After the Franklin Mine Explosions, the Company Says the Worst Is Over
Two explosions tore through the Franklin coal mine on a Thursday afternoon, killing pit foreman Park Robinson and injuring nine. The company's manager insisted no more would die — and angrily denied rumors the blast was caused by boxing up a burning seam.
Yesterday failed to record any deaths among the nine men that were injured in the Franklin coal mines by the two explosions Thursday afternoon. C. J. Smith, general manager of the Oregon Improvement Company, said that the reports he had received from the mines did not indicate that more than three or four were seriously injured. None of the reports received in the city yesterday gave any indication that more deaths would be recorded.
The company sent forty gallons of oil to Dr. J. J. Smith, the physician at Franklin, to be used in dressing wounds. The remains of Park Robinson, pit foreman, who died from injuries received in the explosion, will be taken to Kenton this morning, where the funeral services will be held. The mines will be closed for the day.
Coroner Askam was at Franklin all day investigating the case, and did not get through in time to return on the last train.
General Manager Smith was indignant at a report that the explosion was the result of a desire on the part of the managers of the mine to get at a deposit of coal on the sixth level, which was claimed to be on fire and therefore boxed up. "You may say for me," said Mr. Smith, "that the report is untrue from beginning to end. The story has been manufactured out of whole cloth."
“The story has been manufactured out of whole cloth.”
Franklin was a company coal town in the foothills of the Cascades, and its miners — many of them Black workers recruited from the East and Midwest — worked some of the most dangerous seams in the state. The company's instinct to deny the cause of the blast before the coroner had even finished his investigation is a familiar pattern in industrial disasters, from coal mines to refineries.
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