Bartley mine disaster marker preserves names of 91 miners lost in 1940
A Bartley marker beside Route 83 names the 91 miners killed in 1940, and points back to the methane blast that turned a deep shaft into a mass grave.
At the intersection of West Virginia Route 83 and Bartley Hollow Road, a historical marker stands beside a monument in the park that carries the names of the 91 miners killed when Pond Creek No. 1 exploded in Bartley. The marker, erected in 1975, gives McDowell County a public place to confront one of its deadliest mine disasters, not as an abstraction, but as a list of names carved into stone.
The explosion came on January 10, 1940, inside a deep shaft mine nearly 600 feet down in the Pocahontas No. 4 seam. The operation belonged to the Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Company, an Island Creek Coal affiliate, and the blast killed 91 men while 47 escaped. Rescue crews spent five days recovering bodies from the mine.
Investigators blamed methane gas for the explosion. The coal dust in the mine had been treated with rock dust or crushed lime, a safety measure meant to keep dust from igniting and spreading a blast. That detail places Bartley in the center of West Virginia’s long argument over mine safety, where the question was not only what exploded, but why the men underground still died in such numbers.
The human toll reached beyond the mine itself. The Bartley disaster came only three months after a school bus wreck killed six children in the same community. One local family lost both a father and a son in the explosion, a reminder that the disaster did not strike a nameless workforce, but households already carrying loss.
West Virginia’s mine-disaster record reaches back to 1883, and Bartley belongs to that longer history of fatal work underground. The monument in Bartley keeps the disaster in public view, but it also does something more specific: it preserves the names of the dead in the place where their deaths changed the county’s memory of coal, risk, and responsibility.
For McDowell County, the marker is not just a memorial. It is a reminder that the cost of coal was measured in men who never came home, and that the record of what happened at Bartley remains visible where Route 83 meets Bartley Hollow Road.
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