Consumers, Utah: The Gordon Creek Coal Camp That Replaced the Mine Car
Consumers sat at the end of a narrow road up the North Fork of Gordon Creek Canyon, about 15 miles southwest of Helper. It began in the winter of 1921–22 as a handful of miners driving tunnels into a seven-foot coal seam and hauling the coal out by wagon. Within five years it had a steel tipple, a high canyon bridge and underground conveyor belts that, by the company’s claim and the record that follows it, were the first of their kind in a Utah mine. The camp shared a canyon, a school, a hospital and a hall with two neighbors, National and Sweet, and its Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lange are among the best-known images of a Utah coal camp.
Arthur Gibson and the camp of Gibson
Coal outcrops in Gordon Creek were noted by prospectors around 1907–08. The man who turned them into a mine was Arthur E. Gibson, a Price telegrapher and longtime mining man who worked at Spring Canyon. Before the federal Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 changed how coal land was acquired, Gibson put together claims on roughly 1,480 to 1,500 acres. In the winter of 1921–22 he opened drifts into a seven-foot seam he had sampled in 1920.
There was no railroad. That first winter his crew took out about 34 carloads of coal, loaded it into horse-drawn wagons and sent it down the canyon grade to the Utah Railway’s Wildcat siding. The rough camp at the tunnel mouths took the name Gibson.
Consumers Mutual and the rail spur
Wagons could not carry a commercial mine. In February 1924 Gibson and two investors, Donald E. Jenkins and J. Tracy Wootton, incorporated the Consumers Mutual Coal Company. Jenkins became president, Gibson vice-president and mine superintendent, and Wootton secretary-treasurer. The camp was renamed Consumers to match a plan to sell coal more directly to the people who burned it. The mining financier Emil J. Raddatz, who also appears in the story of Dividend, later bought a controlling interest.
A railroad was the other half of the plan. The promoters chartered the National Coal Railway and built about five miles of standard-gauge track up Gordon Creek from the Utah Railway main line near Jacobs, next to Wildcat. The Utah Railway later bought the line and called it the National Branch. One account has coal moving by rail in November 1925; another has early shipments still going out by wagon in 1925, and company announcements of the period point to rail service starting in 1925 or 1926. I have kept the date general. Research also contradicts itself on who built the line: some accounts credit the Consumers promoters, while the history of neighboring National says the National Coal Company and George Storrs’s Gordon Creek Coal Company organized it.
The mine without cars
In the mid-1920s nearly every coal mine in the Rocky Mountain West still moved coal in mine cars, pulled by mules or electric locomotives and gathered into trips. Derailments, bottlenecks and runaways were routine. In November 1924 Consumers Mutual announced that cars would no longer enter its working rooms. Portable conveyors would carry coal from the face to a main belt in the haulageway, and the belt would carry it out to the portals. Consumers was, by the standard histories of the camp, the first Utah mine to use underground belts in place of cars for its main haulage.
Above ground the company hired the Pittsburg Boiler & Machine Company to build a steel tipple, finished in late 1926. It could grade and load coal across five tracks, and the belts from the tunnels fed it directly. To join the coal entries on both sides of the North Fork, the American Bridge Company put up an 80-foot-high double-track steel bridge that cost about $60,000. It was built to carry heavy Utah Railway locomotives and long trains of loaded cars.
Blue Blaze
The company sold its coal under the brand Blue Blaze, promoting it as clean-burning, and in the autumn of 1927 it took the name Blue Blaze Coal Company. The camp’s busiest years came in this period. As the Depression deepened and homes and industry turned to fuel oil and natural gas, the costly plant and the rail line up an isolated canyon wore down the company’s reserves.
On January 31, 1938, Blue Blaze closed the mine and went into receivership. The whole property was sold at a foreclosure sale in July 1938. Terry McGowan, the former superintendent, stayed more than a year to oversee salvage of the tipple parts and underground equipment. A federal suit over $14,361.40 in unpaid lease royalties ended in February 1939, when the company gave up its federal coal leases and left about four miles of branch track in place.
McGowan Coal Company reopened the mine in October 1939. In January 1949 it was sold to the Hudson Coal Company, which was already working the nearby Sweet mine. By then the old way of running a company town was fading: miners preferred to live in Price or Helper and drive in, and trucks were eating into the economics of canyon rail branches. Hudson closed its Gordon Creek workings, and between about 1948 and 1952 Consumers was abandoned, its houses moved to valley towns or torn down for scrap.
Three camps, one canyon
The canyon was too narrow for each mine to build a complete town, so Consumers, National and Sweet shared. National, about a mile east, had the school and the post office. Consumers had the hospital, the doctor’s house, the company store and the Miners’ Amusement Hall, which held films, boxing, dances and union meetings. Sweet, a short distance to the southwest, was a satellite camp where about 200 men lived in tents on wooden platforms and used the services at the other two. Most families lived in company frame houses without plumbing and carried water in cans from standpipes. Lange noted in one of her captions that rent in the camp was $8 a month. In 1930 superintendents and engineers got concrete and sandstone houses with full plumbing on the hillsides above.
A small mixed community lived here: Italian, Greek, Austrian, Croatian and Slovene immigrants, alongside Anglo-Americans and Hispanic miners from southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. The Blue Blaze baseball team played weekend doubleheaders in a regional league on gravel diamonds on the benchland.
Dorothea Lange at the Blue Blaze mine
In March 1936 the photographer Dorothea Lange visited Consumers on assignment for the federal Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration, and made more than twenty photographs. They show miners coming off shift with coal-blackened faces, women on wooden boardwalks above muddy ground and children playing near the mine waste. Her caption for one image describes the settlement around the Blue Blazes coal mine as sometimes called the “dumping ground of the West.” The Library of Congress holds the photographs, and the six camp scenes on this page are hers, colorized with AI.
The camp doctor
Dr. J. Eldon Dorman arrived on January 3, 1937, to be the company doctor for Consumers, National and Sweet, and he ran the hospital until the camp began to break up around 1940. His memoir, Confessions of a Coal Camp Doctor and Other Stories, published in 1995, describes crushed limbs and burns alongside childbirth and sickness from bad well water, and the gap between the managers’ houses and the miners’ rows.
The 1933 strike
The Gordon Creek camps were centers of support for the communist-led National Miners Union in the 1933 strike that shut down much of Carbon County. One source describes an August 27, 1933 clash at Consumers and National, in which Sheriff S. Marion Bliss and deputized men used tear gas on pickets and arrested 68 miners. Another says the strike did not bring violence to Consumers specifically.
Danger underground
The mine cut into the Blackhawk Formation of the Wasatch Plateau, where heavy rock above the coal can cause “bumps,” violent failures of coal pillars. Nine miners are reported to have died at Consumers over the years. They were killed in separate accidents, such as roof falls and equipment, not in a single disaster like Scofield in 1900 or Castle Gate in 1924.
What is left
Most of the wooden buildings are gone. Visitor and survey accounts describe sandstone foundations and concrete basement walls from the company store and offices, concrete footings that held the tipple, reinforced-concrete abutments on opposite sides of the canyon from the steel bridge, graded house terraces with retaining walls and steps, and dark piles of coal waste along the old rail line. A ghost-town visitor describes one partial stone building on fenced property and a more recent shack, with little else beyond foundations.
Later coal operators worked the Gordon Creek field in the 1970s and 1980s and used parts of the old townsite for staging and loading. State reclamation under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act has since collapsed, sealed or covered many of the old tunnel mouths and regraded the portal benches.
Legends and what the record says
The buried payroll. A story says a gold payroll was buried near Consumers during the strikes or the receivership. No record supports it. Blue Blaze was in debt, behind on taxes and federal royalties, and paid in checks and company-store scrip. The company failed for lack of cash.
A lawless camp. Some guidebooks describe daily gunfights. Court records from Price and Helper show the usual small-town offenses of the period: petty theft, bootlegging and brawls. The nine deaths at the mine were industrial accidents.
Timeline
Historic sites nearby
Further reading
Sources
UtahRails.net — Gordon Creek Coal Mines — company history, conveyors, tipple, bridge and receivership
Legends of America — Consumers, Utah Ghost Town — the site and road
Library of Congress — Dorothea Lange, Consumers, Utah, March 1936
Utah Division of Arts & Museums — Life in a Utah Coal Camp — Lange’s photographs
Carbon County genealogy site — 1933 strike — the September 11 Price march
Utah Geological Survey — Bulletin 132 — Gordon Creek coal geology
