Building a New Breaker at Cameron

A new breaker began taking shape at Cameron Colliery on October 1, 1936, according to the News-Dispatch's 1964 history. The account placed the decision during the Stevens Coal Company's lease and said Stevens agreed to extend it by three years while building the new plant. The date marks the start of construction, not a completed breaker already operating in 1936.

The next installment described the breaker as an all-steel structure constructed in 1937. New coal cleaners used water to remove slate and culm from raw coal. The retrospective gave the cleaning capacity as about four hundred tons an hour and reported a water rate of three thousand gallons a minute, figures expressing the scale of the plant as the paper remembered it.

The account put the expenditure for the breaker at $250,000 and described new facilities to meet an increasing truck trade. These included a loading area along Route 61, then known as Route 122, and chutes beneath the breaker. Later in 1937, officials were said to have decided to reduce remaining fire risks by installing more steel steps and flooring. The construction story was a sequence of work and changes, not one interchangeable date for planning, building and improvement.