Ten Names from Henry Clay

Ten Men Lost

Ten men died in the Henry Clay Colliery disaster of June 10, 1873. The Sunbury Gazette’s report four days later preserved their names and described death by suffocation and drowning. It also showed how unsettled the first explanations could be: lamps and mine gases were described in ways that did not fit together cleanly. An inquest had begun, but that newspaper account did not provide a final verdict.

The later official report supplies a second ten-name list: John S. Hays, Michael Mench, Enoch Megenski, Lawrence Rogolskie, Anthony Harris, William Drumheiser, Daniel Paull, Nicholas Paulus, Michael Deia, and Conrad Drumheiser. Several differ from the newspaper’s spellings, and Michael Mench appears where the paper listed Isaac Mousch. The differences should remain visible rather than be silently standardized. The official list records how the investigators named the dead; civil and family records are still needed to settle each name.

The report distinguished the immediate effects of the disaster. Conrad Drumheiser, the inside mine boss, was killed and burned in the explosion. The other nine men, it said, suffocated from the gases that followed. It recorded seven widows and twenty children left orphaned, giving the loss a dimension beyond the mine’s casualty count. Those are the report’s family totals, not a complete list of the people who depended on each man.

Airflow and the Inquest

Ventilation lay at the center of the inspector’s explanation. The report said the fan’s direction had been changed before the accident so that air was forced down from the upper level into the slope workings, instead of drawing air out. Investigators believed the change helped gas accumulate in abandoned workings. After the explosion, the report said, the fan’s operation was changed again to clear the affected workings and subsequently continued as an exhaust.

The report also described an inquest held on June 11 and 12 and summarized the jury’s finding. According to that account, Conrad Drumheiser entered the old workings with an open flame, ignited accumulated gas, and caused the other deaths when harmful gases were forced into the men’s workplaces by the reversed fan. That is the official report’s account of the jury’s conclusion, not the complete testimony or signed verdict. The report then turned to harsh personal criticism of Drumheiser, a distinct part of the inspector’s commentary rather than the summarized finding.

Together, the newspaper and the official report preserve different moments: the first news of a terrible loss and a later explanation of what investigators believed had happened. Keeping them together makes the story fuller without pretending that the early paper already contained the final findings. Above all, both accounts return attention to ten men and to the families whose lives continued after June 10.