The Thurber coal district sprang to life in the late 1880s in northern 
Erath County, Texas, some seventy miles west of Fort Worth.

    The mines were opened by the Texas & Pacific Coal Company to 
fuel the locomotives of its railway, whose tracks crossed the state from 
Marshall to El Paso. The company also built the town of Thurber to 
service the mines. It then imported workers from distant points, 
eventually including some twenty nationalities, whose old country 
ways contrasted sharply with neighboring farm life.

    John Spratt grew to manhood in Mingus, just three miles north of 
Thurber during the 1920s. His chronicle of the Thurber district is not 
only a nostalgic trip back in time but also a case study of the impact of 
technological change on one part of modern America.

_________________________________________________________

JOHN S. SPRATT, SR. was a professor of economics at Southern 
Methodist University. He died in 1976. HARWOOD P. HINTON is 
professor emeritus of history at the University of Arizona and was one 
of the senior editors for the Handbook of Texas. T. LINDSAY BAKER
is director of the W. K. Gordon Center for the Industrial History of Texas 
located in Thurber, Texas.


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