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On May 1st, 1900, at 10:28 in the morning, something ignited inside the
Winter Quarters No. 4 coal mine in Carbon County, Utah. At least 200 men
died. It is still the deadliest disaster of any kind in Utah history.

By lunchtime that day there were 107 widows and around 270 children
without a father, in a town of about 1,800 people. The local paper wrote
that every house, without exception, was a house of mourning. Utah ran
out of coffins and had to bring 75 more in from Denver by train.

The company gave each widow five hundred dollars, wiped out the debts the
miners owed at the company store, and reopened the mine 28 days later.
Nobody was ever held liable, even though the state mine inspector had
flagged that exact hazard three years earlier and again one month before
the explosion.

This Labor Day episode is about what happened to those men, what the
company did afterward, and what happened to the two towns they lived in.
Winter Quarters had a main street over a mile long and thirteen saloons.
It was empty by 1930. Scofield has 26 people living in it today. The only
thing in that valley that outlasted everything else is the cemetery.

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