A headline in the Times Leader on Sept. 7, 1908.
File Photo
As custom of the era, the bodies of five men instantly killed in the Buck Mountain slope of the Lehigh Valley Coal Company in Warrior Run were taken to their homes on Aug. 28, 1908. A sixth man died after being taken to Nanticoke Hospital.
The youngest of the dead was 18 years old, and the oldest was 60.
“Five men met instant death, and nine men were injured, one of them perhaps fatally, and four of them seriously, in an accident at the Warrior Run Colliery yesterday afternoon,” the Wilkes-Barre Record reported on Aug. 29, 1908.
All six men who were killed resided in Warrior Run: John Tokarshak, 60, Simon Buscavage, 18, James Gallagher, 22, Frank Ostrofsky, 55, Julius Muscavage, 25, and William Naywadny, 24, who died at the hospital in Nanticoke.
Funerals were held from their respective houses with burials in St. Charles Cemetery in Sugar Notch and the Polish Catholic Cemetery in Nanticoke.
They were killed at the end of their 12-hour shift, as they were in the process of exiting the coal mine.
“The accident occurred between 4:30 and 5 o’clock, and many of the employees at the colliery had already gone to their homes. The men were being hoisted up the slope and had reached what is known as the No. 3 lift, where a stop was made to take on other employees,” the Record reported.
They had switched cars and had taken their places on seats when the signal was given to the hoisting engineer to start on the upward pull, when the roar of an oncoming runaway car warned the men of danger, the newspaper reported.
Despite screams to jump out of the car, it was too late.
The runaway car violently crashed into the occupied miner’s car, creating a force that snapped the hoisting cable.
“The mangled cars started to run further down the slope, and after going down about 100 feet, the cars jumped the track and piled up in a mass of wreckage, pinning a number of the dead and injured beneath the broken and splintered timber and twisted iron,” the Record reported.
A recovery team immediately entered the cave and removed the bodies, some of whom had missing limbs, to their respective homes, and were cleaned and prepared for funerals by their wives. In the case of Buscavage and Gallagher, who were not married, their mothers prepared their bodies for burial.
A coroner’s inquest was held with a jury of six men on Sept. 6, 1908, with the jury being permitted to inspect the mine and shown the process of how cars are switched.
Evidence presented during the coroner’s inquest showed a car of manure was being lowered, but a “head block,” a safety device to slow descending mine cars, was not placed on a track that caused the car to go out of control.
Three Warrior Run men — William Roberts, Condy Brislin, and Gwillyn Jones — were found negligent by the coroner’s jury in performing their duties of track control, the Times Leader reported on Sept. 7, 1908.
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