Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Herron 33
big steam engine fan which ran day and night to keep the air blowing
through that mine.
Q: So it is possible that the house that I lived in over on Park Avenue
was right on top of a mine?
A: Yes, it was. There is a coal belt right underneath us right now.
Q: Well, what would happen, you think, if we had an earthquake here in
Auburn?
A: Oh, it is 365 feet down there, straight down. There was a big fire
down there and the west side of the fire was a couple blocks west of the
Methodist Church. The mine got on fire and the air and the water and the
sulfur somewhere caught fire and they had to seal the whole part of the
mine off. They used kind of a plaster of Paris and brick and cement and
shut the air off. They had to smother it out and its all mine two or
three miles west of town, east of town, all mined out.
You asked me if we had an earthquake here, I'm telling you now that there
is many a layer of rock and slate and six to eight feet of coal space
that we wouldn't fall any farther than that. It's the least of our
worries because I have been here all of my life since I was about seven
years old and it never failed yet. But now when the Peanut Mine, the old
mine here where I started, when it closed down, they would take the mules
out of the mine, bring them up one at a time, put them an pasture and
then when the demand for coal became greater in the fall, they would take
them back down in the mine again. Then when the Peanut here, everybody
called it the Peanut Mine, when it closed down the last time, Charles
McMann and myself went to Divernon and we got a job on the night shift
over there driving the mules. The Divernon Mine was one of the finest
coal mines in the country, ever known around here. They had a lot of
rock top. Just solid rock and you had no props to hold it up or anything.
It was a good clean mine. We worked there and we got, as the day shift
lost their drivers, we moved from the night shift to the day shift. Then
World War I started to come. France and them were in to it and we were
involved to the extent that they raised our pay to $5.00 a day, from
$2.84 to $5.00 a day because they wanted coal. In the meantime my mother
died and I came back over to Auburn.
They wanted me to get Dr. Woolover, that I spoke of that owned this
horse, and this veterinary at Edinburg, bought twenty-one horses and
mules for France and they had them all assembled in the livery barn at
Chatham, Illinois. He had me go and take those twenty-one horses from
the Edinburg. When I got them all tied together and put my saddle in
the car, I went to Chatham. Si Shelton ran the livery barn in Chatham.
He helped me and we got them all lined up and we tied a lead on the back
horse to bring in to the tail of the front horse. We went down the road,
so I had a buckskin colored horse and horses are like sheep, you get one
with an odd color they follow him better. And so I got as far as Beamington,
Illinois, that was about two thirds of the way to Edinburg. Well, I had
to water the horses. A fellow had a little grocery store there, all it
was was a house and a watering trough and this was at Beamington. He
helped me water them and get them tied together again. I left Chatham