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A picture of the old Steiwell mine and it’s crew. Often young boys were used in the mine as shown up front. The
lunch buckets held their food in the upper deck and their water for the day in the bottom pail.
The miners are wearing lard oil lamps. The
mine was powered by a steam engine.
The railroad was completed from Little Rock to Clarksville in 1873. It was completed on to Fort Smith in 1874.
Along about this time Vina Weathers met the man of her dreams. They went together for quite some time. He had asked her to marry him and
they had set a wedding date. He took sick and the day before they were to be
married he died.
In December of 1876, George Willford built a house about a mile up the railroad from Josh’s house. The railroad went right through Josh’s
land. The next year, George built a store. At the same time the Steiwell’s began operating a coal mine. The railroad then put in a switch to
accommodate the output from the mine slope. This switch was called
Whalen Switch. Lots of people came to work in the mine and a town began
to spring up along side the railroad tracks. Since the switch was called Whalen Switch, then that’s what they called the town. The mine
field was called the Eureka field and some people called the town Eureka.
Three or four saloons sprang up around this little town. The first one being owned by a man named Arron Matthews. The trains had been using wood to fire the boilers but now that the coal mines were in operation at Whalen Switch,
they changed to coal
for fuel.
In 1878, Henry and Vina were living in the log house in the bottoms. Henry was still running the cotton gin and still had sharecroppers
farming his land. Billie, Robert, Mattie, and Evaline’s son Walter, all colored people, were some of Henry’s sharecroppers. If they had
their own horse and seed, Henry would take ¼ for the rent on the land.
Henry was shipping his cotton on riverboats. One of the riverboats was named "Rose City". It cost $2.50 a bale to
ship cotton to New
Orleans.
In 1878, the town surveyed and streets were marked off. A train depot was built next to the switch. The train
stopped at the depot and
delivered the supplies for the people. Several people from the Cottonwood community
moved to Whalen Switch within the next year. It came a
flood that year in the bottoms and that may have been the
reason they moved out. Also they could get supplies out here off the train. Vina
and Henry moved from the bottoms into the house with Josh and Tenny, because of the flood.
In January 1879, Josh bought 4 lots in Whalen Switch, from Elizabeth Shark and her husband, for $375. Now that
they had the land to move
the house on, Henry and Josh started tearing down the log house and moving it. The main
part of the house was 20 by 20 feet, but Henry had
built rooms on the sides over the years. The house was again
getting close to the riverbank. It took several trips in the wagons to move all
the logs out of the bottoms. Each log was marked, as before, so it could be put back together exactly as it had been. They faced the house
toward the south this time and built a porch on the front. A kitchen and another room was added on the back. On the side two bedrooms
were
built, one on each story. The fireplace was built on the western side of the house. The house was built on two of
the four lots Josh had
bought, and the other two lots were used to keep the horses. They dug a well on the south side
of the house, which was convenient to water
the horses. This all took until April when Josh had the land recorded. In the mean time, they all lived in the Bates house.
At Christmas time in 1878, the people of Whalen Switch held their first Christmas Tree. It was held in the train depot.
The Weathers
family was living about a mile away from the depot and I feel sure they were at this first
Christmas Tree.
In April of 1878 or 1879, Henry started running a
store in Whalen Switch. It is not known if he built the
store or bought it. This store ran for about five years and stood where Bently Yates supermarket is today in Coal Hill. Henry hired his
son-in-law, Fieldon Hackney as the clerk and bookkeeper for the store. Some of the people who
traded at the store were John, Jim, Dave, and
James Jackson, Bud and J.D. Hunt, Nat Butts, Jerry and James Allen, F.S. Hackney, M.S. Senters, Hennetta Mathis, E.H. Walker, John Martin,
Walter and Eveline Weathers (colored people),
George West, Ben Walton, also colored, Wiatt West, John Parker, and Jack Conway.
The store stood on a lot 25 by 94 feet. The store building was about 24 by 36 feet. |
