About half past eleven o’clock, on the morning of the twenty-fifth of May, 1812, the neighboring villages were alarmed by a tremendous explosion in this colliery. The subterraneous fire broke forth with two heavy discharges from the low-main, which were almost instantaneously followed by one from the high-main. A slight trembling, as from an earthquake, was felt for about half a mile around the workings; and the noise of the explosion, though dull, was heard to three or four miles’ distance, and much resembled an unsteady fire of infantry. Immense quantities of dust and small coal accompanied these blasts, and rose high into the air, in the form of an inverted cone. The heaviest part of the ejected matter, such as corves, pieces of wood, and small coal, fell near the pits; but the dust, borne away by a strong west wind, fell in a continued shower from the pit to the distance of a mile and a half. As soon as the explosion was heard, the wives and children of the workmen ran to the pit; the scene was distressing beyond the power of description. Of one hundred and twenty-eight persons in the mine at the time of the explosion, only thirty-two were brought to daylight: twenty-nine survived the fatal combustion; the rest were destroyed. Nor from the time of the explosion till the eighth of July, could any person descend. But after many unsuccessful attempts to explore the burning mine, it was reclosed, to prevent the atmospheric air from entering it: this being done, no attempt was afterward made to explore it, till the morning of the last-mentioned day; from which time to the nineteenth of September, the heart-rending scene of mothers and widows examining the putrid bodies of their sons and husbands, for marks by which to identify them, was almost daily renewed; but very few of them were known by any personal mark; they were too much mangled and scorched to retain any of their features. Their clothes, tobacco-boxes, shoes, &c., were, therefore, the only indexes by which they could be recognized.