Home · The seam
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The seam
Coal hard enough to be worth a railway, thin enough to be cut lying down.
Under the valley floor lies the Arkoma Basin, and in it a coal that the collision which folded the Ouachitas heated most of the way to anthracite. It burned clean, so it was worth hauling; the seams are thin, so it was cut by hand long after machines had taken over elsewhere. The railways came for it, and stayed for the freight.
Everything in the seam
Semi-anthracite
The valley's coal is unusually hard and clean-burning, which is why it was worth moving and why the railways came.
The Arkoma Basin under the valley floor
A subsiding basin filled with sediment, buried deep enough and heated hard enough that the coal in it was driven most of the way to anthracite.
Mines and operators
Who held the leases and worked the seams, and how quickly that changed hands.
Work underground
Thin seams worked by hand, with the conditions and the accident record that followed.
Tipples and washers
Coal has to be sorted, washed and loaded, and the plant that does it is most of what survives above ground.
What closed them
Fuel oil, gas and cheaper strip-mined coal elsewhere, rather than the seams running out.
The Frisco line
The road that connected the coalfield to markets, and set which towns grew.
Sidings and spurs
Every working mine needed its own connection, and the abandoned spurs still show where they were.
Kansas City Southern