A MINE INUNDATED

How Seventy-Four Miners Lost Their Lives In Illinois.

The town of Braidwood, Ill., has been filled with lamintations owing to a terrible disaster which resulted in the death of seventy-four persons, who were overwhelmed by a land-slide, a number of those killed leaving large families. The tragedy occurred in the No. 2 shaft of the Wilmington Coal, Mining and Manufacturing company, known as the Diamond company, and situated three and a half miles northwest of Braidwood. The little village of Diamond was a scene of desolation calculated to wring the hearts of persons most hardened to scenes of misery. Sixty-eight men and six boys lay dead in the mine, and it may be weeks before even the melancholy satisfaction of recovering their bodies is recorded. Diamond is devoted to mining, and this blow carries death into a hundred families. In several instances all the male members of a family were swept away. A section of prairie land forty by ninety feet, over which the floods had extended until the water stood three or four feet deep, suddenly caved, the result being the instantaneous flooding of the mine in which three hundred men and boys were at work. Inside of half an hour the water had reached all parts of the works. In opening this mine a shaft seventy-five feet had been sunk into the earth. At right angles to this two main galleries were run nearly parallel with the surface of the earth and about seventy-five feet below it. From these main galleries narrow spurs of gangways are dug out in various directions. The spurs rise and fall with the ledge of coal, sometimes rising to within twelve or fifteen feet of the surface. It was a such a point, near the top, where the break occurred.
While lying on their backs picking away at the coal above the earth must have fallen upon the miners. Through the opening thus made the water poured in, filling one gangway after another, and cutting off escape to the central shaft. There was little time to give an alarm, for soon after the break occurred every avenue of escape was cut off. The galleries were low and narrow, and only by painfully slow crawling could the victims escape. No noise accompanied the rising of the water, and the first indication of their danger, to many of the miners, was a thrilling sensation of cold water trickling along the pathway in which they lay at work. There was an air shaft offering an additional avenue of escape, of which many availed themselves, but the water came in too rapidly for all to reach it. The news of the accident soon spread, and a great crowd gathered about the mouth of the pit where the workmen were fishing out the almost exhausted and nearly drowned men who were alive at the bottom of the shaft. Wives and mothers knelt on the ground and prayed fervently for the safety of their loved ones, and as the truth of the calamity appeared the grief of the survivors was painful to be heard.
One poor woman bent over the shaft as her husband climbed up the ladder with the dead body of his son in his arms. She extended her hand to receive them, but was disappointed and doomed to greater grief, for the man, worn out by the desperate struggle for life and the body of his son, fell back into the pit and was killed. Another woman, whose husband and three sons were buried, lost her reason.
A large division of miners and several teams were at once set at work to put a dam around the hole that was admitting the water to the mine to prevent it from draining the miles of flooded prairie that surrounded the works. Officers of the company examined the vent and found that the earth had caved in nearly in the same spot that had on previous occassions yielded to the weight of water that rested upon it. The destitute and distracted families were next looked up, and everything possible was done to mitigate the awful effects of the calamity, falling as it did upon them without a moment's notice.

The Ticonderoga Sentinel New York 1883-03-02.
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Researched and Transcribed by Stu Beitler. Thank you, Stu!