Coal Mine No. 8: when St. Charles dug Michigan's best coal

Most people don’t think of Michigan as coal country, but for a stretch of years the best coal in the whole state came out of the ground near St. Charles. Prospectors found it here in 1896, and in 1917 the Robert Gage Coal Company sank a shaft 200 feet down at a site they called Coal Mine No. 8. The main tunnel off the bottom of that shaft ran about three miles underground.

The work was as hard as work gets. As many as four hundred men worked the mine in pairs, undercutting and blasting coal out of seams that ranged from a foot and a half to better than five feet thick. They shoveled it into cars, and mules and electric motors hauled those cars to the cage, which lifted the load up the shaft to the tipple to be sorted, weighed, and dropped into railroad cars. This was bituminous coal — soft coal — and it was the highest grade dug anywhere in Michigan.

It couldn’t last. By 1931 the country was switching to other fuels, and harder, higher-grade coal from other states undercut the price. The mine closed, and the broader Saginaw Valley coalfield wound down behind it; the last underground coal mine in Michigan, the nearby Swan Creek mine, was abandoned in 1952. A century of fuel oil and natural gas has mostly erased the memory.

A green state marker stands near St. Charles to mark the spot, and the old mine ruins sit within the Hartley Outdoor Education Center, where schoolkids tramp past them on the way to a pond. Underfoot, three miles of empty tunnel still run out into the dark.