and Subarus slip through a narrow gap in an ancient embankment; an opening abutted with stone and concrete and bridged with riveted steel, a legendary name there embossed in black-on-silver like some Jolly Roger of Fallen Flags flying from the mast of the grandest mountain tonnage mauler of all, its immortal defiance tattered and torn on the winds of change.

 

Yet, it will forever wave with the legend of sleek and brutish L-105s resplendent in shiny Alamosa green boilers, running boards trimmed in aluminum leaf, pilot shield bearing a sunburst as brilliant as the Colorado sunrise, throttle shoved in, safeties lifting in the cobalt sky as she holds back Pueblo-bound tonnage on the Palmer Divide, brakeshoes smoking and casting a haze about the landscape.

 

For all those who stand on the cusp of yesterdays, breathing in aromas of white sage and mountain pine under the vivid glow of clouds in the half-moon morning sky, the visage of 70-inch Boxpoks churning with a distinct and resolute 4-cylinder cadence is but an imagination away.

 

Despite the best efforts of altitude and friction and gravity---and God---the big 4-6-6-4 Baldwins roamed a system as rigorous as it was beautiful; a railroad steeped with twisting grades climbing to treacherous heights. Names like Minturn and Tennessee Pass and Soldier Summit knew the beat of their exhaust, their smoke clouding the skies over Floy and Seahorse Reef as it towered above the Green River Desert, while over-fire jets satiated the environment-conscious citizens of Provo and Salt Lake City.

 

Ten 3700s rolled out of Eddystone on the eve of World War II, with more to follow. And like so many young men who lined the sidewalks in front of the service recruiters in the days following The Day of Infamy, they would never see their 20th birthday, cut down not by enemy fire, but by the 5,400 horsepower of progress that EMD FT No.103 demonstrated.

 

Though valiant in their efforts to vanquish the Axis threat, the technology war that followed the end of hostilities was simply unwinnable. There was no putting the Diesel Genie back in the bottle. The doors at La Grange and Schenectady had been flung wide open, and the lights burned round the clock until the tracks at Burnham and Salida and Roper teamed with the aromas of diesel, the rumble of 567s and 244s sounding the death knell.

 

It was in the year 1956 that Judge McCarthy became one for the ages, and so too did simple-expansion on the Rio Grande standard gauge lines. Before the 1151 made her curtain call on the Creede run in the very last days of the year, the 3708 rolled into Pueblo, pulled the pin on the limestone train that had strained her drawbar since Salida, dropped her fire, and died.

 

There would be no reprieve, nor quarter given.

 

Nor would they suffer the indignation of neglect and graffiti in some city park, a proverbial Prometheus chained to a short stretch of going-nowhere track until the city council---save for the lone railfan member---deemed it had reached the level of ‘eyesore,’ and sent it off to be melted down into nails or razor blades.

 

The pigeons would find someplace else to roost.

 

But here, on the southbound downgrade at Monument, Colorado, Man’s machines still defy gravity and the elements as an SD70ACe of BNSF heritage noses out onto the old Rio Grande girder bridge with 110 cars of Powder River coal pushing it downhill towards Texas, dynamic brakes whining as the A/C traction motors in her HTCR trucks send current to the resistors in the grid housing, turning them nearly red hot as the fans struggle to dissipate the heat; no plume of spent bituminous to cloud the sky over the Palmer Divide, no moaning steam whistle to clear the track ahead, and no flailing rods as her front truck articulates through the curves on her way down to The Springs---

 

Just brute power designed to do an age-old job in a modern socio-economic environment.

 

And in that, it does it well.

 

Perhaps, for Wall Street’s intents and purposes, the Rio Grande is dead, its trademark being closely guarded by factions in Omaha.

 

But, to the faithful---

 

Those who are led by the ghosts of Kindig and LeMassena and Perry to rise early and stand amid the conifers and sage as the sun peeks over a Rocky Mountain ridgeline to light up a perfect Colorado morning---

 

This will always be Rio Grande Country.

 

Dare tell them otherwise.

 

---RAM

Rick Malo©2025

 

With Mark Cohen.

6:25am, August 16th, 2025.

Monument, Colorado.

 

Asphalt (US Listeni/ˈæsfɔːlt/ or UK /ˈæsfælt/,[1][2] occasionally /ˈæʃfɔːlt/), also known as bitumen (US /bɪˈtjuːmən, baɪ-/,[3][4] UK /ˈbɪtjᵿmən/[5]) is a sticky, black and highly viscous liquid or semi-solid form of petroleum. It may be found in natural deposits or may be a refined product; it is a substance classed as a pitch. Until the 20th century, the term asphaltum was also used.[6] The word is derived from the Ancient Greek ἄσφαλτος ásphaltos.[7]

 

The primary use (70%) of asphalt/bitumen is in road construction, where it is used as the glue or binder mixed with aggregate particles to create asphalt concrete. Its other main uses are for bituminous waterproofing products, including production of roofing felt and for sealing flat roofs.[8]

 

source: wikipedia

Achaemenid Empire, Persepolis, from Palace of Darius or Xerxes, ca 490-470 BC. Bituminous limestone. Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Is an island country in the Caribbean. It consists of the island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city.

Cuba is home to over 11 million people and is the most populous insular nation in the Caribbean. Its people, culture, and customs draw from diverse sources, including the aboriginal Taíno and Ciboney peoples; the period of Spanish colonialism; the introduction of African slaves; and its proximity to the United States.

 

Etymology

The name "Cuba" comes from the Taíno language and though the exact meaning is unclear, it may be translated either as "where fertile land is abundant" (cubao), or as "great place" (coabana). It is also said that Cuba shares the same Arabic root word "Ka'bah." meaning "Shrine". Another claim states that the name "Cuba" was given by Columbus after the ancient town of Cuba in the district of Beja in Portugal.

 

History

Pre-Columbian Era

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the island was inhabited by Native American peoples known as the Taíno and Ciboney whose ancestors migrated from the mainland of North, Central and South America several centuries earlier. The Taíno were farmers and the Ciboney were farmers and hunter-gatherers; some have suggested that copper trade was significant, and mainland artifacts have been found.

 

Spanish colonization

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed near what is now Baracoa, claimed the island for the new Kingdom of Spain, and named Isla Juana after Juan, Prince of Asturias. In 1511, the first Spanish settlement was founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar at Baracoa; other towns soon followed including the future capital, San Cristobal de la Habana, founded in 1515. The Spanish enslaved the approximately 100,000 indigenous people who resisted conversion to Christianity, setting them primarily to the task of searching for gold, and within a century European infectious diseases had virtually wiped out the indigenous people.

 

Cuba remained a Spanish possession for almost 400 years (1511–1898), with an economy based on plantations agriculture, mining and the export of sugar, coffee and tobacco to Europe and later to North America. The work was done primarily by African slaves brought to the island when Britain owned it in 1762. The small land-owning elite of Spanish settlers held social and economic power, supported by a population of Spaniards born on the island (Criollos), other Europeans, and African-descended slaves.

 

Independence wars

In the 1820s, when the rest of Spain's empire in Latin America rebelled and formed independent states, Cuba remained loyal, although there was some agitation for independence, leading the Spanish Crown to give it the motto "La Siempre Fidelísima Isla" ("The Always Most Faithful Island"). This loyalty was due partly to Cuban settlers' dependence on Spain for trade, protection from pirates, protection against a slave rebellion, and partly because they feared the rising power of the United States more than they disliked Spanish rule.

 

The Ten Years' War

Independence from Spain was the motive for a rebellion in 1868 led by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, resulting in a prolonged conflict known as the Ten Years' War. The U.S. declined to recognize the new Cuban government, though many European and Latin American nations had done so. In 1878, the Pact of Zanjón ended the conflict, with Spain promising greater autonomy to Cuba. In 1879–1880, Cuban patriot Calixto Garcia attempted to start another war, known as the Little War, but received little support.

The period between wars

Slavery was abolished in 1886, although the African-descended minority remained socially and economically oppressed.[citation needed] During this period, rural poverty in Spain provoked by the Spanish Revolution of 1868 and its aftermath led to increased Spanish emigration to Cuba.

During the 1890s, pro-independence agitation was revived in part by resentment of the restrictions imposed on Cuban trade by Spain and hostility to Spain's increasingly oppressive and incompetent administration of Cuba.[citation needed] Few of Spain's promises for economic reform in the Pact of Zanjón were kept.

 

The War of '95

In 1892, an exiled dissident, José Martí, founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York, with the aim of achieving Cuban independence. In January 1895, Martí travelled to Montecristi, Santo Domingo to join the efforts of Máximo Gómez. Martí wrote down his political views in the Manifesto of Montecristi. Fighting against the Spanish army began in Cuba on 24 February 1895, but Martí was unable to reach Cuba until 11 April 1895. Martí was killed on 19 May 1895, in the battle of Dos Rios. His death immortalized him and he has become Cuba's national hero.

Around 200,000 Spanish troops outnumbered the much smaller rebel army which relied mostly on guerrilla and sabotage tactics. The Spaniards began a campaign of suppression. General Valeriano Weyler, military governor of Cuba, herded the rural population into what he called reconcentrados, described by international observers as "fortified towns". These are often considered the prototype for 20th-century concentration camps. Between 200,000 and 400,000 Cuban civilians died from starvation and disease in the camps, numbers verified by the Red Cross and U.S. Senator (and former Secretary of War) Redfield Proctor. U.S. and European protests against Spanish conduct on the island followed.

The Spanish-American War

The U.S. battleship Maine arrived in Havana on 25 January 1898 to offer protection to the 8,000 American residents on the island; but the Spanish saw this as intimidation. On the evening of 15 February 1898, the Maine blew up in the harbor, killing 252 crew that night; another 8 died of their wounds in hospital over the next few days. A Naval Board of Inquiry, headed by Captain William Sampson, was appointed to investigate the cause of the explosion on the Maine. Having examined the wreck and taken testimony from eyewitnesses and experts, the board reported on 21 March 1898, that the Maine had been destroyed by "a double magazine set off from the exterior of the ship, which could only have been produced by a mine".

The facts remain disputed today, although an investigation by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover in 1976 established that the blast was most likely a large internal explosion, caused by spontaneous combustion in inadequately ventilated bituminous coal which ignited gunpowder in an adjacent magazine. The board was unable to fix the responsibility for the disaster, but a furious American populace, fueled by an active press—notably the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst—concluded that the Spanish were to blame and demanded action. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution calling for intervention, and President William McKinley complied. Spain and the U.S. declared war on each other in late April.

 

Modern history

After the Spanish-American War, Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris (1898), by which Spain ceded Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to the U.S. for the sum of $20 million. Under the same treaty, Spain relinquished all claim of sovereignty over the title to Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt, who had fought in the Spanish-American War and had some sympathies with the independence movement, succeeded McKinley as U.S. President in 1901 and abandoned the 20-year treaty proposal. Instead, Cuba gained formal independence from the U.S. on May 20, 1902 as the Republic of Cuba. But under Cuba's new constitution, the U.S. retained the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and to supervise its finances and foreign relations. Under the Platt Amendment, the U.S. leased the Guantánamo Bay naval base from Cuba.

In 1906, following disputed elections, the first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, faced an armed revolt by independence war veterans who defeated the meager government forces. The U.S. intervened by occupying Cuba and named Charles Edward Magoon as Governor for three years. For many years afterwards, Cuban historians attributed Magoon's governorship as having introduced political and social corruption. In 1908, self-government was restored when José Miguel Gómez was elected President, but the U.S. continued intervening in Cuban affairs. In 1912, the Partido Independiente de Color attempted to establish a separate black republic in Oriente Province, but was suppressed by General Monteagudo with considerable bloodshed.

During World War I, Cuba shipped considerable quantities of sugar to Britain, avoiding U-boat attack, by the subterfuge of shipping sugar to Sweden. The Menocal government declared war on Germany very soon after the U.S. did.

Despite frequent outbreaks of disorder, constitutional government was maintained until 1930, when Gerardo Machado y Morales suspended the constitution. During Machado's tenure, a nationalistic economic program was pursued with several major national development projects undertaken, including Carretera Central and El Capitolio. Machado's hold on power was weakened following a decline in demand for exported agricultural produce due to the Great Depression, and to attacks first by independence war veterans, and later by covert terrorist organizations, principally the ABC.

During a general strike in which the Communist Party sided with Machado, the senior elements of the Cuban army forced Machado into exile and installed Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada, son of Cuba's founding father (Carlos Manuel de Céspedes), as President. During September 4–5, 1933 a second coup overthrew Céspedes, leading to the formation of the first Ramón Grau government. Notable events in this violent period include the separate sieges of Hotel Nacional de Cuba and Atares Castle. This government lasted 100 days but engineered radical socialist changes in Cuban society and a rejection of the Platt amendment. In 1934, Fulgencio Batista and the army replaced Grau with Carlos Mendieta.

Batista was finally elected as President democratically in the elections of 1940, and his administration carried out major social reforms. Several members of the Communist Party held office under his administration. Batista's administration formally took Cuba to the Allies of World War II camp in the World War II, declaring war on Japan on December 9, 1941, then on Germany and Italy on December 11, 1941. Cuba was not greatly involved in combat during World War II.

Ramón Grau won the 1944 elections. Carlos Prío Socarrás won the 1948 elections. The influx of investment fueled a boom which did much to raise living standards across the board and create a prosperous middle class in most urban areas, although the gap between rich and poor became wider and more obvious.

The 1952 election was a three-way race. Roberto Agramonte of the Ortodoxos party led in all the polls, followed by Dr Aurelio Hevia of the Auténtico party, and Batista as a distant third, seeking a return to office. Both Agramonte and Hevia had decided to name Col. Ramón Barquín to head the Cuban armed forces after the elections. Barquín, then a diplomat in Washington, DC, was a top officer, respected by the professional army, and had promised to eliminate corruption in the ranks. Batista feared that Barquín would oust him and his followers, and when it became apparent that Batista had little chance of winning, he staged a coup on March 10, 1952 and held power with the backing of a nationalist section of the army as a "provisional president" for the next two years.

Justo Carrillo told Barquín in Washington in March 1952 that the inner circles knew that Batista had aimed the coup at him; they immediately began to conspire to oust Batista and restore democracy and civilian government in what was later dubbed La Conspiracion de los Puros de 1956 (Agrupacion Montecristi). In 1954, Batista agreed to elections. The Partido Auténtico put forward ex-President Grau as their candidate, but he withdrew amid allegations that Batista was rigging the elections in advance.

In April 1956, Batista ordered Barquín to become General and chief of the army. But Barquín decided to move forward with his coup to secure total power. On April 4, 1956, a coup by hundreds of career officers led by Barquín was frustrated by Rios Morejon. The coup broke the backbone of the Cuban armed forces. The officers were sentenced to the maximum terms allowed by Cuban Martial Law. Barquín was sentenced to solitary confinement for eight years. La Conspiración de los Puros resulted in the imprisonment of the commanders of the armed forces and the closing of the military academies.

Cuba had Latin America's highest per capita consumption rates of meat, vegetables, cereals, automobiles, telephones and radios. In 1958, Cuba was a relatively well-advanced country, certainly by Latin American standards, and in some cases by world standards. Cuban workers enjoyed some of the highest wages in the world. Cuba attracted more immigrants, primarily from Europe, as a percentage of population than the US. The United Nations noted Cuba for its large middle class. On the other hand, Cuba was affected by perhaps the largest labor union privileges in Latin America, including bans on dismissals and mechanization. They were obtained in large measure "at the cost of the unemployed and the peasants", leading to disparities.

Between 1933 and 1958, Cuba extended economic regulations enormously, causing economic problems. Unemployment became relatively large; graduates entering the workforce could not find jobs. The middle class, which compared Cuba to the United States, became increasingly dissatisfied with the unemployment, while labor unions supported Batista until the very end.

 

Cuban Revolution

Main article: Cuban Revolution

On December 2, 1956 a party of 82 people, led by Fidel Castro in a small boat, the Granma, landed on the shore of Cuba with the intention of establishing an armed resistance movement in the Sierra Maestra. While facing armed resistance from these rebels in the mountains, the Batista regime was weakened and crippled by a United States arms embargo imposed on March 14, 1958. By late 1958, the rebels broke out of the Sierra Maestra and launched a general, popular insurrection. After the fighters captured Santa Clara, Batista dramatically fled from Havana on January 1, 1959 to exile in Portugal. Barquín negotiated the symbolic change of command between Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara, Raúl Castro and his brother Fidel Castro after the Supreme Court decided that the Revolution was the source of law and its representative should assume command.

Castro's forces entered the capital on January 8, 1959. Shortly afterwards, a liberal lawyer, Dr Manuel Urrutia Lleó became president. He was backed by Castro's 26th of July Movement because they believed his appointment would be welcomed by the United States. Disagreements within the government culminated in Urrutia's resignation in July 1959. He was replaced by Osvaldo Dorticós who served as president until 1976. Castro became prime minister in February 1959, succeeding José Miró in that post.

In its first year, the new revolutionary government expropriated private property with little or no compensation, nationalised public utilities, tightened controls on the private sector and closed down the mafia-controlled gambling industry. The CIA conspired with the Chicago mafia in 1960 and 1961 to assassinate Fidel Castro, according to documents declassified in 2007.

Some of these measures were undertaken by Fidel Castro's government in the name of the program outlined in the Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra, while in the Sierra Maestra. The government nationalized private property totaling about $25 billion US dollars, of which American property made up only over US $1.0 billions.

By the end of 1960, all opposition newspapers had been closed down, and all radio and television stations were in state control. Moderates, teachers and professors were purged. In any year, about 20,000 dissenters were held and tortured under inhumane prison conditions. Homosexuals and other unfortunates were locked up in internment camps in the 1960s, where they were subject to medical-political "re-education". One estimate is that 15,000 to 17,000 people were executed.

The Communist Party strengthened its one-party rule, with Castro as supreme leader. Fidel's brother, Raúl Castro, became the army chief. Loyalty to Castro became the primary criterion for all appointments. In September 1960, the regime created a system known as Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), which provided neighborhood spying.

In the 1961 New Year's Day parade, the administration exhibited Soviet tanks and other weapons. Eventually, the tiny island nation built up the second largest armed forces in Latin America, second only to Brazil. Cuba became a privileged client-state of the Soviet Union.

By 1961, hundreds of thousands of Cubans had left for the United States. The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion (La Batalla de Girón) was an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban government by a U.S.-trained force of Cuban exiles with U.S. military support. The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F. Kennedy became the U.S. President. The Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by Eastern Bloc nations, defeated the exiles in three days. The bad Cuban-American relations were exacerbated the following year by the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Kennedy administration demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet missiles placed in Cuba, which was a response to U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey and the Middle East.

The Soviets and Americans soon agreed on the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and American missiles secretly from Turkey and the Middle East within a few months. Kennedy also agreed not to invade Cuba in the future. Cuban exiles captured during the Bay of Pigs Invasion were exchanged for a shipment of supplies from America. By 1963, Cuba was moving towards a full-fledged Communist system modeled on the USSR. The U.S. imposed a complete diplomatic and commercial embargo on Cuba and began Operation Mongoose.

In 1965, Castro merged his revolutionary organizations with the Communist Party, of which he became First Secretary, and Blas Roca became Second Secretary. Roca was succeeded by Raúl Castro, who, as Defense Minister and Fidel's closest confidant, became and has remained the second most powerful figure in Cuba. Raúl's position was strengthened by the departure of Che Guevara to launch unsuccessful insurrections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967.

During the 1970s, Castro dispatched tens of thousands troops in support of Soviet-supported wars in Africa, particularly the MPLA in Angola and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. The standard of living in 1970s was "extremely spartan" and discontent was rife. Fidel Castro admitted the failures of economic policies in a 1970 speech. By the mid-1970s, Castro started economic reforms.

Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1962 in support of the U.S. embargo, but in 1975 the OAS lifted all sanctions against Cuba and both Mexico and Canada broke ranks with the US by developing closer relations with Cuba.[citation needed] On 3 June 2009, the OAS adopted a contentious resolution to end the 47-year exclusion of Cuba, but the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton walked out in protest as the resolution was being drafted. Cuban leaders have repeatedly announced they are not interested in rejoining the OAS.

As of 2002, some 1.2 million persons of Cuban background (about 10% of the current population of Cuba) reside in the U.S., Many of them left the island for the U.S., often by sea in small boats and fragile rafts. On 6 April 1980, 10,000 Cubans stormed the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking political asylum. The following day, the Cuban government granted permission for the emigration of Cubans seeking refuge in the Peruvian embassy. On 16 April, 500 Cubans left the Peruvian Embassy for Costa Rica. On 21 April, many of those Cubans started arriving in Miami via private boats and were halted by the U.S. State Department, but the emigration continued, because Castro allowed anyone who desired to leave the country to do so through the port of Mariel. Over 125,000 Cubans emigrated to the U.S. before the flow of vessels ended on 15 June.

Castro's rule was severely tested in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse (known in Cuba as the Special Period). The food shortages were similar to North Korea; priority was given to the elite classes and the military, while ordinary people had little to eat. The regime did not accept American donations of food, medicines and cash until 1993. On 5 August 1994, state security dispersed protesters in a spontaneous popular uprising in Havana.

Cuba has found a new source of aid and support in the People's Republic of China, and new allies in Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela and Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, both major oil and gas exporters. In 2003, the regime arrested and imprisoned a large number of civil activists, a period known as the "Black Spring".

On July 31, 2006 Fidel Castro temporarily delegated his major duties to his brother, First Vice President, Raúl Castro, while Fidel recovered from surgery for an "acute intestinal crisis with sustained bleeding". On 2 December 2006, Fidel was too ill to attend the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Granma boat landing, fuelling speculation that he had stomach cancer, although there was evidence his illness was a digestive problem and not terminal.

In January 2008, footage was released of Fidel meeting Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, in which Castro "appeared frail but stronger than three months ago".[citation needed] In February 2008, Fidel announced his resignation as President of Cuba, and on 24 February Raúl was elected as the new President. In his acceptance speech, Raúl promised that some of the restrictions that limit Cubans' daily lives would be removed. In March 2009, Raúl Castro purged some of Fidel's officials.

 

Geography

Cuba is an archipelago of islands located in the northern Caribbean Sea at the confluence with the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. The United States lies to the north-west, the Bahamas to the north, Haiti to the east, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands to the south, and Mexico to the west. Cuba is the principal island, surrounded by four smaller groups of islands: the Colorados Archipelago on the northwestern coast, the Sabana-Camagüey Archipelago on the north-central Atlantic coast, the Jardines de la Reina on the south-central coast and the Canarreos Archipelago on the southwestern coast.

The main island is 1,199 km (745 mi) long, constituting most of the nation's land area (105,006 km2 (40,543 sq mi)) and is the 16th-largest island in the world by land area. The main island consists mostly of flat to rolling plains apart from the Sierra Maestra mountains in the southeast, whose highest point is Pico Turquino (1,975 m (6,480 ft)). The second-largest island is Isla de la Juventud (Isle of Youth) in the Canarreos archipelago, with an area of 3,056 km2 (1,180 sq mi). Cuba has a total land area of 110,860 km2 (42,803 sq mi).

The local climate is tropical, though moderated by northeasterly trade winds that blow year-round. In general (with local variations), there is a drier season from November to April, and a rainier season from May to October. The average temperature is 21 °C (70 °F) in January and 27 °C (81 °F) in July. The warm temperatures of the Caribbean Sea and the fact that Cuba sits across the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico combine to make the country prone to frequent hurricanes. These are most common in September and October.

The most important mineral resource is nickel, of which Cuba has the world's second largest reserves after Russia. A Canadian energy company operates a large nickel mining facility in Moa. Cuba is also the world's fifth-largest producer of refined cobalt, a byproduct of nickel mining operations. Recent oil exploration has revealed that the North Cuba Basin could produce approximately 4.6 billion barrels (730,000,000 m3) to 9.3 billion barrels (1.48×109 m3) of oil. In 2006, Cuba started to test-drill these locations for possible exploitation.

 

Other info

Oficial Name:

Republica de Cuba

 

Independence:

Declaredc October 10, 1868

- Republic declared May 20, 1902

- Cuban Revolution January 1, 1959

 

Area:

110.860 km2

 

Inhabitants:

12.500.000

 

Languages:

Lucumi [luq] Classification: Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Defoid, Yoruboid, Edekiri

More information.

 

Spanish [spa] 10,000,000 in Cuba (1995). Classification: Indo-European, Italic, Romance, Italo-Western, Western, Gallo-Iberian, Ibero-Romance, West Iberian, Castilian

 

Capital city:

La Habana

 

Meaning country name:

From Taíno Indian Cubanacan — "centre place". In Portugal, some believe that the name echoes that of the Portuguese town of Cuba, speculating that Christopher Columbus provided a link. In portuguese and spanish, the word "cuba" refers to the barrels used to hold beverages.

 

Description Flag:

The official version of the Cuban government about the meaning of the shapes and colors of the cuban flag says that the blue stripes refer to the three old divisions of the island, the two white to the strength of the independentist ideal, the red triangle stands for equality, fraternity and freedom as well as for the blood split in the strugle for independence and the lone star symbolizes the absolute freedom among the peoples

 

Coat of arms:

The Cuban Coat of Arms is the official heraldic symbol of Cuba. It consists of a shield, crowned by the Phrygian Cap, all supported by an oak branch on one side and a laurel wreath on the other. The coat of arms was created by Miguel de Teurbe Tolon and was adopted on April 24, 1906.

Shield

The shield is divided in a three parts:

In the chief, a key charging a blue sea between two rocks, symbolizing Cuba’s geographical position as the key to the Gulf of Mexico, with a bright rising sun in the background, which represents the rising new republic.

In the division located to the viewer's left (dexter) are three dark blue stripes (bend sinister) on a light blue background, representing the three departments which divide the island: Oriental, Central y Occidental (the Eastern, Central and Western).

In the division toward the viewer's right (sinister), a heraldic landscape consisting of mountains, green vegetation and a royal palm, the national tree of Cuba, representing the rich soil of Cuba.

Supporters

The shield is supported by an oak branch on one side and a laurel wreath on the other. The oak branch symbolizes the strength of the nation; and the laurel wreath: honour and glory. These symbols were meant to represent the rights of man: Equality, Liberty and Fraternity.

Helm/crest

The Phrygian Cap (Gorro Frigio) or liberty cap that has a sole star, and serves as a crown symbolizing liberty, and the sole star stands for independence.

Official description

"The National coat of arms represents our island. It is shaped like a pointed leather shield, and divided into three sections. In its horizontal upper part, there is a golden key between two mountains, and a sun rising over the sea - which symbolises the position of Cuba in the Gulf, between the two Americas, amidst the emergence of a new state. The blue and white stripes, down the left hand side, represent the situation of the island, in terms of its division into states, in the colonial period. Down the right hand side, a Cuban country scene is dominated by a royal palm tree - the symbol of the unbreakable character of the Cuban people."

 

Motto:

" Patria O Muerte "

 

National Anthem: La Bayamesa

 

Spanish Lyrics

 

Al combate, corred, Bayameses,

Que la Patria os contempla orgullosa;

No temáis una muerte gloriosa,

Que morir por la Patria es vivir.

 

En cadenas vivir, es morir

En afrenta y oprobio sumido;

Del clarín escuchad el sonido;

¡A las armas, valientes, corred!

 

English translation

 

Hasten to battle, men of Bayamo!

The fatherland looks proudly to you;

Do not fear a glorious death,

Because to die for the fatherland is to live.

 

To live in chains is to live

In dishonour and ignominy,

Hear the clarion's call;

Hasten, brave ones, to battle!

 

eng | arg | ast | cat | dan | fra | frp | glg | hau | ina | ita | jnf | lat | lld | nah | nld | nor | oci | por | roh | ron | rup | spa | srd | swa | wln: Cuba

afr | aym | bre | ces | cor | dsb | eus | fao | fry | hrv | hsb | hun | ind | jav | lav | lin | lit | mlt | nov | pap | pol | que | slk | slv | sme | smg | sqi | swe | szl | tet | tgl | zza: Kuba

aze | bos | crh | kaa | slo | tuk | uzb: Kuba / Куба

est | fin | som | vor | yua: Kuuba

deu | ltz | nds: Kuba / Kuba

hat | kin | run: Kiba

smo | ton: Kiupa

bam: Kiba

cym: Ciwba

epo: Kubo

fur: Cube

gla: Cùba

gle: Cúba / Cúba

glv: Yn Choobey

grn: Kuva

ibo: Kiuba

isl: Kúba

kab: Kuba / ⴽⵓⴱⴰ

kmr: Kûba / Куба / کووبا

kur: Kuba / کوبا ; Kûba / کووبا

mlg: Kioba

mol: Cuba / Куба

msa: Cuba / كوبا

nrm: Tchuba

rmy: Kuba / कुबा

scn: Cubba

tur: Küba

vie: Cu Ba

vol: Kubeän

wol: Kubaa

abq | alt | bul | che | kjh | kom | krc | kum | mhr | mkd | rus | sah | tyv | udm | ukr: Куба (Kuba)

bak | bel | srp | tat: Куба / Kuba

chv: Кубӑ (Kubă)

kaz: Куба / Kwba / كۋبا

kbd: Кубэ (Kubă)

kir: Куба / كۇبا (Kuba)

mon: Куб (Kub)

oss: Кубӕ (Kubä)

tgk: Куба / کوبه / Kuba

ara: كوبا (Kūbā)

fas: کوبا / Kubâ

prs: کیوبا (Kyūbā)

pus: کيوبا (Kyūbā); کوبا (Kūbā)

uig: كۇبا / Kuba / Куба

urd: کیوبا (Kyūbā)

div: ކިއުބާ (Kiubā)

heb: קובה (Qûbah)

lad: קובה / Kuba

yid: קובאַ (Kuba)

amh: ኩባ (Kuba)

ell-dhi: Κούβα (Koýva)

ell-kat: Κοῦβα (Koỹva)

hye: Կուբա (Kouba)

kat | lzz | xmf: კუბა (Kuba)

hin: क्यूबा (Kyūbā); कूबा (Kūbā); क्योबा (Kyobā)

ben: কিউবা (Kiubā); কুবা (Kubā)

guj: ક્યુબા (Kyubā)

ori: କ୍ୟୁବା (Kyubā)

pan: ਕਿਊਬਾ (Kiūbā)

sin: කියුබාව (Kiyubāva)

kan: ಕ್ಯೂಬ (Kyūba)

mal: ക്യൂബ (Kyūba)

tam: கியூபா (Kiyūpā)

tel: క్యూబా (Kyūbā)

zho: 古巴 (Gǔbā)

yue: 古巴 (Gúbā)

jpn: キューバ (Kyūba)

kor: 쿠바 (Kuba)

bod: ཀུ་བ། (Ku.ba)

dzo: ཀིའུ་སྦ། (Ki'u.sba)

mya: က္ယူးဘား (Kyùbʰà)

tha: คิวบา (Kʰiwbā)

lao: ກຸບາ (Kubā)

khm: គុយបា (Kuybā)

 

Y Bont Aur, Ynyscewny Tin Plate Works, Ystradgylais

 

These striking arches are known locally as Y Bont Aur - or the Golden Bridge, and are all that remain of the Ynyscedwyn Iron Works. There is evidence that a charcoal furnace was working here from the early 17th century (1600s), By 1788 bituminous coal was being brought up from Swansea to fuel the furnaces, helping to increase output to 800 tons a year. By 1798 the Swansea Canal opened increasing the supply of coal, lime and iron ore. Ynyscewyn Ironworks and several local collieries were then owned by the Gough family

 

From 1823-1846 the ironworks was leased to George Crane, during his time in control David Thomas was the ironworks superintendent, Thomas strived to perfect a way of smelting with the use of anthracite coal, a feat that had never been achieved before, as anthracite (the local Coal), was to hard to burn well in a hot blast furnace. On the 5th February 1837 he succeeded which was an achievement of national and international significance. In 1839 David Thomas emigrated to the United States as most of US coal reserves are of anthracite Thomas's invention revolutionised US iron production.

 

Ynyscedwyn ironworks decline after the death of George Crane and was reduced to working intermittently during the 1870s. In 1872 work began a new iron mill, but was stopped due to the collapse of the iron industry. The Bont Aur were part of the unfinished works. In 1889, the Ynyscedwyn Tin Plate Works were constructed on the ironworks site. Production continued there until halted during the second world war never to reopen. The Industrial remains were cleared during the 1970s making way for the new Ystradgynlais Hospital, with the arches remaining of a lasting reminder of the industrial heritage of the site.

 

Diolch am 87,863,136 o olygfeydd anhygoel, mae pob un yn 90cael ei werthfawrogi'n fawr.

 

Thanks for 87,863,136 amazing views, every one is greatly appreciated.

 

Diolch am 87,863,136 o olygfeydd anhygoel, mae pob un yn 90cael ei werthfawrogi'n fawr.

 

Thanks for 87,863,136 amazing views, every one is greatly appreciated.

 

Shot 01.10.2021 at Ystradgynlais, Cymru Ref. 121-468