DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just along for the ride. Two hundred yards southeast of where you're standing right now, at the base of a hill, brothers William W. and Harvey E. Johnson put the first coal mine in this area into operation.
They went down sixty-five feet to get at it. Sixty-five feet straight down into the earth, out here in Erath County. Now that's the kind of ambition that writes itself onto a landscape.
But Harvey died in 1888, and with him gone, things got harder. Labor difficulties, financial difficulties, the kind of compounding trouble that has a way of outlasting one man's resolve. So William Johnson sold his mining interest to R.
D. Hunter's Texas and Pacific Coal Company. And that's when this corner of Texas started to grow into something.
Railroads needed coal, and they needed a lot of it. That ready market turned a mine into a company town. The town was named Thurber, after an investor by the name of H.
K. Thurber. It grew and it grew, and then in 1903 a strike came through and changed the character of the place entirely.
When the dust settled, Thurber was completely unionized. Every last bit of it. The company employed two thousand five hundred miners, and those miners came from eighteen different nationalities.
Eighteen. In a company town in Erath County, Texas. People from all over the world went sixty-five feet down into the same dark earth, shoulder to shoulder.
That hill out there to the southeast doesn't look like much now. But it remembers.
What the marker says
Two hundred yards southeast of this site, at the base of the hill and at a depth of 65 feet, the first coal mine in this area was placed in operation by brothers William W. and Harvey E. Johnson. After Harvey's death in 1888, and because of labor and financial difficulties, William Johnson sold his mining interest to R. D. Hunter's Texas and Pacific Coal Company. Railroads provided a ready market for coal, and the company town of Thurber (named for investor H. K. Thurber) became completely unionized after a 1903 strike. The company employed 2,500 miners of 18 nationalities. (1995)