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There was a time not that long ago that dinosaurs roamed our land, and I was lucky enough to spot them in the wild a few times. I even got to ride one once. They had names like Big Muskie and the Gem of Egypt, and they towered over everything around them. The dinosaurs I speak of were not living animals, but man-made giants that moved around southeastern Ohio to get to the coal buried deep underground.
One of the interesting things about being a journalist is you get to do things and see things that most people, at most jobs, never get the chance to do. A freelance assignment for the Buffalo News led me to Cadiz and a group of retired coal miners who met me at a greasy diner to talk about their time on the big shovels.
We then headed out in the woods to find one. They wanted to show me what they had spent their lives working on. We went down a dirt road, rounding a curve, we came upon the weirdest thing I have ever seen in the woods. Like a 6-story building, one of five giant shovels sat abandoned in place in the middle of nowhere. They looked more like the AT-ATs from Star Wars than a tool for scraping tons of earth off of coal. The shovel, and others liked it, were designed to strip dirt and rock from the top of the coal seams so that the black fossil fuel could be removed to burn and produce energy that powered homes and factories for generations. This particular shovel had simply been parked and had stood silently at that point for years.
If I wanted to see something special, they told me, we would have to travel some more and hike through a farmer's field to the edge of a working strip mine. We could hear the Gem of Egypt before we could see it.
When we got to the edge of the field, there it was, working away in what amounted to a giant hole in the earth. It could grab 200 tons with each bite, so it was literally moving a mountain while I stood there. It went into service in 1967 and operated until it was parked in 1988. Rising 20 stories high, it weighed 7,000 tons.
Several other giant shovels operated in the hills between Cambridge and Wheeling. On Jan. 5, 1973, two of them, the Mountaineer and the Tiger had to cross I-70 to get to coal on the other side. Giant berms of earth were laid over the highway, traffic was rerouted around the zone and late one cold night the two shovels crossed the major east-west highway.
It was interesting to see both the abandoned shovel in the woods and the operating one from a distance. I wanted to see one up close, I wanted to be on one.
I hatched a plan a few years later. Big Muskie, the largest dragline shovel ever built, operated north of Washington County. It exposed coal that was transported by truck, train, and then conveyer belt across land and water on its way to the Muskingum River Power Plant that operated north of Beverly and Waterford. We made a few calls and we got an invite to visit.
It stopped operating just long enough for us to climb on a staircase that had been lowered for us to climb up. It started moving again before we reached the top step.
The machine was huge. Standing 22-stories high it could remove 325 tons of earth and rock in a single bite. With the giant boom it was nearly 500 feet long. Operating from 1969 until 1991, it moved twice the amount of earth as was removed to build the Panama Canal. It moved 483 million cubic yards of rock and earth during its life. Think of that the next time you are hauling one yard of dirt home in your pickup truck.
Once inside, it felt more like being in a factory than a moving machine. Cables and giant spools filled most of the enclosed space. The operator of the giant bucket sat in a room-size cab high above the ground that he was removing.
To operate, Big Muskie used a massive amount of electrical power, as much as 27,000 houses. A drop in the demand for high-sulfur coal helped to make the shovel unprofitable to use. Once the coal mining operation closed, coal for the Muskingum River Power Plant was sent by train to the site, traveling twice per day through Marietta on its way up to the plant. The power plant closed in 2015.
After sitting idle for years, the machine had to be removed as part of the reclamation process of the land.
The one-of-a-kind machine would be cut up in 1999 and sold for scrap like the others.
Only the giant bucket was saved. It is now the centerpiece of the Miners' Memorial Park west of Caldwell where people can marvel at what is left of the dinosaurs that roamed and removed the land.
The land that it once worked on is now park land, including land used by The Wilds for animal conservation.
The era of giants crawling over southeastern Ohio is over. I'm glad I got to see some of the giant dinosaurs before they became extinct.
Art Smith is online manager of The Times, he can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com.