WHAT IS BONEY COAL AND WHAT WERE THE BONEY DUMPS?

"Boney" (or bony) is a type of coal that contains more rock than coal, and it was once sorted out and discarded. In the days before cleaning plants, "boney pickers" labored inside the tipple and separated good coal from pieces of slate, rock, and sulfur. The thankless job paid so little that usually young boys and older men performed this task. Many boys under the age of fifteen used to work up to twelve hours day until laws were passed that required boys to be fifteen years old. Later, the number of hours that boys worked were reduced to protect their health and allow them the time to get an education.

There was a time that the term "boney picker' denoted a person who was lazy. Older men sometimes chose to be a boney picker to earn just enough money to buy liquor. The term also denoted someone who was poor, because many poor people used to scour the "boney dumps" to pick out usable coal from unwanted coal.

Nowadays, boney coal is crushed into a powdery form and burned at electrical generating plants.

As an aside, there was also a time when young boys were used as chimney sweeps, because their small bodies could fit inside of chimneys. Once inside, they used a special broom to remove the soot from the walls of the chimney that had built up over time. (If chimneys weren't cleaned, smoke would not be able to escape and therefore would back up into the house.) Unfortunately, these boys would breathe in a lot of fine soot that collected in their lungs. Many of them developed a bad cough and many had trouble breathing. Many of them also died young, as young as the age of twenty.

THE BONEY (OR BONY) DUMPS ABOVE SAMPLE RUN

In the mid-1950s, it was decided to dump boney coal onto the large grassy field at the south end of lower Second Sample Run. What was once a baseball field and a playground area for children turned black overnight. Some children continued to play there, and they usually went home with black stains on their clothes instead of the usual grass stains.

In addition, boney was also dumped onto the side of a hill just outside of Mine Number Two. In time, the boney grew to the size of a small mountain. After more time the mountain began to smolder. The weight of all of the boney placed tremendous pressure on the coal on the inside of the gigantic pile, causing spontaneous combustion to occur. Inhaling the fumes, which consisted of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide that smelled like rotten eggs, caused the nostrils and throat to burn and the eyes to water. There were always several small fires and hot spots that released heat and smoke like a volcano. When the caustic smoke mixed with the rain it would help to funnel sulfur into Two-Lick Creek. (This was before the term "acid rain" came into vogue.)

In 1970, the United States Government formed the Environmental Protection Agency, Those put in charge of this bureau issued new laws for those companies, to include coal-mining and strip-mining operations that had damaged and polluted the land, the water, and the air. Obviously the boney dumps in Sample Run were cleaned up (most likely during the late 1960s, early 1970s), because they are no longer there today. The south end of Second Sample Run is again a grassy playground area, and a sign reads: Sample Run Recreational Area (est. 1969). Families who play and picnic there should think of those coal miners and their families who also played baseball and picnicked there one hundred years ago.

Here are a couple of photos of boney dumps that still exist in Indiana County (albeit in remote places).

A Boney Mound

A Boney Field

Sample Run Recreational Area Today

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