Coal Miner

Coal built Carbon County, and it took a heavy price for it. From the late 1800s, miners from across America and dozens of countries came to dig the seams of the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau — coal that heated homes, made steel, and generated power. They worked in cold, wet dark among explosive gas and shifting rock, and many did not grow old: Utah's worst mine disasters, at Scofield in 1900 and Castle Gate in 1924, killed hundreds. This memorial is for all of them — the killed, the crippled, and the slowly poisoned by black lung.

What the plaque says

When coal mining started in the Bookcliff and Wasatch Plateau back in the late 1800's many miners from different ethnic groups from America and countries from around the world came to Carbon County to mine the coal to provide for their families, heating of the homes, the making of steel, the production of electricity and other products. These miners were exposed to cold, wet harsh conditions, bad top and ribs, explosive and poisionous gases, confined conditions with mining machinery and coal dust. This memorial is dedicated to all miners who paid the ultimate sacrifice with their lives and to all miners whose lives were shortened by crippling injuries, natural causes from mining conditions and miners pneumoconiosis.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Prehistoric Museum at USU Eastern — steps away
  A small-town museum punching way above its weight in dinosaur science
• Price — steps away
  A gritty coal mining town with a surprisingly excellent dinosaur museum
• Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry — 20 mi
  The densest concentration of Jurassic-era dinosaur bones ever found

More markers nearby

• Immigrant Monument — steps away
• Carbon Tabernacle/Price River Valley — steps away
• The Price of Freedom World War I Memorial — steps away
• Coal Man Machine — steps away