James Somerville Quigley (1875 - 1914)

Born 3 Apr 1875 in Parish of Millburn, District of Fauldhouse,Linlithgow, Scotland

Ancestors

Died 19 Jun 1914 at age 39 in Hillcrest, Alberta

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Biography

James Quigley died in a coal mine in Hillcrest, Alberta on 19 Jun 1914

In 1891 James was sixteen years old and was employed as a coalminer.

James, a supervisor, was killed in the Hillcrest Mine Disaster along with his brother, Thomas. The worst coal mining disaster in Canada occurred in Hillcrest, Alberta, on Friday June 19, 1914. A total of 189 men died. 130 women were widowed and 400 children left fatherless. The workers were members of the United Mine Workers of America and among the other mining communities in the Crowsnest Pass -- Burmis, Leitch Collieries, Maple Leaf and Bellevue -- Hillcrest was considered to be the safest, best run operation of them all. There were 377 men on the Hillcrest Mine payroll and the average wage was a respectable $125.00 a month. The Hillcrest catastrophe occurred just before the maelstrom of World War I, and perhaps as a consequence, was forgotten by the Canadian public. Fifty years later, author and historian Frank W. Anderson researched the story of what happened at Hillcrest, and in 1969 he wrote Canada's Worst Mine Disaster.

In 2005, a documentry film, The Devil's Breath: The Story of the Hillcrest Mine Disaster was released. Written and directed by Steve Hanon and starring Christopher Freeman, the 48 minute documentry tells the story of Canada's worst mining disaster.

Web Resources

• [Hillcrest Mine Disaster]

Sources

Scotlandspeople, http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ (Statutory Births 1875_673_02_0019), courtesy of Jacqueline Hewitt, Personal communication (Feb 5, 2012).

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Eugene Quigley for starting this profile. Click the Changes tab for the details of contributions by Eugene and others.