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Gatherings From the Pit-Heaps; Or, the Allens of Shiney-Row, by Coleman Collier
Gatherings From the PitHeaps Or the Allens of ShineyRow by Coleman Collier Author:James Everett General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1861 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: INTRODUCIION. Thf . history, as recorded in the following pages, embraces a period of eighty years, commencing in 1750, and ending somewhere about 1830. At the earliest of these periods, the coal-fields on the Wear were not so extensively worked as those on the Tyne. In 1773, there were only thirteen collieries on the Tyne; in the year 1300, there were upwards of thirty. In 1828, they had increased to forty-one on the Tyne, and eighteen on the Wear; in all, fifty-nine : producing 5,887,552 tons of coal. The coal produce in Northumberland and Durham was, in 1854, no less than 15,420,615 tons ; and now there are in Northumberland and Durham, 283 collieries : this is the number under inspection in Northumberland and South Durham. In 1854, Mr. T. Y. Hall stated the number of collieries in the Great Northern Coal-field to be about 136, the number of firms working these 80, and the number of pits for sea-sale to be about 200. The two leading owners are, the Marchioness of Londonderry and the Earl of Durham, who then owned eleven and eight respectively. Glancing over the " Mineral Statistics " issued annually from the Mining Record Office, they appear every year, to become more complete in every division, and may now (1858) be regarded as embracing every important branch' of the mineral industries, -- the returns of which are of special interest to the miner, the smelter, the metallurgist, the engineer, the manufacturer, and the political economist. When it is recollected, that the British miners have been searching our native rocks for metalliferous minerals, since the- daywhen the merchants of Tyre suppli...« less