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January 23, 2026 - For the early part of its history, Brookfield Township, which was founded in 1799, was a rural community economically driven by family farms with a little bit of commerce with outsiders in the center, where stage coaches came through.
The discovery of coal in the 1830s transformed the township in terms of its economy and its culture.
Brookfield Township Historical Society Vice President Jan Arnaut knows this now, but as a kid playing in Brookfield’s significant wooded sections, she “had no idea” about the role or even the existence of coal in the town’s history, she said. Marilyn Yensick, also with the society, believes not much has changed in that regard.
“Children, they have no idea about anything about Brookfield,” she said.
Carol Novosel shows a reporter items her grandfather held onto from when he mined coal.
The society wants young people to know about coal and other significant developments in Brookfield history, and part of that outreach was a program on Brookfield’s coal-mining history on Oct. 25 at the Brookfield Public Library.
Coal was first discovered in Brookfield in the 1830s on the West Hill, and Sharon industrialist Joel B. Curtis opened a mine in 1838 in the vicinity of the Kaleidoscope building on North Stateline Road, the former Curtis School. The mine stretched roughly west to Yankee Run Road and north to Lincoln Street.
The Curtis mine was a drift mine where workers tunneled vertically into the side of the hill and extracted the ore. The bituminous coal vein was four to five feet thick, Arnaut said.
“It was considered really good when you had a vein that was that thick,” she said.
The coal was used by local industries and transported to the Erie Extension Canal in Sharon for shipment to market. In later years, railroads became the chief means of transporting the coal out of town.
Following the discovery of coal on the West Hill, mines started popping up elsewhere in the township, some run by individuals on their farms and others operated by business entities. The Curtis mine operated the longest of all Brookfield’s coal mines, closing in 1877
“Trumbull County led the state in (coal) production in 1875 with 1,065,000 tons,” Arnaut said. “The main production years were from 1870 to 1884.”
In Trumbull County, coal also was mined in Vienna, Hubbard, Liberty and Weathersfield.
The second-longest operating mine in Brookfield was the Brookfield Slope Mine, which opened during the Civil War and was located around the intersection of Bedford Road and Stewart Sharon Road, which was known as Slope Road at the time. At a slope mine, miners dig into the ground at an angle to reach the coal.
Christian and Frank Buhl, who were major customers of the Curtis mine, bought the Brookfield Slope Mine in 1869. The Buhls were Sharon industrialists and philanthropists as the Buhl Mansion, the Buhl Club and Buhl Park can attest. This mine closed in 1893.
The Keel Ridge Mine on the east side of Collar Price Road, between Stewart Sharon Road and Route 82, also was a slope mine. It operated from 1885 to 1903.
Many mines in Brookfield operated for only a year or two.
Coal miners in corporate mines worked 10 to 12 hours a day and were independent contractors, meaning they had to buy their own tools, Arnaut said. They often were paid in “scrip,” a form of money only honored by the mining company.
“They’d get paid with this and have to go to the company store to pay for their equipment, their food, all of that kind of stuff,” Arnaut said. “They had to pay for their housing as well,” and the housing often was provided by the coal company – for a fee.
“They’d never get ahead,” she said of the miners.
Miners at the Curtis mine were paid half in scrip and half in regular money, Arnaut said. “That wasn’t as bad. At least, they could buy things outside of that neighborhood.”
Because the mines needed many workers, they started attracting people from other areas – and other countries. Brookfield saw an influx of English, Welsh and Italian men to work the mines, growing the population and bringing their societal traditions, foods and other cultural components to the community.
In some cases, the miners built neighborhoods. Cherry and Willow streets on the east side of Route 7 south of Stewart Sharon Road were created by mining companies, and the Slope community around Stewart Sharon Road and Bedford Road – known as Salow’s Corners – had a general store, post office, school and two churches, one of which catered to English immigrants and the other to Welsh, during the busy mining period.
In the days before child-labor laws, children also were a key workforce component in the mines. Some started mining as young as 8.
“My grandfather was 13 years old when his father died in a coal-mining accident,” Yensick said. “He had no choice, he had to support his family, so he became a coal miner.”
Whether the worker was a child or an adult, coal mining was a dangerous business. The Brookfield Slope Mine was the scene of a tragic accident. The mine operators were using a small locomotive to move coal out of the mine; it was powered by anthracite coal and gave off a poisonous gas. On July 11, 1877, a hot, sultry day, some workers noticed that foreman John Jones II was missing. Other workers rushed in to look for him and word spread to other area mines and workers from them also came to help. Seven men, including Jones, died that day, and 36 others were overcome by the smoke.
That was the worst event in a sad year for coal mining in Brookfield. Five men died in four other mine accidents that year, from cave-ins and fires.
The significant coal mining in Brookfield ceased around 1880, following local labor unrest and a nationwide economic collapse. The significant source of employment gradually morphed from supplying the coal that powered local mills to working in the mills.
Coal “really drove the industrialization of America,” Yensick said. “The coal was needed for the blast furnaces and the steel mills. The trains used the coal for their steam engines.”
Aside from powering industry, coal had a place in many homes to fuel furnaces. Driving around town, you can still see coal chutes on some homes.
After the cessation of the Brookfield coal mines as a major industry, the mines continued to play a role in Brookfield – sometimes for the worse. Before safety laws governed mining, the mines were not necessarily filled in or their entrances sealed after mining stopped. In 1898, 19-year-old James Ward Clark fell into the closed Cleveland Mine air shaft southwest of Route 7 and Sharon Stewart Road, and died. Perry Coxson died in 1933 when the closed Evans mine west of Sharon Hogue Road collapsed while he was digging for coal.
“My great-great-grandfather was in the mine with him,” said Shirley Evans O’Brien. “When that caved, he started screaming for them to get out. He was running when it was caving and my dad always talked about, ‘Poor Coxson didn’t get out.’”
Her father, Edward Evans, continued mining from that vein on a small scale, she said.
“He ran a car with a cable and that would pull the (coal) basket up,” O’Brien said. “He used to sell it (coal) to families to heat their homes.”
O’Brien’s husband grew up near another mine in town.
“My husband, as a kid, living right behind Curtis, they used to play in the coal mines,” she said. “He used to talk about them shooting rats with BB guns.”
Carol Novosel lives on Lincoln Street – also former mine territory – in a home that used to be her aunt’s.
“When my dad was little in the 1920s and ’30s, his father would lower them by a rope down in the coal mine to take coal out for the house,” Novosel said. “My aunt said, if you had an old refrigerator or washing machine (that you needed to get rid of), there was one hole that was bottomless,” a reference to using mine shafts as refuse dumps.
Every once in a while, a sinkhole develops from a mine that has caved in, and it’s encouraged to have mine subsidence insurance as part of your home insurance policy.
“When the coal mines were built, they would leave pillars of coal” as supports, Arnaut said. “During the Depression and those years that other people would go in, they would, of course, go for the easiest-to-get coal and take it home to heat their homes. They would take that coal (from the pillars), which weakened the mines.”
In 2017, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources reclaimed two sections of former coal mine that had subsided in Brookfield Township Community Park. A contractor pulled out garbage and other material that had been dumped in an air shaft and a tunnel entrance and filled the holes with stone, concrete and soil, officials said at the time.
Arnaut expressed gratitude for the sacrifices of the miners of the past.
“They worked in unsafe conditions, low wages and few regulations,” she said. “Besides mine accidents and mine disasters, coal miners contracted black lung disease. It stunted their physical growth and denied schooling opportunities. Coal mining laid the economic foundation for the growth of Trumbull and Mahoning counties.”
Portions of this story were supplemented by Lois Werner’s book “The History of Brookfield Township Trumbull County, Ohio,” which is available for purchase at Amazon.com. |
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