Carrying Coal to Columbus: Mining in the Hocking Valley

As early as 1755, explorers found coal deposits in Ohio s Hocking Valley. The industry that followed created towns and canals and established a new way of life. The first shipment of coal rolled into Columbus in 1830 and has continued ever since. In 1890, the United Mine Workers of America was founded in Columbus. Lorenzo D. Poston became the first of the Hocking Valley coal barons, and by the start of the twentieth century, at least fifty thousand coal miners and their families lived and worked in Athens, Hocking and Perry Counties. Authors David Meyers, Elise Meyers Walker and Nyla Vollmer detail the hard work and struggles as they unfolded in Ohio s capital and the Little Cities of Black Diamonds."

A graduate of Miami and Ohio State Universities, David Meyers has written a number of local histories and various works for the stage. Among the former are Columbus: The Musical Crossroads and Ohio Jazz, while the latter include The Last Christmas Carol, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Condominium Association and The Last Oz Story. For twenty years, he was on the board of the Hocking Valley Museum of Theatrical History in Nelsonville.
Elise Meyers Walker is a graduate of Hofstra University and serves on the boards of the Columbus Historical Society and the Ted Lewis Museum in Circleville. She and her father have previously collaborated on Central Ohio's Historic Prisons, Historic Columbus Crimes, Look to Lazarus, Columbus State Community College, Inside the Ohio Penitentiary, Kahiki Supper Club and Wicked Columbus Ohio.

Raised in Union Furnace (where she graduated from high school), Nyla Vollmer became immersed in the history of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds after moving to Haydenville in 1989. She is a nursing graduate of Hocking Technical College, co-founder of the Haydenville Preservation Society and a board member of the Hocking County Historical Society. Nyla has authored Haydenville: The Last Company-Owned Town, South Perry History and Reflections of Starr-Washington: Union City Schools.