Why Was the Mine at Fourmile, Kentucky Sealed for Three Years?
The film of this episode premieres October 22, 2026 on YouTube. The documents, the transcript and the sources are below now.
At about 8:20 in the morning on December 26, 1945 — the day after Christmas — the Belva No. 1 mine of the Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company blew up at Fourmile, Bell County, Kentucky. Thirty-one men were underground. Twenty-five of them died.
Transcript
The tipple
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Twenty men were still inside this Kentucky mine when this picture was taken.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
They had been in there eight months. They would be in there two years more.
Fourmile, Bell County. The mine blew up the morning after Christmas, nineteen forty-five.
And the report on it turns on one sentence. Kentucky rated this mine nongassy.
Four federal inspections found gas in it, said so in writing, and nothing happened.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The photographs are from the following September, by a photographer the federal government sent to look at coal camps.
What four inspections found
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The Belva Number One, owned by the Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, six miles north-west of Pineville, on a branch of the Louisville and Nashville.
The report names four operating officials. President and superintendent are both W. E. Lewis, father and son.
After the fourth name, the mine foreman's, one word has already been added. Deceased.
The report quotes the last of those inspections directly. The air arriving at the intake was adequate for the needs of the mine, it says. If directed properly to the working faces.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
It was not. Air leaked through wooden walls, the airways were partly blocked by roof falls, and doors were hung singly instead of in pairs, so opening one short-circuited the ventilation.
And a number in the same passage tells you how the mine was run. Since the last inspection the company had built two hundred and eighty-five new walls underground to replace defective ones. All of them were wood.
No fire boss was employed to walk the mine before a shift went in. Mine officials carried a flame safety lamp, the report says, except infrequently.
All four federal inspections had recommended that the mine be rated and operated as a gassy mine, and that a fire boss examine it for gas within three hours before the men began work.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The Bureau of Mines could inspect. Under the law as it then stood, it could not make anyone act on what it found.
Smoking was permitted in the mine. That is the entire sentence.
No employee had been trained in mine rescue. The company kept no breathing apparatus and no gas masks. The nearest belonged to another company, at Kettle Island, fourteen miles off.
It then lists the explosions in nearby mines in the same coal bed. Six men at Pineville in twenty-two. One at Kettle Island in twenty- seven. Sixteen at Kettle Island in nineteen thirty.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Kettle Island is where the rescue equipment was kept. It was kept there because sixteen men had died there fifteen years before.
The morning after Christmas
Nobody had been inside the mine since two in the morning on Sunday the twenty-third of December. The man-trip went in at two minutes past seven on Wednesday the twenty-sixth.
Contrary to custom, the report says, the main fan was shut off from two on the morning of the twenty-third until six on Christmas evening. The booster fan stayed off until Wednesday.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Sixty-four hours with no ventilation, and no one examined the mine before the men went in, because there was nobody whose job that was.
At twenty past eight the assistant electrician was going to reset a breaker for the second time when he saw a cloud of smoke and dust rolling out of the haulage portal.
Thirty-one men were in the mine, two of them borrowed from the company's other workings. Eighteen were killed almost at once. Four more died about seven hours later of afterdamp.
Filed with the report are Bureau memoranda with the newspapers pasted to them. The first is from the day after. Hope flickers for fifty caught in mine blast.
Fifty-four hours
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The fan was reversed to exhaust by half past twelve. Crews rebuilt the walls the blast had destroyed, pushing air ahead of themselves a few hundred feet at a time.
On the twenty-eighth a party found several sets of footprints, advancing and retreating. Then a board with writing on it in chalk, saying nine men were in five left.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Further in, a second marker told them which working place. When they opened what the report calls a poorly constructed barricade, they could see a lighted cap lamp ahead of them.
The barricade was built, the report says, principally of an old mine door.
Two of the men described how. Turned back by smoke, they crawled along the rail to clear air, then spent two hours looking for a way through to the next section. Every opening was caved tight.
Then all but one of them lay down on the mine floor with their faces as close to the floor as they could get, because the bad air sits higher.
The two survivors both thought everyone in that place was still conscious at nine o'clock on the morning of the twenty-eighth, and that after that they lost consciousness one at a time.
In another section, four loaders were cut off by smoke and heat. They went back toward the face, and for several hours they wrote the time on the rails.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The last time written on the rail is two in the afternoon. On boards nearby, other men had dated notes half past ten. Those four were asphyxiated.
They were reached about half past one that afternoon, all unconscious. Stretcher crews carried them more than half a mile, over rock falls, under roof so low the bearers stooped.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Six of the nine lived. One was already dead when they got there. One died in hospital two days later, and one died several months after he was carried out.
Sealed
The last clipping in the file is from the Charleston Daily Mail. Crews enter burning mine for gas test. Results may cause rescuers to abandon search for twenty men.
On the thirtieth the methane in the return started climbing. At a quarter past one it read one percent, with very dense smoke, and everyone was pulled back.
That night the Chief of the Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals called a conference. Every leader who had been underground said the same two things. There could be no survivors. It was too dangerous to go on. The next morning he ordered the mine sealed.
Then a paragraph that is easy to read past. Very little labour was available on the second of January. Men would work a short while and wander off the job. By five o'clock they had all gone.
The next day was the same, and a crew from another company finished it. The seals were boards an inch thick, plastered with wood fibre, closed at half past four on the third of January.
September, nineteen forty-six
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Twenty men were on the far side of those seals. Eight months later a photographer walked into the camp and made this picture.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Mrs. Tommy Fisher's husband was killed in the explosion. She had received no compensation, and was staying on until there was some settlement. The company had given her seventy dollars since January, in scrip and in cash.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Mrs. Leanore Miller, widow of a miner, under a picture of her husband on a wall papered with newspaper. She said: there's more widows and orphans in this holler than men at work.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
This house belongs to W. H. Lawson, who worked in the mines for sixty years. He gets no pension from the company. He is allowed to live here rent free.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He was ninety-seven. The caption lists what the mines did to him: a broken leg, both hips out of place, a smashed skull, three ruptures.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He draws a state old age pension, and he makes bread pans out of sheet steel salvaged off the mine dump.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
And one caption puts three generations into a single sentence, written from the point of view of Lawson's grandson. His grandfather was a miner for sixty years. His father is a miner now unable to work.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
That father is Charlie Lingar, and his name is in the report. He is listening to a battery radio with his son.
The casualty list has three parts: removed from the mine dead, rescued but died later, and rescued. Charles Lingar, Fourmile, Bell County, Kentucky, age thirty, dependents five, occupation coupler, is in the third part.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
He came out of that barricade alive. Fourteen years with the company, and nine months later he still could not work.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The house is three rooms at six dollars seventy-five a month. No running water, no toilet, no electricity.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Mrs. Edna Lingar got her wash water here. The photographer wrote down what was in it. Stock wade it. Privies drain into it. A dead animal lay fifteen feet upstream of where she was standing.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Then she washed.
What the rent bought
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Oliver Hinkle had been disabled fifteen months with a crushed ankle.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Monroe Jones, his wife and five children. Four rooms, nine dollars a month. The company, they said, hasn't ever done anything to the houses, and gets mad if you ask them.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
This doorway has no door. In winter they hang a quilt across it.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
These windows have no panes. Old quilts and boxes go in them when it turns cold.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Theo Sizemore paid nine dollars too. The company put in a window about two years ago, he said. That's all they've done to the house.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Nobody in this camp was working at this mine, because this mine was sealed.
The school
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
There were fifty-four children in the primer class and the first grade.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Forty-seven more, in the second, third and fourth grades, were in another room with another teacher.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The drinking water at the school came out of an open bucket.
The doctor
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Doctor Pierce Martin, the company doctor, visiting Ed La Rossett, whose back was broken five years ago in a slate fall.
One valley over
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
A few miles away is Cary, where the mine had already closed and the company had already gone.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Three rooms here, at four dollars a month. Eight people live in them — four adults and four children.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
At Arjay, this was the only approved water in the camp. A spring at the far end had been condemned by the health officer, but nobody put a sign on it, so families nearer the spring kept using it.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
At Blanche, Oscar Powers was asked what it would take to get his house repaired. These men here are nice talking men, he said, but they won't put out any money. Chin music, I say.
What the report concluded
The Bureau's finding is four lines long. The disaster was caused by the ignition of an accumulation of methane, which in turn ignited coal dust.
The gas gathered because of defective ventilation and unsafe practices. The flame ran through the mine because the mine was not rock-dusted. And the gas caught because open flame was never kept away from the faces.
On the rock dust it says plainly what it would have bought. Proper rock-dusting would have confined the explosion to a small area, and probably the loss of life to the four men at the face.
If the loader was attempting to smoke, they wrote, he was not violating any company rule, or State mining law, but on the contrary was a victim of the mining conditions and practices which were allowed to exist in this mine.
The recommendations then begin exactly where the four earlier inspections began. The mine should be rated and operated as a gassy mine.
One more sentence, from the section on property damage. The most serious loss other than the loss of human life, it says, was the loss of production for nearly three years.
Reopening would be hard, it adds. Not for the damage the explosion did, but for the cost of correcting the conditions allowed to develop over the lifetime of the mine.
Appendix E
The last thing in the report is a list. Each man gets a name, a town, an age, an occupation, and one more column.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Dependents. Reed Lawson, thirty-five, six dependents. Delbert Lockard, thirty-three, eight. Harmon Lovell Junior, nineteen years old, six dependents.
Number eighteen. Tom Fisher, Fourmile, Bell County, Kentucky. Age fifty-three. Dependents four. Occupation coal loader. Removed from the mine dead.
That is Mrs. Tommy Fisher's husband, and those are the four.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Add the whole column up. Twenty-five dead men left ninety-seven dependents in one hollow.
October, nineteen forty-eight
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
In August nineteen forty-eight the fan was started and the seals came out. Crews spent seven weeks repairing walls and clearing falls before anyone could reach them.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
On the eighteenth and nineteenth of October they brought out fifteen bodies. Two more came out on the twentieth. The last three came out on the twenty-first. The investigators went down on the twenty- second, the day after, to look at the mine one last time.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
Congress did not give federal inspectors the power to close a mine until nineteen fifty-two. This report was written in the gap.
And the Bureau said so itself, in its annual report for nineteen fifty-one.
The act does not provide any enforcement powers, and therefore compliance with the inspectors' recommendations is not mandatory. It does give Federal coal-mine inspectors the right to enter coal mines for inspection purposes.
The same report explains what an inspector could do instead. He could ask the State mine-inspection agency for its cooperation, because the State generally did have authority to require a hazard be corrected.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
At Belva, the State agency was the one that had rated the mine nongassy.
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Russell Lee · Bell County, Ky., Sept. 1946 · National Archives, RG 245 · AI-colorized. View the original.
The report, the photographs and the list are federal records, all free, and the links are below. If you read one page, read Appendix E. It is only the names, and it is the part that still has arithmetic in it.
Sources
- [S1] *Final Report of Mine Explosion and Fire, Belva No. 1 Mine, Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Fourmile, Bell County, Kentucky, December 26, 1945* — U.S. Bureau of Mines, Jellico, Tenn. office; M. J. Ankeny, M. C. McCall and C. H. Dodge. 40 pp. Federal document, public domain. Scanned by the National Mine Health and Safety Academy. https://web.archive.org/web/20241212022951/https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/1945_Belva.pdf
- [S2] Bureau of Mines office memoranda filed with the report, carrying 1945 newspaper clippings annotated by hand with the paper and the date.
- [S3] *Federal Coal Mine Inspection: A Decade of Progress — Annual Report for Fiscal Year 1951*, Information Circular 7625, U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1951. Federal document, public domain. https://archive.org/details/pub_usgov-bmines-information-circular_7625
- [S4] Russell Lee, photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Bell County, Kentucky, 31 Aug. and 4 Sept. 1946 — National Archives Record Group 245. Federal works, public domain; colorized here by machine. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/541208
- The two halves meet in Appendix E. Lee's caption for [R27] names "Mrs. Tommy Fisher", whose husband "was killed in a mine explosion last December"; entry 18 on the casualty list is Tom Fisher, Fourmile, Bell County, Kentucky, age 53, dependents 4, occupation coal loader, removed from the mine dead. Lee's caption for [R20] names "Charlie Lingar", disabled in the same explosion; the "Rescued" list gives Charles Lingar, Fourmile, age 30, dependents 5, occupation coupler. The report and the photographs were made for the same federal survey nine months apart and neither cites the other.
- Ninety-seven dependents. The episode states a figure the report does not print: it is the sum of the "Dependents" column in Appendix E, read off the page images. The 23 men removed dead: 6, 8, 6, 6, 4, 8, 2, 4, 3, 2, 6, 3, 1, 4, 2, 7, 2, 4, 1, 4, 3, 4, 3 = 93. Plus the two rescued who died later — Bud Towns, 3, and Thomas McQueen, 1 — for 97. Anyone can check it against the same two pages.
- The newspaper clippings are fair use, not public domain. The Office Memorandum forms are federal records; the 1945 *Charleston Gazette* and *Charleston Daily Mail* clippings pasted to them are not, and no renewal check was run. They are cropped to the headline and used as excerpts for comment on what the Bureau of Mines filed. If a takedown ever arrives it will be about these three plates and nothing else on the channel's ladder.
- Names as printed. The narrative section of the report calls the brakeman "Hugh Miller"; Appendix E calls him "Huey Miller". The operating-officials table calls the foreman "Nath Centers"; Appendix E calls him "Nate Centers". The episode uses neither spelling on screen where the report disagrees with itself.
- What the episode does not claim. The report never says the explosion caused the state's February 1946 penal actions against the company, and this episode does not either. (Kentucky did sue Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Co. and its officers in Feb. 1946 for doing business in the state without ever registering as a foreign corporation; the Court of Appeals reversed the $3,000 judgments on venue in *Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Co. v. Commonwealth*, 304 Ky. 247 (1947). Nothing in that opinion mentions the mine disaster, so it is not in the film.)
- Resolution. The report scan is 2550×3300 bitonal at 300 dpi; the photographic masters run 2306–3000 px. Every plate ships at or below 1.11× and the audit is clean.
- The gap the report was written in. The Federal Coal Mine Inspection and Investigation Act of 1941 authorised federal inspection and required the findings to go to the state and the operator. It gave the Bureau of Mines no power to close a mine or to compel compliance; that came with the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act of 1952. The episode says this in general terms and does not put it in the report's mouth.
- Colour. The photographs are black-and-white negatives colorized by machine (DDColor). The episode says so on screen, the description repeats it, and `"synthetic": true` in `upload.json` forces YouTube's altered-content disclosure. The originals are free at the National Archives.