Coal Township, Perry County

How Coal Township, Perry County began

Coal Township, in southern Perry County, was established in 1872 and named plainly for the coal mining industry that defined it. Its principal settlement, New Straitsville, sits in the township's western part and was founded in 1870 by the New Straitsville Mining Company; it reached 2,782 residents at the 1880 census before an 1884 labor dispute set a mine fire burning underground that has never gone out. The township's population was 939 in 2020.

Settled 1835 (old Straitsville laid out by Jacob and Isaac Strait), platted 1870 (New Straitsville, by the Straitsville Mining Company), incorporated 1872 (struck off from Saltlick Township as a separate township of thirteen sections), by The Straitsville Mining Company laid out New Straitsville; the building of the Straitsville branch of the Hocking Valley Railroad led to the township's organization.

Where the name comes from

Named directly for the local coal-mining industry that was the township's reason for being.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail or treaty site specific to Coal Township is recorded. The nearest documented Native trail and village in the county history, the Shawnee Run Trail and the Shawnee village site, lie in neighboring Salt Lick Township to the east; the county's mound and earthwork concentration is well to the north around Glenford.

Timeline

1. 1835 — Jacob and Isaac Strait lay out the village of Straitsville (the 'old town') about a mile from the later New Straitsville, on a broad ridge; it has only a post office, a store or two, a tavern and a church and fewer than one hundred people for many years.
2. 1861 — The first three-years company of volunteers in Perry County rendezvouses and drills at old Straitsville before taking the cars at New Lexington for the seat of war; Straitsville and its neighborhood are a favorite recruiting ground, far ahead of quota, and the 1883 history says no draft ever fell on its homes.
3. 1870 — The New Straitsville Mining Company founded New Straitsville as a coal town in what became Coal Township.
4. 1871 — The Catholic church, a large brick building, is built at New Straitsville, followed by the Methodist Episcopal church in 1872 and the Welsh Baptist and Disciples churches in 1880.
5. 1872 — Coal Township was organized and named for its defining industry.
6. 1880 — The census counts 2,782 in New Straitsville and 308 in old Straitsville, with 3,836 in Coal Township including its villages; the town has a bank, a furnace, an eight-room union school, four churches, and Masonic, Odd Fellows and Knights of Labor lodges, the last said to have four or five hundred members.
7. 1883 — Coal Township is described as a cosmopolitan place of English, Irish, Welsh, Scots and American-born people with a few of African descent; New Straitsville ships more coal than any other point on the Hocking Valley Railroad, and Bessie Furnace in its suburbs buys the local iron ore.
8. 1884 — During a labor dispute, miners sent a burning coal car into the New Straitsville mine, igniting a fire that has burned underground ever since.
9. 1916 — The New Straitsville School was built in 1916-17 at 402 Clark Street; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 and later rehabilitated as the Amelia Place apartments.
10. 2020 — Coal Township's population was 939; New Straitsville's was 652.

Stories

A fire that has burned since 1884

In 1884, during a labor dispute at the mine that built New Straitsville, workers pushed a coal car loaded with burning material into the mine entrance, setting the coal seam itself on fire. It has never gone out. Longtime residents told of drawing water hot enough from local wells to brew coffee without a stove, heated by the fire burning below. More than a century later the New Straitsville mine fire is still cited as one of the longest-burning coal seam fires in the United States, a slow-motion consequence of the same industry that gave the town its start and, for decades, its living. The town now marks its coal and moonshine history each Memorial Day weekend with a Moonshine Festival, a nod to a different underground economy that thrived here during Prohibition.

The boom town that outran its county

Coal Township is the youngest of Perry County's townships, struck off from Saltlick in 1872, and the county history says the building of the Straitsville branch of the Hocking Valley Railroad and the founding of New Straitsville caused its organization. The Straitsville Mining Company laid out the town in 1870, and it grew, the 1883 history says, 'with a rapidity that no other new mining town in this section of the State had equaled': coal works, stores, shops, dwellings and churches 'as if by magic,' miners and mechanics gathered from nearly all quarters of the globe, a population of 2,782 in 1880 and probably over 3,000 in 1883. The old village a mile away, platted in 1835 by Jacob and Isaac Strait, had stayed a hamlet of under a hundred people, but it had drilled the county's first three-year volunteer company, and the county history claims that no part of Ohio gave a greater share of its people to the Union army. In the new town the Knights of Labor lodge claimed four or five hundred members, and the history notes there had been very serious troubles between miners and operators a few years before, though latterly strikes were rare and short.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · archive.org · upload.wikimedia.org · historic-structures.com

Mostly private wells The water here

• New Straitsville, Village Of90% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)
• Old Straitsville Water Association10% of residentsHocking River Buried Valley Aquifer (wells)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Basic Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-04-10

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