A stockade, armed guards, and a barbed wire fence, which restricted labor organizers, peddlers, and other unauthorized personnel, regulated access to the town.ĭespite the retirement of Colonel Hunter in 1899, Thurber remained a company-dominated community. In 1897 a second industry came to the town, a large brick plant Hunter was also a partner in this operation, which, although it was separate from the mining company's holdings, used clay found on company property. As in the typical company town, low pay, drawn once a month, forced employees to utilize a check system between pay periods, whereby the customer drew scrip, reportedly discounted at 20 percent, for use at the company's commissary stores.
In addition to the mines, the company operated commissary stores. Eventually the strike ended, and the miners and their families moved into the new town. The new company fenced a portion of its property and within the enclosure constructed a complete town and mining complex, including schools, churches, saloons, stores, houses, an opera house seating over 650, a 200-room hotel, an ice and electric plant, and the only library in the county. Thurber of New York, for whom the town was named.Ĭolonel Hunter chose to deal with the dissident miners, who were affiliated with the Knights of Labor, with an iron hand. Following inability to meet a payroll and a resulting strike by miners, the Johnsons sold out in the fall of 1888 to founders of the Texas and Pacific Coal Company, including Robert Dickey Hunter, who became president of the new company, and H.
The force of predominantly foreign workers, many of whom spoke little or no English, enabled the company to maintain a repressive environment for many years. Black miners from Indiana worked in the mines during the labor troubles of the 1880s. Isolation forced the operators to recruit miners from other states and from overseas large numbers of workers came from Italy, Poland, the United States, Britain, and Ireland, with smaller numbers from Mexico, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, and Russia. Mining operations were begun there in December 1886 by William Whipple Johnson and Harvey Johnson. The site of the town is seventy-five miles west of Fort Worth in the northwest corner of Erath County. At that time (1918–20) it was the principal bituminous-coal-mining town in Texas. Though it is a ghost town today, Thurber once had a population of perhaps as many as 8,000 to 10,000.