Norman Boland
Norman Boland B-O-L-A-N-D Okay, well it wouldn't be much use to start to say until I was about six but I can remember lots of things then.
Where were you born?
Deloge, Missouri, 1930.
That girl, Wal-Mart, a young girl was working there one day in her mother's place.
She just wanted to know my birthday and I said four nine thirty.
She said thirty!
She backed up by three.
I thought that was another time and place.
We moved to Fredericktown or out in Village Creek, about a mile or two from Fredericktown.
We rented a small farm in 1941.
My dad had worked at the mines up there, national mines.
You know where the big chat dump is?
You go from Flatwood to Deloge, there's a big chat dump.
We lived on the same side of the street as the chat dump, about a half a mile.
That's where I grew up and he worked in the mines around there.
But then the Depression, he had worked at national in the mill.
He worked on the underground, he worked on top of the mill.
I know he worked ten years because I got a picture somewhere of ten years.
Then he got laid off in the Depression of 29, it was 30, about January 30 and he got laid off.
He didn't have another job till, per se, he worked a day or two on the WPA and learned how to do that, where they put that white...
When we lived out on Strangtown, we had a fence up in the front because it was like a bank.
He built a fence about that high with that white, with a little trim around it.
But he didn't have a job in all that time.
So he lost his job with a new baby because he was in 1930?
All together we had eight of us, but then a couple of them wasn't born yet.
Okay, where are you in them?
Let's see, I had one sister older and a brother older and then me and then another sister and then another brother and then another sister for a long time.
You left out one sister born after you, so there are eight of you all together.
So he had three children and lost his job.
Let's see, Virginia and me, yeah, they're big.
You said your father lost his job in 1930.
Did your mother do something to bring in some money?
No.
Did you live?
No, she had no other kids.
Did you have your own gardens to eat?
We didn't have a little garden, we didn't have too big of a place.
They lived out in town.
We existed.
You said there was a Weatherall Food Warehouse just up the road from there under Lowe's Drive and sometimes they would get out-of-date food from that warehouse.
Well, it didn't take anything home or anything.
They'd throw candy and stuff out and those kids would go through it and it didn't have worms in it.
We did something.
I guess we, well, there wasn't anything like bread.
When I would go out and play all day, I'd be gone.
I just went, when I was six years old, I just went wherever.
I did what I wanted to when I was gone all day and played on the jackdump and everything else.
I'd put a piece of cornbread in my pocket and I'd eat any fruit trees you'd come by, green or whatever, or whatever else.
You'd eat up everything.
It was a different world.
So where you lived, was it a place you owned?
We did own it.
I think that, I'm not sure, but I think my dad's mother lived with us for a while and I think she probably had owned a house.
It was on Chestnut Street in Delores.
It was on the main highway there.
Right off Delores Drive on Chestnut Street.
I don't think Chestnut, I think Chestnut went up the street there.
That short street was dead end, wasn't it?
One house next to us, Miss Shaner lived, and there was a street that went up there and it was a dead end.
About a block east of Delores Drive.
Yeah, it went up there.
And the house burned, but they built back another house that looked just like it after you left, right?
Yeah, we sold the house to Polly Bytsill after it was down there.
And it did burn and they built one back.
It looked very similar on the same, I guess probably on the same foundation.
And then you moved to Frederictown Village Creek Road when you were what, around 10 or 11?
11, in 41.
Okay.
Because he got a job.
He didn't have a job from, what did I say, 30?
Until 37 when the war took and all that stuff.
They stored lead mines in Malamot.
And he got a job down there and he drove down there in an old car for a little while and then another guy got a job.
Both of them drove.
First he had a 28 Chevy and then a 31 Chevy, I think.
And they'd have to work on them every once in a while.
The one would break axles pretty often.
So it had two of them running together until 41.
And then we moved down in 41 out on Village Creek.
On a little farm, ran into a little farm about 18 acres.
The guy told us if he'd fix it up, it would really run down.
Growing up on the roadside and the house was in a terrible shape.
If he'd paint the house, fix it up, we could live there as long as we wanted to.
But we lived there a few years.
Got it all fixed up and everything looked good.
And one day a guy came by and told us he'd bought it.
He didn't tell us goodbye, hello, or nothing.
The guy walked in and he was out of town.
Then I think he lived in Kansas.
But later he moved to town and married it.
The lady in town lived here.
Faircloth was his name.
So he sold the house from under you?
Without saying goodbye.
We would have bought it.
We would have had to borrow the money, but probably could have.
Because my dad had a pretty good job at the mines.
And it looked like it was going to last several years then.
And it did last a few years.
How did your dad find out Mr. Barron had a house for sale?
I don't know exactly, but we moved into what they call Straying Town.
Go out of Fredericktown North, Fredericktown.
Turned out first right.
No, not the first right, but the second.
And there's a string of houses there.
That's what they call it.
Straying Town.
That's what they call it.
Village Creek Road.
Village Creek Road.
Where you go up around the curve, he bought a house there from Doc Barron for $500.
It was in pretty bad shape, but he worked on it and fixed it up.
Built another granite rock fence in front of it because it was up on a bank.
And we lived there for years and years.
And he built these fences, no mortar, just by positioning the pieces?
No, they didn't have a mortar.
And then they put the white line with that little round thing about the size of your finger.
They would put that white line around them and make them look good.
Okay.
Tell them how you took care of all the farmhand when you were out there.
Well, when I was 11, when we moved there, I was the farmhand.
Dad worked, and he not only worked at the mines, he worked on that.
We were close to the mines.
He worked at the mines, but he was fixing that place up, so he worked all the time.
So I was 11, I was the farmhand.
I had a cow and a calf, and I'd let the calf have, and I'd run him off and milk the cow.
And I had pigs.
We killed hogs every year.
Had chickens, free range.
A creek run, I knew the back of the place through the 100 yards back, Village Creek.
And so I was the farmer.
Then, when I was 11, but when I was 12, I needed to make a little money because I didn't ever get anybody at home.
So I worked on the, I started working on the thrash machine when I was 12.
Every year when the thrash machine would come by, Shulies had the biggest place.
Shulies in Skaggs Farm.
But we'd make the trowels.
Every year they'd hire the same men.
Of course, the reason why I got a job at 12, I was pretty big for my age, but the men were in service.
The good men were in service.
So they didn't have to, they was a little older.
So if you got it on one year, every year you'd get to work, well, a couple months, between the months.
Did Village Creek flood?
Yeah, once in a while.
Did that affect your house?
No, it, every day you'd get up close to the house.
There was a lot of room for it to run down through the next area there.
And 3 or 400 yards, if it would have flooded, it'd get in the road down there.
Like 400 or 500 feet from our house or so down further down.
It never did get up in the back, but it never did get really close to the house.
Because he walked to Village Creek School from where they lived out there every day.
Yeah, we walked to school.
At Village Creek School they had two rooms.
And in one year, one room, smaller room, they'd have the first grade one year and the second grade next year.
And the other was fourth and fifth and sixth.
And you might start, you might do the eighth grade before you did, and then do the seventh the next year, according to how it come, when you're going up there.
And the same way in the fifth and sixth, you might do the fifth first or you might do the sixth on an alternative year.
First you do the sixth and then the fifth and then the eighth and then the seventh.
And his favorite teacher was Mrs. Vance?
Yeah.
So if you did eighth grade before seventh, by the time you went to seventh, that was a-coasting you.
Yeah, well yeah.
They were really practically the same thing, really.
They just kind of had it together really about the same.
He learned to read when he was real little, and so he did that with the proper school.
I could read when I was six.
I read all the time.
I read the paper every day when I was six years old.
I wondered how in the world we ever got the paper.
One night I was lying in bed, how did we?
Because we couldn't afford paper.
But there was one house, one or two houses, and they had a store.
And the people that ran the store lived in the house, one of those houses next to us, between us and the store.
Their name was Tucker, and they had a daughter that was in a wheelchair that had, what do they call it, a disease?
She couldn't control herself at all.
She was grown and a little bit heavy, but she just couldn't, she could talk a little bit.
My sister could understand her, but she just didn't have no control.
And my sister took care of her, and she would get the paper and bring it home to me from the day before.
It would be a day's old paper.
So I read the paper back when I was six years old every day.
I read the whole thing.
I mean, I knew what was going on when Hitler was taking those other countries.
I had to figure out what was going to happen before.
Because he was a pretty easy figure, because he was just going to try to take the world.
Crazy.
Did your other siblings, were you the most read in your family, or was the whole family reading?
I guess I was, as far as I know, because I could spell.
I know one time, my sister came up and said, you want to talk to Norman?
He's smart.
He said, he can spell brown swagger.
I can't do that.
I learned how to spell it, and I remember it.
But from reading a lot.
Did you have a radio or anything like that in the house that you remember?
I don't think we had, in the first years we didn't have a radio.
But you had electricity.
In the district house we did, yeah.
But in the one up there, I don't think we had electricity for a while.
I don't remember just when we got electricity.
It should be a thing you shouldn't remember, but I don't remember exactly.
We might have had, back then, but I doubt it, we didn't have anything that you had to pay for, extra.
Before that, I worked in St.
Louis.
I went to St.
Louis in what years?
Before you were married or after you were married?
You were married in 48.
Yeah, I was married in 48.
But you had already worked at Shoe Factory in Frederictown a couple years then, hadn't you?
Yeah, I quit school in the 10th grade.
You quit?
I went to work just as soon as I got 60 and got the Social Security.
And I started a bank account.
I always wanted to have a bank account.
New Area Bank still has the bank account.
You had to have, to get a bank account, you had to have $25 Social Security number.
And I was thinking a while back, something else, but I can't remember what, to start a bank account.
So I started a bank account at the bank then.
Had them little red books with a cellophane number in it.
Still got the same account.
But they don't know it.
I mean, they, I was talking to the girl, my granddaughter worked at the bank as a teller for a while when she was in college.
And I started doing it one time and that woman said, well, we can't tell her how long I've been a customer there since then.
And she said, well, we haven't got no records because they built more on the bank and they had all the papers, everything.
They got rid of all that.
So they had loads of it, you know, so they got rid of everything.
And he's been there at least 70 something years.
Yeah, since I was 16.
Well, I had to work a lot.
I saved all my money to get $25 to work at the shoe factory.
Took me about probably my months or getting.
So you left school and the shoe factory was your first job after leaving school?
Because I see when we remove them.
And that would have been, I guess, in what, 46?
Six.
I had that house built out there on Lincoln Drive.
I guess 46. 16, yeah. 16, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
As soon as I was 16, it was cool.
What did you do at the?
Different thing, but mostly scarred heels.
You worked, you worked on a piecework deal.
But they roughed it, put the heels on, they'd swim in shoes.
Then they changed time to time.
And they had a heel about that long.
And you put, had this machine roll around.
You put sandpaper on it.
You had to keep changing your paper yourself and get it where it wouldn't jump and leave rough places.
And it was second scar.
They did it roughly.
And then you went on and you smoothed it up.
And you did it, but it had cases that run through.
So many pairs on a case.
And you was on a, you had to do so much you didn't have to keep a job.
If you got so much, you made a little bit extra money if you did so many in a day.
And they ran through on a case this year.
And you said you built a house on Lincoln's?
I had.
How you bought one?
I had part I built.
I built and then I built onto it.
I was working the whole time.
I built extra rooms on the back and dug a little basement by hand, 12 by 20.
On the back.
And there were parts that I built extra on the back.
Did Revelles build that house for you?
It was next to your mom's parents, right?
It was next door.
No, they were there later.
They went on a house there.
They went on a house down the street there.
But somebody built the house and then you...
It wasn't long before they kept building up there.
Later, my mom and dad did build a house next door.
And then they didn't let us stay long.
Of course, he was always changing you.
But we had to find a neighbor.
But we lived there for...
Until 67 or 68.
Yeah.
I know I paid on it to 17 years. $40 a month.
Six percent interest. $40 a month.
After I paid it, I think I paid $1,000 down.
The reason why I had $1,000, I worked in St.
Louis at Union Station.
What did you do there?
Loaded mail.
And pretty interesting.
I worked, but they had a flooding, a big flood in Kansas City while I was working there.
And we had to handle the mail.
And I had to work.
You had to work.
You had to handle the chores.
I had to work seven days a week, 14 hours a day, for about a year.
And they had the Railroad Workers Union, which was a pretty strong union.
And they took out, instead of Social Security, back then was about 1% or 1.5%.
They took out 6% for pension.
But they got it through pension.
And I worked there a full year.
And after I got my Social Security, I had a few months.
I got a $50 raise.
And they turned that money over to then Social Security.
So I got $50 more on Social Security.
It was an interesting place to work.
How did you go from, so you were working at Brown at the shoe factory.
What led you to be working in St.
Louis?
That seems like a pretty significant jump there.
Was it during the same time period or later?
It was later.
They had a lot of labor trouble at Brown's shoe after the Second World War.
Was there a strike and that was all you did?
No, they actually built onto it for baby shoes.
And they asked all the employees to donate money.
I donated $30 and I worked in the baby shoe department a little while.
Yeah, they tried to get all the employees.
Some of them did, some didn't.
They didn't fire the ones that didn't.
Seems like you should own a piece of the company.
Yeah, you shouldn't own that.
First it was Balsbury Steves and Devers.
It was more like locally.
Then it was sold to Brown.
But you don't remember exactly why you decided to go to St.
Louis?
Yeah, the best I can remember, I got up one day and I thought, I saw a lot of people working there and everything and I thought, well, I'm not going to ever do any good if I stay here.
So I quit and went to St.
Louis looking for a job.
Were you married at that time and family?
I didn't have no family, but I was married.
I got married in 1948.
I was 18.
Did your wife come with you?
I was 17.
Especially working seven days a week.
Yeah, she did come.
I worked up there for a while at another place, a can company.
Making cans.
Well, I don't know, I worked there about a month.
You'd throw this thing up and you'd have flat boxes.
You'd grab them and make a box out of them and put them through this thing and do it there and it would put semen on them the next place.
Put cans and you could see the line all up through there.
And they were busy times in the spring and that's when I got a job.
So I don't know what happened, but I worked about a month and one day they told me I was out of the job.
They didn't tell me anything.
But I didn't care much.
I was looking for something better.
And I guess that's when I got the job.
I got the job at Union Station because a friend of mine was working there.
And he told me and I applied for a job and I got a job.
And you worked in St.
Louis for two or three years before you came back and got the job in 1951 down here?
Yeah, I must have worked.
How much time have I got between there?
I guess I worked a year there at Union Station.
I think about a full year.
So you were in St.
Louis about a couple of years?
Yeah, I lived two or three.
Well, I was up there by myself for a while.
But then we ran into a place.
So let's talk about the Binds.
You came back down in 1951.
Yeah, I got a job at Binds and I took it.
I just put in an application and let's see what time it was.
But they was hiring.
They called me and told me I could have a job if I wanted it.
And I did go to work in the mill.
Dad was the shift foreman.
I went to work for him in the mill.
And I was a slime line man, about the same as their labor.
But they had this big slime line.
Have you ever been to a freight town with a slime pond?
Yes.
Well, it pumped all the way to the slime pond.
From the mill up on the mock.
I would go out and stay all night there building that dam up.
The pipe ran out of a big iron pipe.
And also you had to walk it a couple times every shift.
The health department and so on.
They thought that leaked in the creek a little bit at the end of the world.
Well, it wasn't amounted to anything because the lead would settle down.
And there wasn't much lead in it after it went out.
It could have been a little bit.
It pumped all the way out there and see if it broke anywhere or anything.
Day and evening and night.
Rain, snow, whatever.
I mean, I waded the water across the creek between me and them.
I waded the water up over my knees a lot of times.
One night I was walking out through there and had my light on my helmet.
Boy, something ran into me.
It was a big owl.
I guess that light kind of blinded him and hit me right in the chest.
So you would walk the line and make sure it was...
Yeah, see, it was all the way out to the end.
But then later I stayed out there the whole shift building that dam up.
Because they made the slime pond bigger.
So they worked on the dam end.
They had a bucket full of wooden plugs.
And that's the way you'd adjust it.
If it ran thin, you'd plug it up so it wouldn't wash.
And if it ran thick, you'd open up a few more.
And they'd keep building it up.
So is there lead in slime pond?
Is there lead in slime pond?
Sure.
But they're not going to hurt anything.
Everybody's got this crazy idea that lead is going to kill you.
Well, lead will hurt you if you're welding and breathe it.
Or if you get it in paint.
Otherwise, you'd be a fool to eat it.
But you could eat lead, a little piece of the lead, it'd go through you.
And you wouldn't.
Of course, I've seen guys working that dryer.
They just had lead all over them all the time.
And they lived to be in their 80s.
I watched just to see.
Of course, still, you wouldn't want to do anything foolish.
But it's not near as dangerous as you'd think.
Well, it seemed to me that slime pond was kind of a country club.
It is.
Yeah.
And now...
It would pay to join in swimming.
Oh, yeah.
I bought shares from the Slime Pond Association and paid annual dues, too.
I'd love to take him out there.
You could just walk in there.
For my older years, I fished in it.
I ate lots of fish out there.
Lots of fish.
It was a real place to fish.
Clear water.
You got this tar up in there.
Have you ever seen it?
Was there once?
The concrete tar?
It's got a concrete tar and it had three windows.
And that would keep the height of the pond.
And they made it bigger, made the dam a little bigger.
So they'd concrete up two of them windows.
Part of two windows now that you see in this tar.
It's about 10 feet or so.
It's about 30, 40 feet out from the north end.
And where the dam is.
Under it is a tunnel that comes out and goes down what they call Shave Creek.
It runs into Village Creek and overflow.
It rains too much and everything.
It overflows there to keep them moist now.
And you could walk through that tunnel, but I did walk through it.
Of course, I jumped off there and swam over to the side, too.
To all the ways.
That tunnel was about concrete and growed up the green stuff.
And it was about four feet wide and about six or seven feet high.
I think I could stand up there and come out and when it overflowed, run down there and run down the creek.
Out to back.
Down under.
Like the snakes.
I see tunnels with excellent planks.
So when they wanted to make it bigger, they just concrete up those windows.
So I think there's only two rows on the shore.
Now, then there's three windows in that tower.
So that was a gradual process over the course of years?
Yeah.
They wanted to make it bigger because now we went out there last summer.
They used to be you go out there and fish and you might not see anybody.
Now it's a playground.
And they was trailers.
Boy, some of them cost $70,000 to $80,000.
They was all around that one part.
All back up on the hill and everywhere.
They rounded down to the dam.
They just right on the side of the water.
Just that close to each other.
All as far back as you can walk around it.
How many trailers do you think could have been?
60 or 80.
Somewhere between 60 and 80 I think.
They got there all summer.
Nice big trailers.
It's half people from St.
Francis County and half from Madison County.
They have shares in it.
And some of them just live there all summer.
They're older people.
But a lot of people come down and spend a little bit of a week.
And that's okay with the association?
Yes.
They have strict rules about who parks where and when they bring them in and all that stuff.
But that's what it's there for mostly is a private campground.
I was involved in a different thing because when I was young we'd just go out there anytime.
Swim and fish.
The lake across from that is where I live.
The Hinky Lake.
Oh yeah.
And was that involved with the mining at all?
Did you ever recall or know?
Hinky is the reservoir.
Do you recall the reservoir?
Yeah.
It was built for the mines.
It has a pipe that goes down.
And one time somebody got mad about something and they knocked down an under there.
They knocked, broke that pipe and let that drain.
And it drained.
Right.
And it was just a mud hole.
But the fish didn't all die.
There was mud and water enough.
That's been about...
That's before we started fishing there.
We started fishing there in the early 60s.
I fished there a long time.
That was 20 or 30 years after I first fished there.
In the 70s, right?
But it's been...
I heard who it was.
Got mad at them about something and they knocked a hole in that drain.
Was that before your dad bought it?
My grandpa bought it back in the 70s.
Grandpa?
In the 70s.
Grandpa Bob, yeah.
I was out there.
I used to go out there all the time.
And then back when all the old road down there was so rough, we carried the boat down in there.
Right.
Yeah, we carried the boat.
It was a yarn boat.
Okay, yeah.
We put the yarn boat down there.
A long way to carry it.
Yeah.
But we caught a lot of fish down there.
So you came down.
You were working in the mines.
Or you were doing the...
Was that your first job?
Was doing the water checking that mine?
Is that what you did the whole time?
Or did you...
Oh, no, no.
That was my...
Yeah, that was my first job.
Okay.
That's what I went on.
I was a slimeline man and a laborer, too.
When I wasn't working in the slimeline, I'd just clean up.
And I broke in on a lot of other jobs.
When somebody was out, I'd work in their place.
In the mill.
I thought I learned about every job in the mill, so I'd work in the mill.
What do you say?
Where was the building at?
Where were some of the primary buildings compared to, say, the slimelines building?
Well, yeah, the slimelines building.
Yeah.
On the curve there, back where...
They had a sawmill in there, right in the mountain.
They went from the fence back, from this side, it was the office there.
Somebody rented that office.
What'd they do?
Burn that down?
This is on Copper Mines Road?
Okay.
You know, this is just south of Mime Mount Lake.
Okay.
Just south of that lake.
Early comedy, they call it now.
Just south of there, where you can still see the mine, the concrete mill.
It was three stories high?
How many stories high was it?
You can still see that concrete mill there, if you look south from Mime Mount Lake.
Well, this is a road that goes around from Strangetown, from Townside, where Mime Mount goes around.
It's right where they made the curve up there and come back, where you'd be coming back to Mime Mount, on that round part there.
And there's a road up that goes up, the road goes up through there, where the railroad track, there used to be a railroad track, because there's some spikes and stuff up in there.
Because Rick was young, took my car up there and got one of them spikes in his car, and that ...
And up there, they were sinking another shaft when the mines shut down, and they went ahead and sunk it.
It's a shaft about, I'm thinking about 700 feet deep.
And the geologist told me that they had some cobalt there, along with the lead and stuff.
Higdon, down in Higdon, they sunk a shaft down there.
You know where that shaft ...
You know where Higdon is?
The ...
J Road?
J Road goes down north, about 10 miles ...
Timber Ridge Church.
Well, they sunk a shaft down there and never did do anything.
Never did have a mill or anything, they sunk a shaft.
And between the two, if you go as a crow flies, it's not too far.
And I think they sunk that when the big fear was about cobalt.
You know what the main problem with cobalt is, that heat, it'll expand enormous heat.
So the jet planes and stuff like that, and we was getting all our cobalt from South Africa, and they were worried, and so that's why them shafts are still there, and that's why.
And there was a mine, another mine is out in Monomont, that they call cobalt.
What was your next job after the mill there?
When did you start going underground?
Well, let's see, I worked in the mill, probably a couple of years.
To about 53?
Probably.
And because of the Korean War, the mines were going really strong.
Yeah, and I bet underground, because that's where the money was.
But he didn't want me to, he said, I said, you wear out more clothes and boots and stuff than you.
But I said, well, I'm going to try.
So I've been underground, and you had to be a trainee.
You worked with somebody for a few months to learn, and then they put you out by yourself and see if you could, they had a contract.
They charged you so much a day for your labor, so much for your powder, dynamite, so much for your fuse, and then when you broke rock, they paid you so much a ton.
And first you had to pay off your debt, and after you got your debt paid off, the rest of the rock, they paid you so much bonus for a ton.
I'm not clear on when you talk about a mill.
The mill, like at Monomont, of course, that was the older one, but you had one crusher underground.
I worked there for a while, and it come down, you're dumped in a place, now they've got what's called grizzlies, they're big iron rails where they dump on, and it goes down through there, down through the hole from the trucks, you know, now they're trucks.
And then there was railroad cars and stuff, and you ought to watch some old flier dump them cars.
They run them on a thing, and I think they'd dump two at a time, maybe just one, there's 12 tons, and that thing would turn over and dump them, and then they'd pull up and dump the next one, and then it would go down to the...
They kept getting smaller and smaller, they would start with one crusher.
Primary crusher.
You'd get it so small, and they'd go up to Monomont, this big long belt, well, it would go through the crusher underground, and it would be in pieces, well, some would be small, but they'd be in pieces, and they'd go up to the mill, and Monomont was obsolete compared to the others, but they had rolled and crusher, both in the mill there, and they'd go through the secondary crusher, crusher up smaller, and then they'd go through these two big rolls that they constantly welded on, like this big, and they'd roll around and they'd go between them and spit them out, and then they'd go up in the elevator and go with these screens, and there was a band in the mill, and on the rod mill floor, lower floor, that had a thing in it, and they could adjust how much you take out, run out on, and then they'd go through these big...
It was a little...
They had two big rod mills that you put rods in, like 12 feet long, two and a half inches, and on Saturday, some time we'd work, and we'd take the little ones out, because they'd leave them in there.
When they'd get real small, they'd wrap up, and you'd take some out, get in there and take some out, and turn it a little bit and take some, and then you'd have a roller thing.
Two guys would take these and shoot them in there, the big ones.
You could still see those rod mills at the Missouri Mine State Park, and that mill that's still intact there.
Yes.
If you look in there, in that building, you could still see those rod mills.
That was the last thing you'd do.
That would grind it up, that would go around there, and the Monomont didn't have ball mills, but the others, because the ball mills would grind it even finer, but the rock at Monomont was so hard, it didn't compare, when you were a driller, and you worked at Monomont, and you went somewhere else, everything was easy, downhill, because so much drill, so much difference.
It was limestone, Monomont was hard rock.
The earlier miners at Monomont all died when they were about 50, because they drilled dry, and they had colicosis, they breathed it, and you could breathe limestone in and cough it up, but that would eat your lungs up.
Sandstone and granite out here, that's great.
Oh yeah, it is hard, it is hard rock, and everything at Monomont, when you got away from Monomont, like drilling and everything, everything was red down here, so it was all much better.
Oh, yeah, they refer to this as Minomont sandstone, I guess.
Because this is from the old St.
Francis Mountains, I mean, this is sort of the heart of it, so the mountains used to be 10,000 feet tall, and now it's down to the base of them, it's 300 or 400 feet tall, and it's a real hard rock.
Almost as hard as granite.
Igneous rather than sedimentary.
How old were you when you, I guess, retired?
Yeah, I was 54, I had 34 years, I believe, and I just decided to, but let's see, what was I doing when I quit?
You were driving a truck.
Yeah, I'd been on top driving a truck.
So it was around 1984.
Yeah, 1984, I believe.
So you were underground for about 30 years, right?
Yeah.
Close to 30 years.
A lot of years drilling underground.
Started with a column machine, you'd put the machine up the column, you'd put the column on the bottom, you'd put a metal footplate, had a little hole like in it, and that thing fit in the side, and on top you'd put a wooden block, and you'd crank it, a screw in it, and put it tight, and then you'd put your machine up that post.
The machine weighed about 100 pounds.
Well, there was a trick to getting it up there.
When you go up, get so far, then you'd put it out, and then you'd take it on up high as you go.
You tried to get it up at least eight foot, tip toe.
But the trick was, when you started, you had to go.
If you stopped, if you ever got in between, you couldn't do it.
But that's what a lot of guys learn about lifting.
We was coming out from underground one night, and there was a guy, big old guy in strong, and it was a machine laying there, weighed about 100 pounds.
And he said, I can lift that up over my head, but you've got to, nobody else can.
And he couldn't do it.
And I said, I believe I can.
He said, he laughed, and I could, I could lift it up over my head, and he got mad.
He really got mad.
But all it was, was when you got it up like here, you went up.
If you didn't, if you ever stopped, you couldn't do it.
You had to keep going.
And this machine's a jackleg drill?
No, no, that's not a jackleg, that's just a column clamp on a post.
And then it went to jacklegs.
Oh, once or twice ago, I was watching a thing, and I'd been to Leadville one time, and this guy was drilling a gold mine with the jackleg, just exactly, Leroy, from France, L-E-O-O-I, but it was the jackleg.
And you just carried it around, it had to just feed it out the leg, and the back had two, it had a point on it, and then two things, it'd catch, and if it was too slick, you couldn't catch, you'd have to put a chain, drill a bolt, put a bolt, drill it down, put that chain on it, and it had links or so on, so you could hold it.
How much did the jackleg weigh?
Less than a hundred pounds, the leg was part of the aluminum, so it weighed a little less than a hundred pounds.
And it was really tough from the first start, because you had to learn to handle it, and the guys that had used them all the time, everybody had a tough time at first, because it'd flop out behind you and drown you, but after you learned, a big guy came to work with me one time, and they put two of us in the same place, and he was trying to drill, he was trying to use all the seals, well the jackleg, you wouldn't use it, two and four, you'd just use it like a four or five foot and a ten foot, because you'd be a lot easier, because you could back up, or call him, you had to use all of them, because he couldn't go so far back.
He was trying to use them all in small, and I told him, I said, you'd be a lot better off, and he said, I don't need nobody to tell me, he'd worked in the lead belt, but I said, well, I'm just trying to help you, and so two or three weeks later, he finally figured it out, and he'd come home, he said, I'm sorry, I was just too contrary, I said, I appreciate you trying to help me, and that's what it was, I was contrary too, and he didn't know what to tell you or anything.
Those were all hydraulic drills, right, running off of compressed air, or were they?
Air, you had air and water holes, you had to take air and water holes in, you weren't supposed to drill without water, because it's dangerous to your breathing, yeah, of course it does step there when I drill boulders dry sometimes.
It wasn't like you could get by with a lot of that, lime sowing, you cough it up.
Tell them about working with dynamite and later with powder, you blasted holes every day.
Yeah, you shot your own holes, you paid for the powder, so you had to break so much rock on so much powder, you didn't make any money.
But you first started with dynamite, right, and then later they moved to powder, is that right?
No, they moved to fertilizer.
Fertilizer.
Which you ever thought?
Yeah.
I hated it at first, because it had a tank and had a long plastic hose, and if you got air in that hose, that thing would come out of that hole and flop all around and beat you to death.
Yeah, it was a big deal, because you bouldered it and it bouldered that fertilizer.
Fertilizer mixed with fuel oil, and it was just as powerful as dynamite.
But you'd put a nifter, they called it, a nifter was a stick of dynamite with a cap in it.
You had to set it off, because it was a little harder, but it would break just as good.
But the only bad thing about it, if you had water in the hole, like some of the downholes, some places you had water, it would dissolve.
That fertilizer would just go to nothing.
And dynamite will too.
Maybe I'm, you know, naive, but as I'm listening to you, it almost sounds as if you're independent contractors because you had to buy your supplies, and then you said, like, you paid for this, so you might as well use it.
So they charged you for these things, and then you sold it.
Not literally, though.
I mean, it was all on paper.
Like the guy said about some, his dad, he said, don't even worry about it, it's all on paper.
Well, it was all on paper.
I mean, you didn't pay anything or anything.
But you worked for free until you paid it off.
They still got to pay it off.
You've got your wages.
You've got regular wages, just like anybody else.
You made it, your rate of pay was, well, a little higher than the laborers anyway.
But this was all to do with the bonus deal.
So I think you make twice as much as wages, sometimes with a bonus.
Yeah.
So it's really pretty good pay for this area.
But the prospecting job I had later was the best, because I did make, most of the time, I made twice as much bonus as I made wages.
Wages really wasn't that much.
You'd think working in the mines, you'd make a lot of money, but you didn't.
You didn't have to use explosives on the prospecting, right?
No.
Samples.
You took samples.
They paid you.
You had to drill so many feet, and then they paid you so much a foot after that.
And I did that for 10 years.
And that was a good job.
Didn't have to use dynamite.
And I got to go out early and take my sample and take a bath before everybody got out.
And I had that for the job for 10 years.
I liked it.
I was my own boss, practically.
Looking back to just being here in town for that duration, I remember talking to someone recently.
We were talking about how Fredericktown was kind of booming for a while, and then as things wound down, it shrank again.
Fredericktown was a lot more prosperous than it was later.
Of course, a lot of things moved out, like the mines and the things.
And of course, the miner just got by.
A lot of people thought, but that was probably the better job, better working job.
I mean, a lot of people had to run businesses and stuff like that or do anything.
But I mean, for just working for wages, it was a better job.
But you weren't going to get rich working in the mines.
It's just a lot of hard work.
But you couldn't make a living.
But you do remember there were a lot more businesses in Fredericktown, say in the 50s and 60s.
Well, it seemed like it has went down there.
There's just not ...
Well, Fredericktown, just look at the workers.
They had the national mines over there, and at one time, they had what do you call it?
Mines and the refinery.
They had, I'd say at one time over there, they thought they was afraid something was going to happen.
I don't know what they was worried about, but anyway, they had a lot of men working over there.
I would say at one time at national, they had many as a thousand men working.
They had a bunch of men.
But the federal government was subsidizing the coal block reduction and worried about the condo.
Yeah, the government had been subsidizing for it because they couldn't have made that much money.
So that and then the other mines, of course, both of them shut down, of course, Farmington.
I worked at one mine that was right out of Farmington there, Pemville, Flat River, working in the mines up there.
It was a good place to work.
If you remember me, I did good working up there.
I had a jack leg, and working there at Pemville, I made good money.
Tell them how when you worked at, or just before it was getting ready to shut down for a while, and all you did was go around and cut pieces off the big columns to take- Pillars.
They signed the pillars.
They left pillars there, so if you ever see pictures underground, they'd have big, they'd make them, cut it out, make them around, and- Some of them were real tall.
They had to be as tall as the ground was there.
So some ground you cut 10 foot high, some might be 30, 40 feet high.
Most of them it was on levels because they could be hard cut, but you didn't have any pillars that high.
But you did have some pillars as high as 30 feet.
And the mines had to get bigger when they got this big equipment.
When I was working, they come out with the new jumbo, Joy, rotary percussion.
And the first one that they, I think his first one never was, as far as I know, St.
Joe Machine Shop, they made, they got the jumbo arms and stuff, but they put it on, they took a big Klein truck and turned it backwards and made a metal plate and put it on that.
And I worked on experimental at Indian Creek.
And then they got the big jumbos.
And the first they had some jumbos from Gardner Denver that was on a cat track with three arms, two arms and one in the middle.
And like you're drilling a drift, you're drilling a drift, you just drill straight in just to get to the one, to make a, make a big place to go to, to go somewhere else.
And you'd have, and there was two men worked on it.
Well, there was actually three on the shift because when I'd been on a vibram development job, two run the jumbo, one on the ground and one up on the top and lined him up and stuff.
And then one guy cleaned the other shift's drift with a transloader.
And I bet on the job and they gave it to me and I never had seen a transloader for vibram.
And it was jointed in the middle and you run it forward and backwards, you didn't turn around.
And it went in like this and you'd get the dipper in and keep raising it up until you got it full.
And if you had any boulders, you had to try to get them off to the side and then you'd run backwards and dump it in the grizzly.
There's a place about as big as this room in the grizzly and they had like railroad arms and it'd leave holes about this big, be about that wide and about that long.
And you'd jump it on top of that.
They made it, didn't make it big enough where you'd get too many big boulders through there.
But sometimes you'd get a boulder and you'd have to beat it up with a hammer to get it through.
How tall was that jumbo?
Oh, the jumbo before you sat and drilled or stood, it wasn't over.
Your feet wouldn't have been over four or five feet off the ground.
But the arms would go up.
You could drill close to 20 foot because I walked on them a few times.
I get so disgusted now because I'm clumsy.
Then I could do anything.
I could walk on them.
I had such a good balance and everything.
So that made the ceilings lift because they could drill up higher, right, with those?
Yeah, if you're drilling in this room and it's high and you wanted to go higher, the first round you'd drill up and down and then the next one you'd be higher and you'd just keep going higher if you wanted to, as high as you wanted to go, as high as you could reach and as wide, make them as wide as you wanted to reach and then make the pillars round or kind of round.
When you were cutting those pillars, how tall were some of them that you were taking the extra rock on?
Well, they was as tall as the ground was.
They had to fit the bottom and fit the top.
I mean, how tall was the ceilings?
Well, it was just as tall as you made it.
So according to where the lead, you know, some ground was maybe 10 or 12 feet high.
Well, it couldn't be less than 12 with a jumbo, but sometime we'd cut ground like eight foot high just with the lead band when you were drilling with a jack-o-leg or something.
You could cut it as high as you wanted to.
That guy who was working in that gold mine out there, I think that day, he was cutting the place about four feet wide and eight feet tall and just falling in that vein, just falling in that vein.
You could see the vein there.
Just one guy was working.
That's all I seen there working there.
I don't know what, I don't know if what the deal was or anything.
Of course, they'd have to get to get it separated some way and everything, all he was showing on there.
Do you know anything about those houses over by the elementary school?
I understand they're miners' houses.
They're brick houses.
They all look quite a bit alike.
We drove past there this week, remember, Dad?
Yeah, there's two rows.
There's one row over there and then there's one row up the side there, up the other street on the side.
And some of them, if they have the original shutters, they have little art deco cutouts.
Yeah.
And all they, the contractor just built those houses and the people rented them or bought them.
I think he just built those houses to make money, you know.
That's probably when the national mines were going good with the cobalt in the 50s or 60s.
Yeah, they'd been there about 50 or 60 years, I mean, when they built them.
They built them since I was in the very town.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
You weren't sure whether they were built in the 30s or not or 40s?
No, I'm thinking...
After World War II?
Some of them, maybe early 50s.
Okay.
That's what I'm thinking.
They just seem like nice, solid little houses, but I didn't know if they had a mining company owned them or not.
Yeah, and that's the problem with me, when you said little.
I've been in them and they are for small rooms.
They got enough room, but they're, yeah, they were just a little small room that you'd want.
When you were a boy, did they have the company store out mining a lot?
Did the mining companies tell you?
They didn't have no company store around here.
They had the company store, we used to go back up there after we moved from Flat River.
We'd go back up to the company store in Deloge.
The company store was over across the railroad tracks, you know, where the main street was in Deloge and the railroad tracks in front of it, and all the schools over there.
There's a new school there now.
Yeah, after we moved down here, because they run it, they'd run a bill.
So the company store was where the new middle school is?
Approximately, it's real close to there.
It's where you showed me.
Well, it's on the other side of the road, though.
On the other side of the railroad tracks?
On across the railroad tracks.
Oh, I know where it is.
There's a lodge there.
Yeah.
There's a lodge building.
It goes to something.
And a park, Deloge Park.
That's right across the street from the school.
It's over the railroad tracks, just a little ways, and the building still stands.
Yeah, the building's still there, because we, after we moved down there, we'd come back up here to the store.
I remember a Tennessee Williams song, and part of the lyrics are, I owe my soul to the company store.
Yeah, that's right.
I've heard that a lot of times.
Yeah.
Did they have, they'd always sold something to you, but they'd put it on a tab, and then was it overpriced?
Well, you could pay for it, but a lot of them did run, a lot of them did run bills, yeah.
So payday, yeah.
Tell them, have you ever got hurt at one time when a big rock fell on you?
Well, there were several times that, yeah, I stepped out one night, I was drilling, and I leaned my jack leg, you could lean it like this, and lean up against the wall, and it'd stay up.
You didn't have to pick it back.
And I stepped back, and I think about it, I had time to drill another round to hold.
I had several behind each other, you hate to drill too many behind each other, because if the first ones don't break, then none of them can break, you know.
But so I was looking around, and about time I looked up, there was a piece about four or five feet wide, and eight feet long, fell right at my feet, where I'd been standing.
But my machine was under the thing a little bit, and it didn't hurt it, it leaned up against the wall in there.
At one time it fell on your nocturnal laser, right?
Yeah, I was just going to work, and I was mining, where you were going to drill, you took a mining board and cut all the loose down.
And I was standing on two rocks there, by the pillar, and I was mining the piece up, and there's a piece up over it, it was about eight inches thick, and maybe eight feet long.
But it seemed to be all right, it looked, you could tell by looking, if it was dried out, you know it was loose, because it wouldn't be, yeah.
And you could hit it with a bar, actually it worked a while, and you could tell.
And I was mining out in front of that, there's a piece over there in the original, I was just going to mine that for a piece, and in a minute that piece up over me fell.
And I was standing up on a boulder, about two feet off the ground, and it hit me on my helmet right on top of the head.
But it had, in some of those places, they had little seams, you could see little seams like, and it split, and one piece went down the front, and one piece went down the back.
And I wound up out about 14 or so out in that black pile, in the dark, and the first thing I did fell to my legs, as I could tell, all right.
And my light was still on my belt, but my light was out, it knocked it off my head, and my helmet.
He gave me that helmet later, it still has the crack in it.
Yeah, crack in top, there's one in my, and it's kept me up front and back, but it really didn't hurt me much, but if it hadn't cracked up, it went down both sides.
And they took me to the doctor, and I was a little bit bleeding in the run, but not much, and the doctor fell on my shoulder, and he said, well, I believe your shoulder's broke.
And he said, there ain't no big knot there, I believe that's broken.
I looked at him, I said, I don't think it is, it don't hurt too bad, and I said, I've got another knot on the other side.
He looked at me, he said, you're made like that, he said, you're all right, you're just made like that.
It wasn't as dangerous as coal mining, but you know a lot of guys that got hurt or got killed while you were working mines.
Yeah, I'm surprised that offhand, I can only think of one guy who got blowed up a dynamite, because you'd tap the dynamite, you'd tap it hard, because the more you got in the hole, the more power you put in the hole.
Yeah, this place here just runs right along Flat River, probably a couple hundred yards to the left as you go up the street to Flat River.
How far does that?
That's a high place, isn't it?
Train track to go down, it goes several miles, right, on the ground, the train tracks?
Oh yeah, I don't know how many miles of track they had in the Lead Belt there, a lot.
You could go, in the Lead Belt, you could go from, to Farmington, to Pemville, they're Farmington on the same ground, on the railroad track, that was probably six or seven miles, and then all around the Lead Belt and out west, you could go out towards Lead, because I worked out there a couple miles from the shaft, there were six.
And you had a hand car that you rode by yourself on the tracks?
Yeah, for a while, at the last while I worked up there, I was working at the bottom of a five and six, and that's where the funeral home is now.
The shafts, huh, number five and six?
Five and six shafts.
That's near, near, it's across from, across the valley from the Missouri Mine State Park there, right?
You can see.
It's right, right after you turn off on the road there to go to the mill, that funeral home is built right on top of five and six shafts.
And that's where I wound up, of course the funeral home wasn't there then, but that's where I wound up when the mines were shut down, I stayed there for six months, and even when they was taking stuff out, I stayed away by myself.
I had an office, the shift boss saw where it was, I had a phone, and I went away, I went from, I was supposed to have been working at number, at Elvin's at number 12, I went all the way over there underground, over there to work, all along there's, I'd say a couple miles.
Was that hand car electric powered from the line up above it?
Yeah, the wheels were on the rails, and you had a pole that you put on top, on the line, yeah, just lined like a street car, and one day once in a while you'd put the pole behind you so it wouldn't come off it, but once in a while it would go around and so you would duck till you got it, you caught it, yeah, cause you'd been in the dark then, cause you're like, it had a light on it when it, that ground, you know, the rail's ground, it was a...
Now when you were riding around by yourself down there, you had to be careful not to get hit by a train down there.
Well, I was kind of worried, cause I was going like these two miles, and there was trains on there, guys with ten cars, them big cars of rock on there, and I really didn't hardly know exactly, you had red and green light, and I didn't know all about them, cause I hadn't been running, but I went right by 17, 17 was where the mill was, they call that 17 shaft, and that's where the mill was, and underground there, I stopped one day, when the mines were still running there, I come by there, and I wanted to see it, and it was like a city, you just wouldn't believe, most of the ground was not over 12 feet high, some of it was like 10, some 12, and they had an old whitewashed, and big lights everywhere, and they had a machine shop, electric shop, a fabrication shop, the carpenter shop was out on top, they didn't have a carpenter shop out there, and it seemed like they had one other shop, and there was a lot of men worked there, and it was just all lit up, I just couldn't believe it. underground?
underground, yeah, there at 17, you know, 17 is where the mill was, you know, when you go up in Flat River.
St.
Park.
Yeah, well that's right there, 17 was the main shaft, go over there by the funeral home, it's about a half a mile that you can sit there, yeah, right underground, there was where all that was, and they made St.
Joe's, you ever see a St.
Joe's show?
They've got one there at the mine, at the St.Pete Park, I mean, so you can go down, they have, you can walk around yourself, but they, the guy's name, Archie Brink, the manager there, he's great, he's, he has got a rock collection that is amazing from Missouri, just amazing, and he, yeah, he could tell you all about the buildings and the mines and stuff, he knows more about mining history than anybody I know.
St.
Joe made all those shovels for sale, they invented it, and they made them, and they had these electric motors on, they'd run out and around, go around, and these are what, like six foot wide by ten foot long or something, these machines, or what are they, yeah, they're better than that, they were, they were at least eight foot wide, they were on the cat tracks, like, you know, and they'd rotate all the way around, and the dipper would have these arms, they'd show it up and get it full, and then they'd roll it over and put it in the cars, the mine cars, and they'd keep, they'd move the cars up, the guy on the motor would pull the neck up, and the next car, and the next car, and the next car, and the next car.
Were those diesel?
No, there was no diesel there.
They were run by electricity?
Electric, electric cable.
Some places you worked, there was a lot of diesel trucks.
The new mines had diesel.
So the smoke would be?
The lead belt, well the lead belt had a few trucks later, they had one truck when I worked at Pemville, but they, they didn't have much, sorry.
Did they have any mules when you first started working at St.
Joe's?
Did they have any mules still on the ground?
There was one mule that they'd kept for, down the place, and he was there for a while.
They said their mules were so smart that they'd have them pull them cars, and if they'd put too much on them cars, try to load them through here, they wouldn't go.
The mules lived underground, I mean they stayed there all the time.
And I also heard, I didn't ever see it, but I heard the guys laughing about, the guy had carbide lights, man did it in, early, and the mules had gas, and they had carbide light, and a flame.
I heard, I never even see it, but.
Fire breathing dragons that shipped out the other end.
Yeah, it wouldn't hurt them because they'd go in the other way, but, and them mules were so smart, if they, they was two ton cars, if they'd put too much on them cars, they wouldn't go.
And his dad worked at the mines, and his father-in-law worked at the mines, his father-in-law was J.C.
Robinson, and he was a carpenter for St.
Joe, most of the time right, but he worked, he worked underground a lot, and his dad worked his whole career, coming from a mining family on both sides.
I'm a carpenter. you you.