On April 28, 1914, in a small southern West Virginia town called Eccles, a mining disaster claimed the lives of 180 workers. In an eerie coincidence, disaster struck again exactly 10 years later during the Benwood Mine Disaster of 1924.
Hard Conditions
Steve and Rose Vargo were married in 1913 in their home country of Hungary. A year later, after the couple had welcomed their first child, fate brought them to Boggs Run in Marshall County, West Virginia. There, Steve found work as a miner, and he and his wife grew their family with five more children.
On the rainy morning of April 28, 1924, Steve felt sick and wasn’t sure if he would be able to head into work. But, knowing he and his family needed the money, he pressed on. Steve’s story is not so different from the over one hundred other workers who made their living in the mines.
The operation was headed by the Wheeling Steel and Iron Corporation, then the largest employer in the Upper Ohio Valley. Most of the miners at Benwood were Catholic immigrants from across Europe, and many were brothers, fathers and sons, or cousins.
Coal mining is a dangerous job, and the fight for better safety standards had already been going on for years. Just three years earlier, in southern West Virginia, there had been an armed labor uprising involving local coal miners and the United Mine Workers of America. Ultimately, the unions were defeated, and even as far north as Benwood, the effects were felt in the form of hazardous working conditions. A year earlier at Boggs Run, a gas explosion had killed three miners. The roof remained poorly supported, and workers were still using open flame lamps for light.
Disaster Strikes
That day in April seemed like just another day on the job. All the rooms had been checked for gas and deemed safe. The workers fell into their daily routines, boarding electric mine cars to descend into the subterranean city. But not thirty minutes later, a methane explosion erupted, collapsing the roof in part of the mine and triggering a tremor that would be felt blocks away.
The blaze triggered a second, larger explosion, igniting coal dust in the air and sending plumes of fire through the entire mine. Roofs collapsed, debris rained down, and of those who managed to escape the crumbling walls, many were burned to death in the gaseous inferno. But what ultimately killed most of the workers was the residual toxic gas mixture known as afterdamp that filled the air in the wake of the explosions.
The search for survivors began immediately, with help from the Wheeling chapter of the Red Cross and nearby mines as far away as Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of fallen debris and collapsed support structures slowed their progress. When all was said and done, there were no survivors. All 119 workers were found dead—many with their clothes wrapped around their faces, in a desperate attempt to avoid inhaling the toxic air.
In the pouring rain, the streets were filled with the wives and children of those lost inside, reporters documenting the grisly scene, and local onlookers who had felt the explosions beneath their feet and watched flames shoot into the sky.
After the Explosion
Many of the dead were buried at Mt. Calvary Cemetery in Wheeling in Catholic ceremonies. Today, three large stones stand at the Boggs Run Road site as a memorial to the many workers who were lost that day.
When a disaster of this magnitude strikes, the aftermath is always filled with people trying to sift through the pieces, trying to understand how 119 sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands could have been saved. And in a tragedy like this, it’s all the more painful to discover just how flagrantly safety standards had been ignored—and how much unnecessary danger workers like Steve Vargo faced every day.
State inspectors quickly found that just days after the explosions—while Wheeling Steel reported soaring profit margins—they had also been regularly exploiting already weak safety regulations. While changes were made following the tragedy—including finally equipping all miners with gas masks—it took the disaster in Benwood to bring about safety measures that should have been in place from the start.
