Down a farm lane near Lisbon Crossroads, past farms, logging operations and country homes, is the final resting place for four local men who died in a Chatham County coal mine nearly 81 years ago.

When the nation’s eyes were riveted to the recent mine accident in West Virginia, Colleen Stevens remembered finding out four members of the Wright family in the Lisbon community were killed in a similar catastrophe.

The news coverage brought to mind a burial ground on some property she and her late husband once farmed. Stevens said she “couldn’t stand” to see the gravestones covered in weeds, so she began clearing some of the area.

“I was cleaning up around the cemetery,” she said, “when I saw on their tombstones what had happened. Someone later on told me how the local men had gone to the coal mine for work, and were killed in the explosion.”

Thomas N. Wright and his three teenage nephews were killed when the Coal Glen mine exploded on May 27, 1925. A total of 53 men that day.

Profitable, but deadly

When the coal mines in Chatham County were reopened on a large scale in the early 1900s, the owners found themselves in a state with a ready supply of labor.

While the boll weevil hadn’t yet decimated cotton farming, modern farming techniques were slowly eliminating the sharecropper system which had fed many poor white and black families for two generations. Increasing industrialization - like the cotton mills in Bladenboro and elsewhere - also drew young men with promises of good money and jobs that didn’t rely on the weather.

The end of World War I, and the manufacturing advances that came with that conflict, created a class of young men willing to learn new skills, and leave home to use those skills.

The boom times of the 1920s also meant people were ready and willing to invest money in industries that required coal for electricity. The owners of the Carolina Coal Co. decided they could succeed where others had failed.

North Carolina’s Egypt mines are in a 12-mile wide vein of medium-quality coal. Commercial mining efforts started in the early 1800s, according to the N.C. Division of Archives and History. The vein is the only significant coal deposit in the state, and has been occasionally tapped since colonial times.

The mines were always plagued with accidents and explosions, but operations there continued sporadically though the century. The state mined coal there during the War Between The States for use at the Wilmington shipyards and in state-owned blockade runners .

Coal Glen was just one of several mines in the Egypt area. Several coal mining towns - Cumnock, Asbury, and Farmville, to name a few - grew up around the operations.

Accidents were common; according to research done by Gordon Anderson of the Sanford Herald newspaper, a 1900 explosion killed 23 men at the mine. A 1920 explosion killed two and injured several others. Victims of other explosions are buried in the Cumnock cemetery.

But nothing as deadly as the 1925 disaster had ever been reported at the Egypt mines.

The incident is credited with paving the way for workplace safety laws in North Carolina, as well as laying the groundwork for today’s workman’s compensation program.

Out-of-work farmhands, though, were likely not worried about such things. Not able to get the safer, better paying jobs in cotton mills, the idea of $2 to $7 a day was worth the risk of working hundreds of feet underground, surrounded by poisonous gases.

‘Gone For Egypt’

Although they likely had heard of the previous disasters - if not through newspapers, then after they arrived at Coal Glen - the Wrights probably just wanted jobs.

Opportunities weren’t great for young men of any race in Bladen county in the 1920s. The three young men came from a family with 13 children, according to Georgia Mathis. Her husband, Rev. Cedric Mathis, is the son of one of the Wright sisters.

The Wrights lived in a farmhouse off the CC Road. Rev. and Mrs. Mathis live near the family homplace today.

“It’s an old story with the family,” Georgia Mathis said. “They went up there looking for work.”

Like dozens of other young to middle-aged men who went to work for the Carolina Coal Co., the Wrights may have wanted work that was a change from the fields tilled by their fathers and grandfathers.

The historical record doesn’t tell us how the Wrights heard about the opportunities at Coal Glen. Recruiters visited “whistle-stop” depots in rural areas, drumming up workers for companies seeking cheap labor. Posters were also often sent to country stores in isolated areas, promising good wages for a good day’s work in plants, mills, and mines far from home. Help-wanted notices were also sometimes sent out via telegraph and mail to small-town newspapers. It’s very possible that Thomas Wright, the uncle of James, Theodore and Russell, went to work at the mines first, then later got the boys jobs.

Gone for Egypt

According to a 1920s newspaper account, young men who left for the Chatham coal mines were said to be “gone for Egypt.”

The Wrights may have ridden a train from Rosindale station to Sanford - some company recruiters used such inducements, then deducted the train fare from the worker’s pay. The men may have hitchhiked, but it’s equally possible they walked the 100-plus miles to Coal Glen.

Thomas Wright was 49; James, the oldest of the boys, was 23. Theodore and Russell were 18 and 16, respectively.

Since the Wrights were black, few if any records are available about the men. Their death certificates read their place of burial as “Rosindale, N.C.” It was a common practice in the early 20th century for county coroners to use the name of the nearest post office or railroad depot when reporting burials.

Outside of the references on the tombstones - which couldn’t immediately be located recently - the only available records for the Wrights are their death certificates from Chatham County.

Those show that all four men were born in Bladen, and that Thomas was married.

Of the 53 men who died at Coal Glen that day, only 19 of the victims had birth dates listed on the death certificates. Mine officials and surviving friends couldn’t even give an age or hometown for two of the men, Isaac Hays and Albert Holly.

Records do show that 27 of the 53 men were white, and 26 were black, or “colored”, as they were called on the death certificates). The youngest victim - Russell Wright of Lisbon- was just 16. The oldest was 65-year-old James Nabors, a black man from Alabama. Most of the victims were in their 20s.

Unlike a modern disaster, where DNA can be used to identify a body, many of the Coal Glen victims likely didn’t know their own birthday. As homebirths were still common at this time, it isn’t unusual to find the birthdate slot empty on death certificates, especially when people died far from home. For black families, birth records are often even harder to find.

But two of the Wright’s birthdays were listed.

Thomas was born May 18, 1876, and James was born March 21, 1902.

Were it not for a heartbreaking journey to the Carolina coalfields from the pine forests of Lisbon, those dates might be missing, too.

Sources for this article include the Coal Glen mine Disaster Home Page, N.C. Collection at the UNC-Chapel Hill Library, Bladen County Cemeteries, The Sanford Herald and the Raleigh News & Observer.