National, Utah: The Brick-and-Concrete Coal Camp in Gordon Creek Canyon

National was the third of the three small coal camps squeezed into the upper reaches of Gordon Creek Canyon, a few miles west of Helper. Its neighbors were Consumers, less than a mile up the North Fork, and Sweet, just off a side canyon. Unlike its frame-built neighbors, National was built largely of red brick and concrete block, and by most accounts it kept the most masonry above ground when the camp died. At its busiest, around the end of World War II, it held perhaps 250 people.

A coal mine entrance in Gordon Creek Canyon in winter, with rails curving past it and a mine car at right. The camp and date are not recorded. Colorized with AI; the colors are an interpretation.Original photo: Utah State Historical Society

Williamson’s claim and the Sweet brothers

Coal was found in Gordon Creek in 1907 and 1908. The tract that would hold National was staked by an independent prospector named Williamson, who had too little money and too much mountain: the nearest railroad was about nine miles of desert away by horse-drawn wagon, and the claims sat idle for more than a decade. The federal Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 opened public coal land to competitive leasing, and operators moved in. George A. Storrs organized the Gordon Creek Coal Company, and the coal operator Frederick A. “Fred” Sweet and his brother William H. Sweet gathered leases in the North Fork and a neighboring canyon.

The National Coal Company was incorporated on January 2, 1920, to take over an earlier National Fuel Company’s assets and to finance a railroad. In August 1921 it teamed with Storrs’s Gordon Creek company to begin grading what became the National Coal Railway.

The National Coal Railway

Money and rock slowed the road for four years. Utah’s Public Service Commission approved it on March 12, 1925, and Utah Railway crews began laying standard-gauge track on July 6, 1925, working west from a new junction at Wildcat siding. The first trains ran September 18, and the line hauled its first revenue coal on November 9, 1925. The Utah Railway leased it from January 1926 and owned all its stock by March 1926, calling it the National Branch. The line crossed the canyon on a high double-track bridge to reach the mine mouths on both sides.

A brick camp

The mine itself began shipping in August 1927. The company built an electric plant, shaker screens, a timber-and-steel tipple and electrified underground haulage. Fred Sweet ran it as president until illness forced him to resign on January 17, 1935; C. D. Craddock took over.

The town was built to last longer than most. Offices, officials’ houses and multi-family apartments were put up in red brick and cast concrete block. Indoor plumbing was reserved for supervisors and the apartment blocks; most miners lived in company cottages or boarding houses with outdoor privies and shared standpipes. The camp’s people came from many places: Anglo-American miners, Slovenes, Croats, Italians, Greeks and a few Japanese workers. Immigrant families are said to have built outdoor domed ovens behind their houses to bake bread, and to have kept vegetable plots along the washes.

Receivership and a second life

The Depression, cheap oil and gas, and heavy debt wore the company down. It stopped all underground production on July 23, 1938, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation took the property in foreclosure that December. In March 1940 the tipple was taken down and the underground machinery, wiring and yard track sold for salvage. One source adds that a quantity of National’s structural steel was sold for scrap export, including to Japan, at about $20 a ton just before wartime trade bans; I treat that as reported rather than proved.

In May and June 1940 Carl Nyman, a Price businessman, bought the coal rights from the RFC. He built a smaller loading plant, and the Utah Railway laid a new 540-foot spur with room for nine cars, finished on November 9, 1940. Shipments resumed on November 12. The mine ran through World War II. In 1949 Nyman’s holdings went to the Hudson Coal Company, a Sweet-family company that already owned the nearby Sweet mine and, by then, the old Blue Blaze property at Consumers.

Postwar demand dropped as railroads switched to diesel and homes to natural gas. Hudson cut back, and by about 1950 the town was empty. Crews stripped the machinery over the next few years, and in July 1954 the Utah Railway dissolved the National Coal Railway and took up its rails and ties.

Three camps, one canyon

Consumers, National and Sweet sat within less than two miles of each other, and the canyon was too narrow for each to have a full town. The companies shared what they could. Consumers had the hospital and the amusement hall; a consolidated school served all three. Each camp kept its own store and water supply. Dr. J. Eldon Dorman, who arrived in January 1937, treated all three camps under the usual company medical plan paid for by payroll deductions, and described the work in his memoir, Confessions of a Coal Camp Doctor.

The Gordon Creek camps fielded baseball teams that played rival company clubs from Standardville, Castle Gate, Sunnyside and Kenilworth.

The 1933 strike

In August 1933 miners of the radical National Miners Union struck at Spring Canyon, and the Utah State Historical Society records that NMU miners at Consumers, National and Sweet soon followed. They wanted union recognition, an end to forced buying at company stores, independent checkweighmen and the end of scrip. One source describes mass pickets at the mouth of Gordon Creek Canyon, a force of deputies under Sheriff S. Marion Bliss, evictions of striking families and a tent colony near Spring Glen and Helper. The strike ended with the more conservative United Mine Workers recognized across the county.

Seven deaths

Mining the Castlegate and Hiawatha seams meant gas, coal dust, bad roof and the pillar failures called bumps. According to research, the mine inspector’s figures count seven deaths at National, against nine at Consumers and 17 at Sweet. Flash floods and mudslides periodically damaged roads, trestles and buildings. The railway left four retired boxcar bodies at National in 1928 as section sheds.

What is left

Most accounts agree that National preserves the most masonry of the three camps. Reported remains include roofless shells and partial walls of red brick and concrete block on the central bench, sandstone foundations, heavy concrete footings from the tipple and loadout, cellar pits and the line of the railroad grade with its culverts and bridge abutments. The mine openings were sealed and backfilled under state reclamation programs, and Sweet and Consumers were largely recontoured by later mining.

Timeline

Historic sites nearby

Further reading