Article by Linda Digby, Executive Director of the Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site outside Drumheller, Alberta, Canada
The “make do or do without” generation did what they had to in order to make their lives a little easier. With overcrowded living quarters, poor roads, and cold weather, coal miners had to be inventive.
As a boomtown, housing was scarce in the early 1900s in Drumheller, Alberta. Thrift and creativity was the norm. After the first mine opened in opened in the Drumheller Valley in 1911, men flooded in from all over the world.
One miner recalls the community of East Coulee, which mushroomed to 3500 people: “This town was crammed from rafter to rafter with men. You could not find a place to sleep. Sometimes the mines had to provide bungalows.” Sharing a house with other miners worked best when they worked opposite shifts; while one guy was at work, another guy could sleep in the bed. Another housing option for miners was bunkhouses.
Naturally, most men wanted their own house. Many were big on motivation to build, but short on money to buy materials. Subsequently they sought out cheap building materials. Free was even better. By cutting willows along the river, and filling in the cracks with mud and manure, a shack could be built with no money at all. One miner remembers how men built shacks out of scrap wood. Another reminisces: “Of course if it wasn’t nailed down, dad would steal it.” Fortuitously, there were stacks and stacks of rough lumber around every Drumheller mine.
This lumber was in the form of “boxcar doors.” A brief explanation is necessary here. All the coal produced in Drumheller was hauled to market in boxcars. Boxcars, of course, have sliding doors on each side, and coal was loaded through these doors. The trick was, as the boxcar filled up, coal would spill out the doors. The solution was to slot in temporary “boxcar doors” (sometimes called coal doors or grain doors). These 2 x 7 foot doors were made of rough lumber nailed together.
When the boxcar was full, the car was closed up with the wooden doors inside. These wooden doors were stacked near railway tracks anywhere that boxcars were loaded or unloaded. They came and went, and didn’t seem to belong to anyone in particular. And there were heaps of them everywhere. Best of all, this lumber was just the right length for a dwelling. So after dark, when few people were around, a miner would find his way to the closest mine and help himself to some materials for his building project. Once the main shell of the structure was up, it was quickly tarpapered to disguise it. Then they would plaster and white wash the walls of their home.
A typical shack was 10 x 14 feet at the time, and just the height of boxcar doors. One local speculates that 2/3 of the houses in the valley were made like this. The make do or do without generation saw everything as potential something else. When a miner married or brought over his family, he could put on an addition. If he had saved enough money, he could build a bigger house, and save the original shack for a summer kitchen. One miner’s wife recalls: “It was a hard and at times a tragic life but it was also a good life with close relationships made by many.” Many houses in the Drumheller Valley still have a core made of boxcar doors.
Copyright 2006 Drumheller Community Futures and the Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site