Mike Burk, Greg Gdula and I were on a hunt for the most valuable mineral resource in the history of the United States.
But we weren’t crawling through some dark, twisted mine passage searching for gold, opals or emeralds.We were riding bicycles on a blue-sky Saturday morning between the neighboring communities of Connellsville and Dunbar.
After following the Great Allegheny Passage for a couple of miles, we turned onto the Sheepskin Trail toward Dunbar, rode another 1.5 miles then turned off the Sheepskin onto an ATV track. Almost immediately, we spotted our mother lode, set into a long hillside about 50 yards away.
Each year during this transitional season between the snowmelt and the greening of the landscape, Greg, Mike and I get together for what we call a “heritage hunt.” During this brief time of year, the landscape lies bare, revealing its past through manmade scars, remnants of structures and half-buried artifacts.
Mike’s a retired teacher and U.S. Army colonel, who enjoys history. Greg’s an active outdoorsman and naturalist. They’re long-time friends with personalities that couldn’t be more different.
In the past our hunts have occasionally involved long hikes over treacherous ground. Some years we’ve endured cold, wet conditions.
But not this year. Not only was the weather beautiful but we were able to ride to within yards of our destination: old beehive coke ovens, dating to the decades following the Civil War.
But weren’t we hunting the nation’s most-valuable mineral resource? Yes, and we’d found it. The Pittsburgh Coal Seam and the coke that came from it was far more valuable than any gold rushes.
The 38,000 beehive coke ovens of the Connellsville District produced the world’s finest fuelfor steelmaking and – at peak production in 1913 – supplied half of the blast furnaces in the entire nation.
During that periodour nation was industrializing at a unparalleled rate. These brick-lined ovens fired fortunes, fed thousands of families for decades, and generated new communities around Chestnut Ridge.
Our mother lode was an uneven line of semi-circular openings in the hillside, partially caved-in ovens still lined with bricks symmetrically set on end. Three of the ovens still were in remarkably good condition with intact interiors and a facing that still tied the three together with a continuous exterior “yard wall.”
“Look at the inside. It’s perfect,” Mike marveled, standing outside the opening of one of them.
Beehive ovens were so-named because their shape resembled a beehive – a cylindrical base, topped with a hemispherical “crown.” At the top, a 17-inch-diameter opening, called a “trunnel head,” provided a port through which the pulverized coal was dropped into the oven.
A rectangular opening in front would be partially bricked in, during the coking process. A small opening provided a controlled draft for the intense fire that burned off the impurities. The fumes smelled like rotten eggs; the work was hot and hard.
Regional tourism and historical preservation groups are restoring the exterior appearance of these three ovens this year and establishing an interpretive trail from the Sheepskin to the oven bank. Planners hope to have the project completed by this fall.
Just beyond the Sheepskin trailhead in Dunbar, a full-sized replica of a beehive coke oven has been created by the Dunbar Historical Society (DunbarHistoricalSociety.com).Together, these two locations, only a mile apart, will do an excellent job of interpreting one of the Alleghenies’ major claims to industrial fame.
But one member of our group was not impressed: “Too much history, not enough nature!” grumbled Greg.
That probably means next year’s heritage hunt will feature another long hike over treacherous ground in wet, cold conditions.
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To see what coke ovens originally looked like, go to ExplorePAhistory.com and put “Connellsville coke” in the search field.