12/28/2003
James Kinney Farmstead main house and summer kitchen longwall mining damage pictures.

Diary Entry:

8:00 AM, Claude Luke from the coal company called to ask about the house. He said they were 35 feet past it already. I told him the pendulums were right on center and no problems were seen. 8:10 AM Kurt Stubbs here to tighten the cables, he said there was no outside damage. I went to get my cordless phone from the dresser and found pieces of plaster on it. I looked up to see a major crack in the ceiling above which stretched across the wall! I could hear cracking and thumping sounds coming from the other rooms and found the ceilings upstairs were all getting cracks running across them. The hall was very bad and the pendulum had moved west an inch! I talked with Kurt and he said no outside damage yet but we went in the summer kitchen and found the pendulum had moved southwest an inch and it could be felt that the building was tilted. The door was stuck in the museum room. Claude Luke came at 9:00 AM. Gave him the tour. Ceilings and walls getting worse. We observed the pendulums in the barn had moved and the longwall was not yet even under the barn. He said it was a ground swell ahead of the dropping earth. He said it will go down after the mining has gone past it which will be tonight. Mrs. Helen Stanford came out to help me use drop cloths to cover more of the area it looks like will be hit by falling plaster. The room above the kitchen has now had a major loss of plaster. We had to move my computer, desk and books out from under and cover the bed and floor and closet doors (original hand painted wood work on these) Cracks are now appearing above door and completely across the ceiling now. It is wrinkling the new ceiling paint I put on just last summer when this room was re-painted. Bill and Eileen Wise came over for the tour this afternoon. Bernice Bartels and Shirley took the tour of the house and summer kitchen. Mrs. Bartels took a lot of pictures. I have taken over 100 digital pictures with Ron's camera. When I got into the 2nd room (door was stuck) of the summer kitchen we found a huge crack running from the outside wall down the middle of the wall. Outside only one or two bricks were broken,near a window. Same area inside had plaster cracked so this is a structural problem. Otherwise no foundation stones or major brick loss on outside of these two brick buildings. The main barn pendulums have moved back to their starting point by 5:30 PM. Channel 9 ran a little information on the damage, they said they are coming out tonight to run a "LIVE REPORT" at 11:00 PM. Later note: Nate Cline of Channel 9 came out and took a video and interviewed me for the live report. He said he was shocked at what he saw. Mr. Cline had been at a number of our Drovers Trail Festivals and appreciates preservation of the history of our area. There were no ODNR people here today, they are either off for Christmas or due to health problems.

Floyd Simpson