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.