This is Mazon Monday post #311.  What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil?  Tell us at  email:esconi.info@gmail.com.

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Yesterday marked opening day for fossil collecting at the IDNR Mazonia–Braidwood State Fish and Wildlife Area. I hope you were able to make it out… or are planning a trip soon. This is prime season for collecting at Pit 11, the name many collectors still use for Mazonia–Braidwood.

So where does the name “Pit 11” come from? It refers to the eleventh strip mine operated by the Northern Illinois Coal Corporation (NICC, often called “the Northern”). The company ran a series of numbered pits in the Braidwood, Wilmington, and Coal City area from the 1920s through the late 1940s, and the name has stuck with collectors ever since.

In 1949, the Northern Illinois Coal Corporation (NICC) merged with the Sinclair Coal Company, which was later acquired by the Peabody Coal Company in 1955. Pit 11 opened around 1956, and mining continued there until 1974. During its years of operation, the pit produced more than 10 million tons of coal. For more on the final days of Pit 11, see Mazon Monday #282. It was the last of the numbered pits to remain active.

In 1928, the Skinner Brothers operated a slope mine just north of Braidwood. The site lies on land now within the Wilmington Recreation Club, between what was Pits 2 and 3 along present-day Coal City Road. As described in The Braidwood Story (p. 70), “The slope mine ran at a 33-degree angle from the surface to the coal 65 feet below the surface. The slope was about 200 feet long.” Fossils recovered from the Skinner mine were later studied by Dr. Noé and incorporated into his book Pennsylvanian Flora of Northern Illinois (see Mazon Monday #149).

The Skinner Brothers sold their operation to the Northern Illinois Coal Company, which went on to open its first strip mine on May 23, 1928.

Here’s a reprint of an article about that opening in the Chicago Daily News.

ABANDONED COAL MINE REVIVED BY GIGANTIC SHOVEL

BY HARPER LEECH.
Imagine a half completed sky scrap-er come to life and gone to digging into the earth.

That’s the best way to describe what some 1,500 Chicagoans saw yesterday almost in our suburbs–three miles from Wilmington, in commuting distance of the loop, where the Northern Illinois Coal corporation has rejuvenated a dying coal field by modern methods.

A great electric shovel, as big as an eight apartment building, advances Into the earth at a rate of 250 feet per day, cutting to a depth of 30 feet. It’s the biggest machine of the kind ever built and the new mining operation may well boast that its coal is delivered “without the touch of a human hand.”

A river of coal, 1,200 tons per day now, 3,500 tons soon. moves either by gravity or electricity, from the stripped vein into railroad cars. The field begins in a sharp line, marked by a clear 38 to 42 inch vein, where the glaciers ended and coat begins in northern Illinois.

From there the now mining system will strip off the earth due south, until the depth of the vein makes stripping impossible. But as the stripping machinery used five years ago is now wholly obsolete, no one knows how far south that will be. With the present kind of equipment, and with 5,000 tons of coal per acre available, the oрегаtion will go on for 35 years at a rate of 1,000,000 tons per year and involve the movement of more material than the cutting of the Panama canal.

Some idea of what machine mining under such favorable circumstances can do may be had from the fact that production averages 21 tens per man employed per day, against an average of 5.85 for Illinois as a whole.

The monster electric shovel, which weighs 875 tons and crawls about on Its huge caterpillars, is run by two men, but hundreds of sightseers seated themselves on it at the same time yesterday. There is something uncanny-almost unpleasant about this nearly manless mining-these silent rivers of coal scooting along on conveyors or being sorted into sizes and loaded into cars by automatic machines.

Down in the huge pit, where the great scooter has laid bare the black top of the coal vein, and piled mountains of soil across the prairie, there is something suggestive of the lurid pictures with which Gustave Dore illustrated the parlor editions of Dante’s Inferno, which high pressure book agents used to plant in American parlors, But the monster shovel towering out of its hole, tearing into Mother Earth with a gargantuan greed and ferocity, makes the old pictures of Satan and his arch demons as tame by comparison as a group of Watteau shepherdesses.

Forty years ago the nice homey firesides of world’s fair Chicago burned coal from that field coal won by the pick and carted by the patient mule. Coal to produced fitted in with the family album and the family cat.

The thicker veins opened in southern Illinois made such mining impossible and the field languished, rails rusted. Now comes electricity and tears coal out by tons, where formerly human muscle won it by pounds.

The descriptions of the pit and the mining is interesting… Gustave Dore’s pictures of “Dante’s Inferno“. Probably this one?

The reference to “Watteau shepherdesses” is a cultural contrast, between hellish horror and pastoral gentleness.

In 1928, strip mining was new and visually shocking. Many thought it felt mechanized and inhuman, an apocalyptic scar on the prairie. The author seems to be saying “This machine makes Hell look quaint.”