Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1917 — GOOD JOKE ON A RAILROAD [ARTICLE]

GOOD JOKE ON A RAILROAD

Eastern Company Unwittingly Gives Away More Thpn 500,000 Tons of Coal. ' A million-dollar joke on the Delaware & Hudson Railroad company, perpetrated away back in 1906, when the railroad generously deeded 1,200 acres of mountain land to the commonwealtlr otPennsylyaniaas e site for the State Hospital for CJritqlnal Insane, came to light at Eairview the other day when a coal dealer tried to make a contract with the hospital to furnish its coal. The dealer learned to his amazement that the hospital has on its grounds more than 500,000 " tons of chestnut, pea, buckwheat and other steam sizes of coal, all within easy haulimg distance of its, powerhouse. Upon inquiry he discovered that the hospital got the coal along With the land without paying a cent The explanation is that when the land jyas deeded to the institution coal mines threw away every year thousands. t of tons of coal In the culm dumps, then thought to be useless, but Which are now yielding large returns. In 1906 the world had not learned to use small steam sizes of coal. The mines were yielding so plentifully then that grades of coal as large as chestnut were frequently dumped into the culm bank. Before- the Delaware A- Hudson turned over theland to the state, it used the mountain on which the hospital is now situated as a dump. The road had a gravity line to carry coal from its mines at Carbondale to Honesdale. In 1905 this tine was abandoned and a steam road built, and this made the mountain useless to the railroad company. But in the nine years that the gravity road was in use the road had filled swo large ravines with culm. _ The thought that this might be valuable never entered the heads of the raifroad officials, nor even of the state officials who accepted the grant of land for Pennsylvania. Bur a few years later, when the hospital was constructed, a marked change had taken place in the value of culm. The hospital authorities found that they had enough fuel in the two ravines to last them, at the lowest estimate, fully 30 years.