Brooks Mine anthracite coal mining tourist attraction in Scranton's Nay Aug Park revived

Aug. 12—SCRANTON — The oldest tourist mine in Pennsylvania is now also the newest.

The Brooks Mine, a model mine in Nay Aug Park in Scranton dating to 1902 but closed for nearly half a century, reopens to the public Saturday.

The mine will open for tours on Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is free.

The nonprofit Underground Miners organization of anthracite coal mine aficionados spent the past 18 months renovating the 150-foot-long mine dug horizontally into a small hill behind the Everhart Museum.

Though the mine tunnel already existed, getting it ready to host public visitors again was no small task.

The group got the idea to reopen the mine in January 2022, when Underground Miners founder Chris Murley of Tunkhannock took a few other members there.

Click the audio player to listen

Murley had founded Underground Miners, which is dedicated to preserving Pennsylvania's anthracite coal mining heritage, in 2002.

With grandparents who lived in Scranton's Hill Section, Murley was familiar with the mine from visiting the park during his childhood in the '80s. At that time, the mine was closed but it was still the highlight of visiting the park for Murley, who peered through locked gates into the black void of the narrow tunnel.

"As a kid, you'd walk up to the gates and you'd look inside, you'd see a black hole and little tracks going in and your mind takes over," Murley told a crowd of 50 people who attended an unveiling Friday.

The group received the go-ahead from the Scranton Municipal Recreation Authority that oversees Nay Aug Park and then secured approval from state mine inspectors.

A group of 16 volunteers started the interior work in March 2022 and chipped away at it every Saturday. They retimbered walls and the ceiling for support, removed rusty rails and installed a new track. They removed a deteriorated steel-frame and wood rail car inside the mine and installed lighting. They also had to blast and hand-dig a second entrance/exit tunnel, about 50 feet long and 32 inches tall, at the back of the mine for ventilation and safety.

"We made it happen," Murley said.

The park authority embraced having the Underground Miners, all volunteers, take on the project, Chairman Bob Gattens said. A reopened mine in Scranton's largest park represents a tangible remnant of the region's coal mining past.

"We're going to reinvent history here and bring it back to life by opening this model coal mine," Gattens said. "We can't forget our past."

The Brooks Mine was never a working coal mine. Reese Brooks, a coal mine owner, opened it in 1902 as part of the Scranton School of Mines to educate the public about the industry. The mine was closed to the public from 1938 to 1945, then reopened and closed again sometime in the 1950s. It was retimbered in the 1960s and remained open until 1975.

The Brooks Mine is believed to have been the first tourist mine in the state, Murley has said. It allowed visitors to walk inside so people could see what it was like underground .

The reopened mine has the same mission, to allow visitors to gain an understanding of, and appreciation for, the miners of yore who not only toiled to build Northeast Pennsylvania but also contributed to the Industrial Revolution that fueled the growth of the United States .

"This coal mine in 1902 was built to teach the children and the families of miners just what their grandfathers or fathers or brothers or uncles went through on a daily basis, how they had to go to a coal mine and suffer just to make pennies to make that family survive," Gattens said. "It's a part of our history that shaped this city, this county and the towns around us. It brought immigrants from around the world here — the Welsh, the Irish, the German, the Italians and Poles — all congregated here and ended up working in our mines."

The Brooks Mine also is the first tourist mine opened since 2002, when the No. 9 Coal Mine and Museum in Lansford, Carbon County, opened in a former working mine.

The Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour in McDade Park in Scranton opened in 1985 and the Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine & Steam Train in Ashland, Schuylkill County, opened in 1962, both in former working coal mines.

Eckley Miners' Village in Foster Twp., Luzerne County, an authentic 19th century coal company mining town dating to the mid-1800s, has been owned and operated by the state as a museum since 1970.

In mine parlance, the Brooks Mine is a drift mine, meaning horizontal. Other types include a slope dug on an angle, a tunnel bored perpendicular to a coal vein, and a vertical shaft.

The Brooks Mine is about 7-to-9 feet tall and 7-to-9 feet wide, with chambers inside near the rear.

The walls of the mine feature two veins of anthracite coal separated by a section of rock. The ceiling of the mine tunnel also contains "fossils galore of vegetation from ancient forests," said Underground Miners member Scott Kerkowski, a chemistry teacher from Dallas. "We always say coal is solid sunshine. That's where it comes from. It was all plant life at one time."

Tobyhanna Twp. resident Lori Bruch, who grew up in a mine company house in Nanticoke and had Polish ancestors who worked in mines, attended the event Friday.

"I have a history in my family in mining, so I'm very interested in it," Bruch, 67, said.

It was her first time inside a mine and she found it enlightening.

"For me, I think about family," Bruch said. "I think about my grandfather. I think about my great-uncle. I think about that history in our community and the importance of understanding what their lives were about."

For information or to donate, see the group's website undergroundminers.com or Facebook page.

The Underground Miners' Brooks Mine restoration crew includes Murley, Banks Ries, Dan Shurtleff, Josh Schoeneberger, Bill Best, Mark Izak, Gerry Babinski, Devin Purcell, Kerkowski, Greg Bock, Justin Ballard, Mike Borzell, Ian Davis, Adam Zuroski, Frank Borzell and Isaac Walker.

Contact the writer:

jlockwood

@timesshamrock.com;

570-348-9100 x5185;

@jlockwoodTT on Twitter.

Start a dialogue, stay on topic and be civil.

If you don't follow the rules, your comment may be deleted.

User Legend: iconModeratoriconTrusted User