Llewelyn Johns

Llewellyn W. Johns (born November 10, 1844 in Pontypridd, South Wales; died February 4, 1914 at The Elms) was the chief mining engineer for the Pratt Coal and Coke Company.

Johns was the son of William and Catherine Hopkins Johns of Glamorganshire, Wales and was the product of a long line of mine engineers. With the field crowded by his brothers, he took to speculating and amassed a small fortune as a concessionaire to mine operators. He supported the miners during the strike of 1850, but never recovered his lost business. He proceeded to train in engineering at the Western Academy in Bath for fifteen months before withdrawing to help his family by taking a job at a government chain works in his home town. From there, he was consigned to work in the mines himself. His health deteriorated, though, and unable to secure a better position, he made his way, at age 18, to Liverpool to seek passage to America.

Johns arrived in New York Harbor on April 3, 1863, Good Friday. He took a room at a boarding house on Greenwich Street with the last of his funds. He spent the next day walking around the city until he found a surveyor working in Central Park. Within a week he had earned a full-time position with T. H. Tomlinson, but left after three months, apparently infected with a restless need to see more of the country, and to spend his funds as quickly as he could earn them.

Johns worked for the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Allentown, Pennsyvlania, and then in the coal mining district of Wilkes-Barre. In 1864 he moved to Chicago to work for the Lake Shore Railroad's car works, then to Omaha, Nebraska, where he helped construct bridges for the Union Pacific Railroad, traveling with its crews to Cheyenne, Wyoming and Ogden and Salt Lake, Utah. Hearing of gold found in Montana he drove an ox-team three hundred miles to Helena where he was lucky to find a position assisting an Englishman residing there.

The next spring, Johns made his way to the Placer Mines in Lost Chance Gulch. He redeemed an abandoned claim and worked it successfully, taking $15,000 in gold dust. He invested in a partnership with a sawmill operator to build a 12-mile long flume. The project ran out of funds when it was only half-completed, though, and Johns, again penniless, borrowed three dollars from a friend at Deer Lodge and took the stage to Pioche, Nevada, working the mines there through the winter to acquire enough money to return East.

After returning to Pennsylvania in 1868, Johns worked in mines and helped build cars for the Honeybrook Coal Company. He was soon promoted to the position of mining and mechanical engineer for the company and remained there for two years before going to Lime Ridge to assist Major W. R. Thomas. Thomas left in early 1872 to participate in construction of an iron furnace at Rising Fawn, Georgia. Johns intended to follow him, but stopped on the way at Warrior to assist J. T. Pierce in the construction of coal mining works. In the fall he stopped in the newly-laid out city of Birmingham on his way to meet Thomas in Georgia. He was placed in charge of constructing the coal mining works for the furnace, but the local coals proved too poor for the purpose and the company failed in the Panic of 1873. Johns suffered another period of poverty before he was eventually paid the wages owed him by the the company's new owner. He married the former Jennie Scott, an English immigrant, in September 1874.

In 1875 Johns traveled alone to California by way of St Louis, Missouri, but soon turned back toward Virginia City, Nevada where silver was being mined. He began working as a carpenter, but soon proved his skill and was hired as timber boss, and then assistant engineer, for the Ophir Mines. He invested his earnings in mine share margins, and again lost his meager fortune.

He returned to his wife in Georgia that same fall and worked for a while at the re-started furnace. James Thomas hired him away in 1877 to help supervise the coal mines and coke ovens at Helena that would supply the Oxmoor Furnace. He prevailed in a dispute with fellow superintendent Hopkins and succeeded him in that position, opening the Black Shale Mine, Little Pittsburg Mine, and Helena Mine and constructing more than 100 coke ovens.

The works at Helena were bought in 1879 by Henry DeBardeleben and Johns became mining engineer for the Pratt Coal and Coke Company. He was placed in charge of the Pratt Mines, which produced high-quality coking coal. He opened the Pratt Slope No. 2 and the vertical Ellen Shaft in 1880, doubling the output. The works at Pratt continued to expand through the 1880s with several drift operations and the opening of numerous headings in the Laura Slope and Enoch Slope.

References

• Dubose, John Witherspoon (1887) Jefferson County and Birmingham, Alabama: Historical and Biographical Birmingham: Teeple & Smith, Publishers; Caldwell Printing Works.