A Miner Feat

On the walls of Henry Pohs’s basement are more than 1,000 underground mining artifacts, as precisely arranged as any museum collection. Here you’ll find everything from clay lamps used in the Roman catacombs to rare pieces from a 1917 St. Louis mining convention.

This well-lit subterranean space–a contrast from the dark and dangerous holes miners used to slog through with only the faintest light to guide them–is a sanctuary for a man who’s obsessed with flame lights. For more than thirty years, he’s been driven to collect pre-electric mining lamps.

If you doubt that Pohs takes his subject seriously, just put your hands around The Miner’s Flame Light Book, a five-pound, 800-page tome on the history of mining lamps that he wrote, designed and published himself. Thousands of copies of this labor of love sit in boxes in the basement.

Digging into Pohs’s words, one can uncover a simple explanation for his enthusiasm about mining: “Mining is a basic industry. It’s not basic to man’s nature, but it’s basic to man’s society. Everything that’s been built or developed has come from the earth.”

To his friends and fellow enthusiasts, Pohs himself is a guiding light. “Miners were about the only people around who believed there was something better,” says Pohs’s friend and fellow collector Leo Stambaugh. “If you light that lamp, you’re lighting the same lamp folks used a hundred years ago. There’s a connection to those people.”

It’s a connection that’s earned Pohs the tag, among the flame-light faithful, of the “messiah of mining.”

The book has sold almost 700 copies since its publication in 1995. “It covers more ground than anything,” Stambaugh says. “It stands alone. Nothing even comes close to it. Anyone remotely connected with mining or the mining industry wanted to get one.” Pohs has hawked the book at mining conventions and through word of mouth via his thirty-year-old mining newsletter, The Underground Lamp Post.

But Flame Light is much more than a history of old mining equipment. It’s also a history of mining as economic engine, as science, craft and art.

“That’s how we got to the moon–with technology, all the stuff that was mined,” says Pohs.

The 68-year-old Pohs, who retired several years ago, insists he’s just a regular guy who “plodded” his way through the years (and years) of work the book required. But underneath his workmanlike demeanor, friends see an adventurer who’s traveled across America and Europe in search of flame-light artifacts.

Pohs’s interest in mining came about naturally. In 1948, at age twenty, he began working as a draftsman for the Gardner-Denver Company, a local mining equipment manufacturer. He was an engineer for the company from the mid-1950s until 1981, and over time he became immersed in the history of the industry. Professional duty soon gave way to personal interest, but Pohs doesn’t like to term his proclivity for all things mining an “obsession.” He prefers to call it a “focus.” If so, it’s an intense focus.

His childhood struggles, he says, may explain his adult desire to acquire things. When he was in the first grade, his father suffered a nervous breakdown that essentially left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Pohs and his brother, Frank, had to work nearly full-time to support the family.

“When I was a kid, I had nothing,” says Pohs, who also collects old watch fobs, many with mining designs etched on them, as well as rocks and stamps. “[Mining] was a way to collect something. The idea of putting a collection of materials together is lurking somewhere beneath all this.”

Comfortably ensconced in his basement, Pohs spends much of his day amid hundreds of old safety lamps and “candle sticks”–metal candle holders that look like both a long letter opener and a pair of scissors–cataloguing new items and trading letters with scores of people. In decades of collecting, he has amassed more than 1,000 mining artifacts, including exactly 825 “flame lighting” devices.

There are acetylene lights, calcium carbide lamps and candle sticks of all types, one as long as a bayonet. There are small sculptures depicting miners and a wood carving of Barbara, the patron saint of miners. There are clay lamps from Egypt circa 300 B.C. and an ancient pan lamp from Hungary. He’s got copper lamps from Portugal, which Pohs claims come from the catacombs of the Roman Empire, as well as old lamps made out of beer bottles that came from Mexico and look like Molotov cocktails.

Miners led precarious lives, Pohs points out. As proof, he’s got a sparking wheel, an eighteenth-century contraption that presumably generated sparks bright enough to see by. The inventor, Pohs says, was killed by an explosion from the sparks.

Pohs also owns a cage used for canaries that were kept in coal mines for their ability to detect unsafe levels of toxins earlier than humans could.

What is conspicuously absent from his personal collection and his book is anything electric. Though Pohs claims he had to stop the project somewhere–electric lights came into widespread use in mines during the first half of this century–it’s as if he finds electric light to be the antithesis of the mining ethos and, well, simply mundane.

Stambaugh agrees. “Once you got electricity, you just strung up some lights,” he says. “You didn’t connect with your light. You just flipped a switch.”

“People made glass, rolled metal, and they did it all by flame light,” Pohs adds. “I didn’t want to track electricity. Flame light was interesting enough, a story itself.”

That story provides the foundation for Pohs’s book, which evolved from years of collecting and research all over the world, including trips to private collectors, antique shops and museums such as the Smithsonian and the London Museum of Science and Industry. (“He knew where every antique shop was in the country,” says daughter Mary Ireland. “If we were taking a trip someplace new, he’d find out where the shops were.”) At first he had no idea what the result of his collecting would be–he was mostly doing it for himself–but by the Seventies, much of the book’s core text had been written.

“There were times I thought I’d never get done,” Pohs says of the many years he put into completing the work. But others knew he would. “Henry doesn’t give up,” says Stambaugh. “He was like a bulldog. Either they’d find him by the computer, dead, or he’d pull it off. He’s just like a miner who knows there’s gold nearby. He just keeps digging.”

When he had finished the manuscript and assembled thousands of photos and illustrations–which he drew himself–Pohs tried to get his book published. But no one was interested in so narrow a subject, so he spent two and a half years studying design software. He wound up designing every one of the book’s attractive pages and published the tome himself. The cost: more than $50,000 for 3,000 copies of the book. The money came from a retirement annuity, he says, and every book must be sold just to break even.

While he’s not worrying too much about book sales, Pohs frets about the future of his collection. He’d like to find a private museum willing to display his pieces and not let them languish in some back room. “Nobody would come to see a museum of mine lights,” he says, “but they would come to see a Western art museum with a room of mining stuff. That’s a golden dream, a long way down the road. I haven’t found it yet.