History
Cefn Coed Colliery was opened as an anthracite colliery by the Llwynonn Colliery Company during the 1920s. Three attempts were unsuccessfully made to sink shafts at Cefn Coed, but it was not until the Llwynonn Colliery company was bought out by the Amalgamated Anthracite Combine of Ammanford in 1926 and high capital investment made, that a break was made in the hard Blue Pennant sandstone. The first coal raised in 1930, with the shaft and workings powered by a steam engine, fueled by the gas form the old workings.
Like much of western South Wales coalfield, the coal was high quality anthracite. The best coal came from the deepest seam called Big Vein, broken into at a depth of 750 yards. Cefn Coed during its working life at depths of over 2,500 feet (800m), was the deepest anthracite mine in the world. Other shafts worked at Cefn Coed included: Peacock, White Four Feet and the Nine Feet. Brammallite was identified in the Dulais seam, by X-ray diffraction by the Natural History Museum, London; making Cefn Coed one of only two sites in all of Wales for Brammallite. However, at such depths and with frequent mining accidents due to methane gas and roof falls, the pit and it soon gained the unenviable nickname of "The Slaughterhouse."
By the end of World War II in 1945 there were 908 men employed. Nationalised by the National Coal Board, continual investment was required to combat the need to keep roadways open at the extreme depths. Changing economics lead to a reduction in the workforce from the 1950s, and the mine ceased production in 1968.
A majority of the men were transferred to the new Blaenant drift mine, built to extract coal form the No.2 Rhondda seam at a shallower depth. One of the two shafts at Cefn Coed was used to ventilate Blaenant, and as an emergency exit, until the closure of Blaenant in 1990.
Read more about this topic: Cefn Coed Colliery Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)