My father, Leland Powell, never spoke much about the deaths and accidents he witnessed during his more than thirty years as a coal miner in Carbon County. But on a few occasions as we drove north on Highway 6 along the Price River and past the coal-mining town of Castle Gate, he did speak of a mine disaster in 1924 that had a profound effect on him. Born in Price in 1907, as a baby he was taken by his parents in a horse-drawn wagon to their new homestead in the Uintah Basin. By 1923, he was back in Carbon County working as a day laborer at a mine not far from Castle Gate. Although he did not witness the Castle Gate explosion himself, he did see the rescue crews dispatched to Castle Gate on March 8, 1924, to assist in the rescue and then recovery work that began immediately...
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April 01 2024
The Castle Gate Mine Disaster: Reflections on Its One Hundredth Anniversary
Allan Kent Powell
Allan Kent Powell
ALLAN KENT POWELL received a PhD in history from the University of Utah. He worked as a historian for the Utah State Historical Society from 1969 until his retirement in 2013 as Senior State Historian and Managing Editor of Utah Historical Quarterly. Dr. Powell is the author and editor of several books including The Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah's Coal Fields 1900–1933 (1985).
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Utah Historical Quarterly (2024) 92 (2): 157–165.
Citation
Allan Kent Powell; The Castle Gate Mine Disaster: Reflections on Its One Hundredth Anniversary. Utah Historical Quarterly 1 April 2024; 92 (2): 157–165. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/26428652.92.2.06
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