There are many complications when it comes to the events of the Monongah Disaster. From conflicting contemporary accounts to knowledge permanently lost with the long since dead, Monongah is a true quagmire. This is why this Timeline is not a formal and completed presentation. It is constantly “live” and, therefore, subject to change.
It takes more than one person with a want to learn and know mixed with just the right amount of OCD to solve these issues, though many have tried. It will require many minds, many perspectives, and lots of troubleshooting and we may still only be left with a “best guess” in the end. That’s just human history for ya.
But it will take all of us and it is on this page that YOU can get involved with helping to right a few wrongs of the past and it shouldn’t cost anything more than our combined brain power. It is VERY possible that you know something or could see something that no one else would or could which is why every possible mind and perspective matters.
We will be right; we will be wrong; we will think we are right then have to admit we were wrong, but its no big deal. Despite popular belief, being wrong or making a mistake does not discredit anyone or anything; it is simply human and it only devalues a perspective and person if we allow ourselves to let it do so. Often, you don’t find what is right until you’ve been wrong at least a dozen times already. And that’s good. It means the WANT to know is there and that is what matters the most. Not the want to be right or wrong, just the want to know. That’s all learning takes: the WANT to know rather than believe.
This page is going to be dedicated to presenting individual posts/writings on each issue and having an open discussion in order to troubleshoot them. Some of them have already been included in the timeline with a note that it is this author’s narrative of events and it will be discussed later in a “Issues” post. Others I have omitted from the Timeline entirely until an “Issues” post is made and this issue can have many minds review and process its information.
Below is a list of issues which have already come up in the timeline. Posts on these issues will begin sometime in January or February of 2020. First I’m going to finish presenting all of my current research in the Timeline, then we will dive into these problems one by one once I know you have most, if not all, of the same resources and information that I have.
If you would like to get a head start on thinking about some of these issues, that would actually be really cool. Familiarize yourself with this Timeline and Bibliography in the mean time. I know it seems like a lot of information at first glance and it can be quite intimidating, but if you try starting with the things that personally interest you about this event, you’ll find it can be more exciting than intimidating.
Once you’ve given the Timeline and Resources a few reviews and feel comfortable moving on, you can refer back to this Issues page and those listed that have not been fully omitted from the Timeline which are presented below (they will update and increase as the Timeline progresses).
Issues with the Monongah Timeline:
* = Issues which have been omitted from the Timeline
- December 6, 10:20 am
- The runaway train of 15-19 loaded coal cars
- What was going on in #2 mine?
- Peter and Stan Urban at 4 pm
- Interviews with the Associated Press
- The “1,000” number
- The coupler in #6
- Using inaccurate contemporary reports to your benefit
- The Hubris of Monongah
- John and George Tomko*
- The corpse wagon wreck
- The first 24 hours of the morgue*
- Charles Honaker
- The body count and order of recovery
- The fire in #8 on the 8th – cover up or dramatic irony?
- John Neary
- The report by Frank Haas
- Family histories and the human gap
- Monongah’s Black / African-American / “Colored” Miners
- The Joint Legislative Committee
- The cemeteries, the mass grave, and the potter’s fields
- The Glass Strike in Clarksburg*
- The “Mixing & Matching” of Bloody December’s disasters*
- The presence of Boardman, Byington, and the Red Cross in Monongah*
More on the Monongah Disaster of 1907
How Death Gloated!: A Timeline of the Monongah Disaster and Bloody December of 1907
Who is Guilty?: A Timeline of January 1908 and the Coroner’s Inquiry
The Monongah Disaster 