In 1925, four Lisbon residents died a long way from home.

Thomas Wright and his nephews, James, Theodore, and Russell, left their homes in the fields of Lisbon for the coal mines of Cumnock, in Chatham County.

With the increasing mechanization of farming, and improved transportation, there were more opportunities for young men who were willing to leave home and learn new trades.

The men likely wanted more than a hardscrabble farm could offer. They got jobs in the recently reopened Coal Glen Mine, near Sanford. The facility was owned by the Carolina Coal Co.

Miners and their families lived in a village known as Cumnock. No signs of the town remain today, but in its day it was a bustling place, with homes, boarding houses, both “company” and general stores, and other businesses.

On May 27, 1925, residents of the village around the Coal Glen Mine heard three explosions, and saw a plume of smoke pour from the mine entrance.

Laundry was left in washtubs, tools were dropped in gardens and cotton rows, and workers in the half-dozen businesses that made their living off the coal miners ran for the shaft entry, but it was too late.

Changing times

The Wright brothers were from a family of 13 children; in the 1920 census, there were a total of 10 people in the household, including a grandfather.

When their Uncle James offered them a chance at a higher daily wage than the average worker earned in a week doing farm labor, they probably jumped at the chance. This despite the fact Coal Glen was nearly 100 miles from home, and most of the work was far underground.

The census records reveal how the Wright families were good examples of the changing times.

Most of the members of both households could read and write; James and Thomas, as well as their children, were literate. While the children had attended school, according to the census, the adults in both families apparently learned on their own, or were taught by their children.

The senior members of the households - whose names are badly obscured on the census record - were both male, and in their 70s. Neither of them could read.

The state had made strides in public schools in the last decade of the 19th century, and public education for people of all races blossomed after World War I.

With improved education, young people became restless, wanting more than the sharecropper existence of their parents.

The sharecropping system, too, was in its decline, as machines replaced manpower in the fields. While families didn’t need large numbers of children to work their fields, more than one family had a houseful of children, plus an aging parent or two requiring care.

The desire to have more combined with the need to support their families, and many young men, both black and white, left the farms of their birth for jobs in mills, factories, and in the case of the Wrights, the coal mine at Cumnock.

“And there is no tragedy to see”

Ben Dixon McNeill, a reporter for the News & Observer of Raleigh, covered the tragedy for the state newspaper. His stories were telegraphed across the country to other newspapers in the days to come.

He reported that, by nightfall of the first day of the disaster, about 1,000 people - families, miners, and the curious - were around the mouth of the mine. That number grew to 5,000 by the next day. Miners worked two-hour shifts trying to clear the rubble leading to where they hoped some of the trapped miners might be found alive.

The miners occasionally found pockets of poisonous gas, which required them to exit the mine while powerful ventilation fans cleared the air.

The explosion was thought to have been caused by the gas, coal dust, or a mix of the two substances. Rescuers were taking no unnecessary chances, and as the gas pockets were found, they trooped out of the mines and collapsed in front of the crowd of onlookers.

“Beyond them eddies a vast assemblage of people who come hundreds of miles to see a tragedy,” McNeill wrote.

“And there is no tragedy to see. Nothing but the yawning black mouth of the shaft in the center of a roped enclosure.”

McNeill’s report names the known miners trapped in the cave-in, dividing them by race - even those who were brought to the surface dead.

Among the “Negroes” listed trapped were T(heodore).D. Wright, T(homas).N. Wright, and James Wright. Russell is missing from the first list. It’s possible he was the unidentified black worker brought to the surface with the body of Will Irick, a married, 32-year-old man who came to the coal fields from Moultrie, S.C.

The bodies were taken to the only undertaker in the area, but the establishment was soon overwhelmed.

Eyewitness accounts of the disaster’s aftermath referred to bodies being examined by the county coroner in a hastily-erected shelter near the mine shaft. The bodies were then wrapped in blankets or rough-built coffins, and turned over to their families. Later, Coal Glen began supplying pine coffins for the families.

A superintendent at the mine nearly died when he rushed into the shaft after the first explosion.

Once there, McNeill reports Supt. Howard Butler saw six men trapped under debris near the entrance. He was trying to aid the men when a second explosion hit the mine; Butler “was scarcely able to fight his way back” before the third explosion collapsed even more rock into the mine shaft.

A notation at the end of the dispatch points out that mine officials were scrambling to ensure they had correct names for the lost miners. McNeill notes that while officials were confirming the names of the 38 known missing men, “there may be others.”

He was right.

By the next day, 52 miners were discovered to be trapped in the mine. The shaft was closed at 1,000 feet, and had to be reinforced before miners could begin working their way downward.

Rescuers had to break through over 800 feet of crumbling stone, coal and other debris to reach the last of the trapped miners. The entire process was done by hand, and took days.

None of the trapped miners made it out alive.

Tearful trip

State Rep. Edd Nye wasn’t born when the explosion happened, but his father knew the mine fields well.

While the Nye family lived in Lisbon, Burt Nye’s wife was from the village called Cumnock, where most of the miners lived. Burt Nye was a sawyer, and had worked in the Cumnock area providing timbers for the mines and wood for building.

While nothing but the closed shaft remains of the Coal Glen mine today - a timber company owns the land, and with permission visitors can see the old cemetery, and the mine entrance - the area around the Egypt vein was busy in the 1920s.

Plain clapboard houses, similar to mill villages, lined dirt streets. Each mine and each town had company stores, where workers and their families could receive goods on credit, paid for with vouchers from the mining company.

Some homes had small gardens, and farms around the outskirts of the villages often hired the wives and children of coal miners to work in cotton fields.

According to a February 2000 interview with Margaret Wicker, a native of Cumnock, many women were working in the fields or hanging out wash when they heard three explosions from the Coal Glen Mine, and saw a cloud of smoke.

Wicker was seven when the disaster occurred, and was playing “in the dirt” with the young daughter of a mine hand whose mother was working in Wicker’s family’s cotton field. People immediately began running for the mine.

“I know there wasn’t any more chopping that day,” Wicker told the News and Observer.

As the scope of the disaster became known, mining experts came by express train from Georgia, Alabama and West Virginia. Soldiers from Fort Bragg also deployed to the area, providing everything from engineering help to hot meals and manual labor. Several images from the disaster even show Boy Scouts in full uniform at the scene.

McNeill noted that “first aid” stations had been set up around the mine entrance, staffed by members of the American Legion, many of whom had medical training during World War I.

As the rescue progressed, the Legionnaires stayed at the medical station, treating miners trying to open the shaft, but none held any hope for those trapped deep inside.

The community around Coal Glen lost more than half its local income in the explosion. McNeill, who later became a well-known historian and author about North Carolina, used his space in the state newspaper to spread the word about the state of the miners’ families.

Soon donations began pouring in from across the state - food, clothing, and cash were collected b towns, newspapers, civic groups, and churches to help the families of Coal Glen.

Bladen County was no exception, especially in the community that had four sons working in the mines.

When folks in Lisbon, heard about the explosion, Burt Nye gave a man remembered only as Mr. Wright a ride to the mining camp.

Two young boys went along for the ride - Burt Nye’s oldest son, Earl, and J.D. Priest.

“He was an old, old black man,” Earl’s widow, Mary, said. “I don’t know what his name was, but Mr. Nye gave him a ride to go get the bodies.”

The trip should have been an adventure for the boys. The route would go over 100 miles of dirt roads, in a Model T truck.

“The boys were along for the ride,” Mrs. Nye said. “Mr. Nye said Mr. Wright cried the whole way. The boys cried right along with him. They were all torn up.”

While it hasn’t been confirmed in printed records, the “old” Mr. Wright is thought to have been Thomas’ father.

The information Mr. Wright gave the coroner - birthdates, middle initials and marital status - was curious in that it was incomplete. Although both Wright families were literate, it’s possible none learned to read or write until the younger children were born.

After filling out the forms, the coffins were loaded into Nye’s truck, and the travelers headed for home in Bladen County.

Reminders still remain

Coal Glen was opened briefly in the 1940s and 1950s, but closed again after several accidents. No one else died before the state’s Bureau of Mines ordered the mine closed, flooded and sealed.

Modern homes are now scattered along the CC Road, which leads to the old Wright homeplace. The home that replaced the original homeplace is now abandoned.

The burying ground where the Wrights are interred is still maintained to a degree by descendants. Several neighbors of the property didn’t know about the graveyard.

It sits on a slight ridge above a field pockmarked with deer tracks. A huge oak tree dominates the center of the cemetery.

Members of the Wrights, Mathis and other families are interred there. Several were veterans of World Wars One and Two; some of the tombstones date back into the late 1800s, and others are of a homemade hard concrete variety common throughout the area during the Depression.

A number of graves are unmarked, their stones broken or worn away, covered in vines, holly and broomstraw. Some of these may have had wooden gravemarkers, a common practice among both black and white families into the late 19th century.

Thomas N. Wright’s tombstone, beside that of his wife Fannie, gives his birthdate as May 18, 1878, and the day he died, May 27, 1925.

Below the dates is the legend “Rest on, dear husband, we too shall be there soon.”

The three brothers - J. Benjamin, Eddie Russell Wright, and Theodore C. Wright - are buried under a single tombstone.

Across the bottom of the marker is the message “May God’s blessings be with you always - Mother.”

While their birthdates were not included on all four death certificates, the date are included on the tombstone. Why the elderly Mr. Wright didn’t have all the dates when he went to Cumnock will never be known.

Their mother, Gertrude, is buried a few feet away. She was to lose two more children, a daughter named Gertrude and another son, Willie, before her own death in 1968. Her husband, James, died in 1941.

Cedric Mathis’ mother, Oteena, is buried a few yards away. Mathis, who lives near the family homeplace on CC Road, said he remembers hearing the family tell of the tragedy.

“They were an incredible family,” he said. “One thing that I’ve always heard about them - they were a close, loving family.”

Mathis said it wasn’t surprising that the young men followed their uncle to the coal fields.

“They were close,” he said, “and looked after one another. If they had a chance to help the family out, by taking a good job, I know they would do so. Any of them would have.

“It just goes to show that you never know what might happen,” he said. “All life is a chance - we aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, but we have to do our best. I’m sure they never had any idea something like this could happen. All they probably cared about was making things better for the rest of the family.”

Colleen Stevens said she hopes people remember the Wrights.

“When I saw the ages on the gravemarkers,” she said, “I thought, how terrible for such young people to die like that, and nobody remembers they were here.”

Sources for this article included the Paul Wilson Coal Glen Mine Disaster Home Page, N.C. Collection at the UNC-Chapel Hill Library, Bladen County Cemeteries, 1920 U.S. Census Records, The Sanford Herald, and the Raleigh News & Observer.