Himlerville: Hungarian Cooperative Mining in Kentucky - The Filson ...

520 The Filson Club History Quarterly [October
were nearly impassable because of mud and deep ruts. Adding
to the transportation problems was Martin County's hilly terrain
which made travel difficult in the best weather. Mining
equipment weighing between ten and twenty tons had to be
floated across Tug River and then dragged the rest of the way
by horses through the mud. Thousands of tons of concrete and
brick had to be transported to Himlerville in this way. When the
snows melted in early spring, conditions were so bad that it
took six weeks to transport an extremely heavy piece of equipment
from Kermit to Himlerville. 21 Several pieces of mining
equipment had not been delivered when the Himlerville works
were first inspected on 9 November 1920 by investigators from
the Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals. Yet the im:
migrants would eventually complete this enormous task of building
a coal town.
The Hungarians quickly realized that their major problem
was transportation and that their investment would be worth-
less unless Martin County was connected to Kermit. To accomplish
this, Himler organized• the Kermit-Warfield Bridge Com-
pany in 1919 to construct a steel and concrete bridge across Tug
River between Kermit and Warfield, a small community near
Himlerville on the banks of Tug River. The bridge company was
capitalized at $125,000, and all its shareholders were mine operators
who owned coal and timber lands on either the Kentucky
or West Virginia side of Tug River. Officers of the company
were Daniel Elmer Hewitt, a Huntington, West Virginia, lumber
and coal baron, president; Martin Himler, vice president;
Eugene Lang, treasurer; and M. W. Hale, secretary.
Work on the bridge, which was expected to take ten months
to complete, began in July 1919. By November the engineers had
discovered a bed of quicksand eighteen feet below the riverbed.
Only by drilling to a depth of thirty to forty feet could they
21 Bagger, "Himler," 148; Chapman, "Influence of Coal," 227-29.
22 Kentucky, Department of Mines, Annual Report, 1920, p. 201.
23 "Tug River Bridge at Warfield, Ky."