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About The united American : a magazine of good citizenchip. (Portland, Or.) 1923-1927 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 1925)
s I AUGUST 1925 tives on 7,000 acres of coal land owned by the Berger estate, Cincinnati, and about 5,000 acres held by various small owners. There is room, moreover, for further development in the direction of 27,000 acres owned by the- Kentucky Byproduct Coal Company and other vast tracts near by.' The coal vein at the original mine is five feet high and of excellent quality. The roof is exceptionally firm, rendering unnecessary the dangerous and expensive posting. The equipment of the mine is strictly up to date. There is a tipple, with a daily capacity of 3,000 tons, built of steel at a cost of $100,000. It sorts the coal through three screens into different sizes. The dump is constructed so that the cars can be turned without being uncoupled. The shaft, or perpendi cular entrance to the mine, is 76 feet deep and lined with concrete. The stope, carved in solid rock to a depth of 60 feet at an angle of 45 degrees, has room for an elevator, a supply track and a stairway. Before the stope was com pleted 10,000 tons of coal were brought to the surface through the airshaft, to be burnt at the power plant or sold for local consumption. There are Goodman “short wall” machines of the newest type to cut the coal; like all other ma chinery they are operated by electricity, and high power electric drills are installed. A large number of cars, of a" capacity of two tons each, convey the coal to the tipple. Himlerville is a planned community. Some of the miners with families will own their homes; others lease the com pany houses; single ones live at a regular bachelor hotel. The cottages contain two rooms of 13% by 15 feet each and two of 11% by 15 feet each, all rooms having two windows each; kitchens and bath room with tub and shower and hot water supply; plastered floors; heating by gas and' electricity as well as two open fire places for coal and wood; front and back porch. Everything is of fireproof material. Each house has a little flower garden in front, vegetable patch arid accom modation in the rear for cows, pigs and poultry. Beside these standardized houses men may build their own homes accord ing to taste; but it is noteworthy that the old frame dwellings purchased from natives are always supplanted by more ambitious hygienic structures. There is a headquarters building,' housing the offices of the company in the upper story- and a general store in the lower. The latter sells everything from chewing tobacco to millinery and magazines. It has its own refrigerating plant and a rest room for women. The cooperative, however, permits the operation of indi vidual stores for profit. The evils, moral and hygienic, of the boarding house system are countered by the erection of a bachelor’s hotel, equip ped with baths. There is a two-story club house, containing a library with the best of classic and modern English and Hungarian literature and scientific re ference works; an auditorium, seating eight hundred, for amateur theatricals (in which Hungarians excel) and movies. THE UNITED AMERICAN In addition there is a billiard room and a meeting hall, which also serves as ball room. There is a great school with a nine-month term (the county pays the teacher’s salary for six months, the com- pany supplements it for three) and a high school was opened in the fall of 1922. A remarkable feature in these days of quasi prohibition is the rigor with which alcoholic drinks are banned from the settlement. Himler once discovered that one of the most prominent members of the settlement, who, pending completion of the bachelors’ hotel, kept a boarding house for the men, was selling moonshine liquor by the glass. Himler summoned the man to his office and gave him forty eight hours to sell his property and quit the colony under the alternative of being turned over to state authorities. The evening of the second day found the man on the other side of the state line. His absence was inquired about at a director’s meeting.. “I kicked him out. He was selling liquor to my miners,” was the curt explanation given by Himler. It was sufficient. Martin Himler knows his Hungarian miners—and after all there is not much difference in this respect between the Hungarians and those of other nation alities. He is aware what a powerful factor the home-making homestead-own ing instinct is in the European peasant. Instead of thwarting that instinct, and thereby increasing the factors that make for unrest, he chooses to convert it into a stabilizing asset. He says in an article on the housing facilities at Himlerville, published in his weekly newspaper: “Many of the miners at Himlerville have grown so fond of the settlement that they have decided to make their perma nent homes there—rather an exceptional thing with miners, too. For miner are wont to roam from one place to the other —dissatisfied with work or treatment, or simply in quest for a better life. The majority of the miners at Himlerville do not want to roam any longer. They found the soil upon which it is worth while' to build their homes for good. They bought lots at Himlerville and built their houses upon them. Both lot and house are owned by the miners. Everything is done to suit their own taste; so that the Hungarian in America has at last lived to dwell in his own home and to water flowers in his own garden.” * * * The principal value of the Himlerville experiment, then, as far as Americani zation is concerned, is in the organized attempt to bind the immigrant to the' country by giving him a stake in the land, by affording an outlet to his instinct for ownership and home-building, by con triving a compromise between his old' and his new mode of life and by giving him a new sense of independence and importance. It may be added, to reas sure those who believe in the conven tional type of Americanization, that only men in posession of their first papers are eligible for holding stock in the Himler Coal Company—a logical enough stipulation, as only permanent settlers, are desired. An evening class in English P^ge Seventeen and civics for adults is conducted in the school building by the secretary of the company. Will. the experiment of the Martin County cooperative pioneers succeed? The answer depends on the standards by which success is measured. Martin Himler does not offer the workers a get- rich-quick scheme. He warns them in advance that there is hard work, a fight against odds. The first cooperative coal mine in America is frankly an experi ment. But its significance cannot be expressed in tons of coal mined, nor in wages paid. What Himler tries to do is to make men, not owners of wealth, but masters of their own destiny. The significance of the Himlerville venture is moral as well as economic. UNKNOWN By Ella M. Hazen I crossed a barren field in war-scarred France Toward evening of a gloomy sum- mer day; Poor, spindling weeds grew sterile soil, And rank grass stretched its snares . across .my way; Stumbling, one hand outflung to stay my. step, I touched a leaning wooden cross that seemed To shrink amid the tangled growth. A blur Of white against the gathering dusk, it gleamed. I bent above it, and with eager hands Pushed matted grass and wind-blown leaves apart, And found one word, dim written, half defaced — “Unknown.” The word leaped out and struck my heart “Unknown.” What mother, undiscour- aged, still Day after day hopes in a hopeless quest! “Unknown.” No tears to bless his lonely grave, No love to cherish his last place of rest! Just then a sudden rift, a lifting cloud! A ray of light straight leveled at the sod Fell on the cross. Beneath the one sad word I saw more words: “Unknown known to God.” Oh, sudden radiance through the gath ering gloom! Oh, ray of glory in the twilight dim! God keeps the secret of that lonely place. Ah, sleep — in peace — for known to Him! Empty girls. — Little Harry had just returned from his first party, His aunt asked him: “Harry, did you have a good time and did you dance with the girls?” “No, Auntie, I didn’t dance once, and there were lots of empty girls, too.” — From Everybody’s Magazine.
