Free Bus Tour
(Saturday, May 15, 2004):
Meet at 8:30 a.m. at Briceville Elementary School to start the tour. Briceville is located 4 miles southwest of Lake City off I-75 Exit 128 and Highway 116. Stops along the bus tour will include the abandoned Fraterville Mine and cemeteries where the miners are buried (i.e. Briceville, Fraterville Itinerant, Leach, Longfield). Ten of the miners left farewell messages before they suffocated. Tracing paper and charcoal will be provided for you to create a copy of one of the farewell messages inscribed on a headstone. Buses will return to Briceville Elementary School by noon.
Put on your walking shoes and bring your cameras. The tour is free, courtesy of the Coal Creek Watershed Foundation, Inc. Seating is limited. To reserve a spot on the buses, call Carol Moore at 865-584-0344 or email at clmoore@geoe.com.
Knoxville Actors Co-op Original Play:
An original play about the surviving widows and children of the Fraterville miners will be performed at 8:00 p.m. on May 14 and 15 at the Black Box Theatre in Knoxville, TN. Tickets are $12 and can be reserved at actickets@yahoo.com or by calling 865-909-9300. Read more info about the making of the play.
For more details, visit the web site at www.coalcreekaml.com.
Dezern family descendants on the
100th
anniversary tour. Five Dezern brothers and two of their
brothers-in-law perished in the 1902 disaster.
Did you know that the Fraterville Mine Disaster of 1902 remains the worst disaster in the history of mining in the South? The official number of fatalities is listed as 184 with no survivors. Newspaper articles from 1902 list the total dead at 214, accounting for unnamed transient miners who also perished. Only three men were left alive in the town following the disaster. The dead miners left nearly 1000 fatherless children.
One of the miners killed in the disaster, Powell Harmon, lived long enough to write a farewell letter. In it, he told his sons to never work in the mines. Nine years later, his son Conda Harmon died in the 1911 Cross Mountain Disaster in Coal Creek that claimed 84 lives.
In the early 1900’s, if you wanted to support your family in Coal Creek, you mined coal. Today, an education provides students with unlimited opportunities as evidenced by Powell Harmon’s great grandson who owns a software development company.