Coal Mine Road
From Worcester Activist wiki
Also NACKOR’S MINE and WORCESTER COAL COMPANY
If you should ever get caught short on fuel, you can always hike down to Worcester’s own coal mine and pick yourself out a few hundredweight-with the owner’s permission, of course.
Worcester’s coal mine was first discovered by the Nipmuck Indians. They dug out a small batch, pulverized it with water into a paste. They smeared it over their faces and probably turned admiringly to each other: “Heap black face-ugh!”
The mine is located near the north end of Lake Quinsigamond. Before 1820, plumbago, a kind of lead ore, was mined. Shipped to West Millbury, it was ground and sold to shipping firms for painting the bottoms of sailing vessels. It was supposed to be death on worms and barnacles.
The stuff, advertised as Black Lead, was hawked as a cheap and durable covering for roofs and exteriors of buildings exposed to the weather. The coal mine site, listed on early deeds as Nackor’s Mine, was owned by Abel Stowell, Worcester’s great clock maker. Two acres of the mine site was among his effects offered for sale by his administrator’s in May, 1819. Then some of Worcester’s leading citizens became interested; tried to burn the stuff. In 1822 coal from this mine was burned by William Lincoln and Isaac Davis in the presence of Levi Lincoln, governor of Massachusetts, and other prominent men.
In 1823, a campaign to put Worcester on the map was in full swing.
Worcester would soon be at the head of canal navigation, said the report, and her “inexhaustible store of anthracite coal, well calculated for steam engines,” was of the greatest value.
The coal was said to be of the same variety as Rhode Island, Schuylkill and Lehigh coal, but would ignite easier and burn longer with brighter flame. It was tried out by S. B. Thomas in his hotel and brewery and by the Grafton Manufacturing Co.
In Feb. 1824, the Massachusetts Coal Co. was incorporated. Worcester business men bought most of the stock.
In 1827 Amos Binney purchased the mine; pushed through a horizontal shaft the next year, 60 feet deep, 12 feet wide and nine feet high. Several hundred tons of coal were sold at $3 per ton. Later excavations went down 300 feet. In 1828, the Worcester Coal Company was incorporated. Fifteen or twenty miners and a blacksmith were hired. In March 1829, the Worcester Railway Co., with a capital of $50,000 sought to build a railway from the mine to the Lake and to the Blackstone Canal. The plan never went through.
In 1884, Joseph H. Perry, a high school instructor, found a specimen of extremely rare fossil in the coal plant. It was listed as Lepidodendron (Sagenaria) acuminatum; was duly inspected and listed in the American Journal of Science for February 1885.
Reports were coming in from consumers cursing the coal. It was found that about half of the stuff remained after a fire went down. Retorted one irate consumer: “There’s a damn sight more coal after burning than there was before!”
Stockholders tossed their worthless paper into fireplaces burning wood and gave it up as one of those things.
“I can hardly believe, that a coal, which contains probably not less than 90 per centum of carbon, should not be employed, in some way or other as valuable fuel,” wrote Prof. Hitchcock in a report on the geology of Massachusetts. “It will be considered by posterity, if not by the present generation, as a treasure of great value.”
Coal Mine road, extending from Tyler Prentice road west, commemorates Worcester’s own anthracite mine. It was named in 1933.
The core of this article comes from A History of Your City Streets.
