# Coal Mining / Tacoma, Puget Sound, and the San Juan Islands, Washington

Coal Mining / Tacoma, Puget Sound, and the San Juan Islands, Washington Produced: 1916 Description The original catalog description provided by the Ford Motor Company reads as follows: a. Miners operate manual coal drill, use picks and crowbar to break coal from seam, load coal cars in mine with hand shovels, ride loaded coal cars - miner shoes mule. “A powerful steel cable hauls the cars to the surface, a thousand feet in 23 seconds.” Loaded coal cars raised to top of elevator, emptied into chute. “The diamond drift. Drift mining consists in driving a tunnel straight through the side of a mountain to the coal vein. This tunnel runs for a mile before coal is reached.” “Trains, electrically hauled, convey the coal from the drift.” Locomotive pulls coal cars from tunnel - cars are emptied by dumping. (Above caption repeated.) Miners with lunch pails leave mine by elevator. “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Miners after work. “A mining community near Scranton, Pennsylvania. The large buildings are collieries or breakers where the coal is broken to size, sorted and the slate removed.” Cranes and culm - banks - coal colliery machinery. “‘Stripping.’ Earth removed to a depth of fifty feet from the coal vein permits the coal to be taken out with a steam shovel.” “Miners’ homes, well-built and comfortable, are erected the coal companies.” “Culm dumps. Coal not of a marketable size and refuse is piled in the culm dump. Washing redeems a large percentage of it for fuel.” Coal is…

- Kind: Educational
- Year: 1916
- By: National Archives
- Genres: Education
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/fc-fc-29)
- Licence or status: none stated by the archive
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/fc-fc-29?play=1)