Father and daughter spent their last moments together on the front porch, basking in the warm sun of a spring afternoon.

He was John Tate, a gas watchman at the No. One Mine in Hanna.

She was Eva Tate, his young daughter, 12 or 13 years old.

He sang an old miner's song while he cleaned the candle lamp on his coal-miner's helmet. She sat with her father and listened to the words.

Her father had brought the song with him from England's coal mines. It was a song about a miner, cleaning his helmet's lamp so he would be ready for work in the deep, dark mines.

That afternoon, Eva had agreed to help Mrs. Dodd clean her house. Soon she would be leaving.

When his song had finished, John told Eva she didn't need to go. She didn't need the money.

But she wanted to go, Eva answered. She liked Mrs. Dodd, a jolly lady with whom she got along well.

So Eva left.

When she came back, her father was already gone.

Hanna, a history

Hanna, Wyo., was built on coal and because of coal. In a sense, it was even named after coal.

In 1889, Union Pacific Railroad needed a reliable fuel source to run its massive coal-fired engines. After mines in Carbon ran out, it hastily formed Union Pacific Coal Company and opened a mine at "Chimney Springs," according to research by Nancy Anderson, director of Hanna Basin Museum.

Chimney Springs was renamed Hanna in honor of Mark A. Hanna, a coal and shipping bigwig.

Union Pacific built Hanna and owned everything - the boarding house, the store, the houses miners rented for $12 a month.

In those days, coal was mined by dynamite and the backs of men loading it into donkey-drawn carts. Men worked long hours in the dark, faces covered in black dust.

Life-long coal miner Lonnie Briggs, 59, remembers his dad getting off work, taking his paycheck to the company store and settling his bill. Sometimes, he'd walk out of the store with 50 cents to his name.

"There's nothing easy about mining. You work long hard hours," said Briggs, who now works at a strip mine in Elk Mountain. He gets up at 4 in the morning and doesn't get home until 4 or 5 in the evening.

But he's one coal miner in a family of coal miners. His dad, his dad's dad, his great-grandfather and six brothers all worked in Hanna mines at one time or another.

His great-grandfather, Alexander Briggs, is buried in the hill once called No. One Mine. He was the mine superintendent and, as the family story goes, he walked into the mine 100 years ago to deliver paychecks to miners battling a fire. The first explosion on that day sealed his tomb.

That was how it was in Hanna, and in so many other coal towns at the turn of the century. The work was dirty. Dark. Deadly.

But it was work the men did without complaint. They were coal miners. They came from England, from Finland, from other mining towns back East. And even after their sons, brothers and fathers died in horrible accidents, they went back underground to mine coal.

"Our families spent many, many years in those coal mines. We mined a lot of coal out of that little town, but there's still a lot more," Briggs said.

"I look at coal mining as a tradition that has been going on and that we are part of a big family. It makes me feel proud that I was part of that."

Deadly days

Hanna has been called the town that refused to die.

It lost nearly 230 men in less than five years in two mine disasters before safety teams, safety laws or even safety inspections were implemented.

The first was on June 30, 1903. No. One Mine exploded, raining dirt and sod down on the identical frame houses, Anderson wrote.

The mine's general manager quickly ordered caskets and "nice suits of clothing" for the 169 miners killed. But bosses blamed the accident on a careless miner and, because of a coal strike in Colorado, Union Pacific Coal Company reopened No. 1 a few months later.

It exploded again on March 28, 1908.

It was a Saturday, the same spring afternoon Eva and John Tate sat together on their front porch. No. 1 had been idled because of a coal fire and bosses had been called in to extinguish it.

It was a lovely day, Eva would later tell her son, Ralph Penman. She recorded her memories of the disaster and of her father on cassette tapes for her children. She even sang the old miners' song her dad had sung to her, said Penman, 86, born and raised in Hanna.

On that Saturday, Eva Tate had already gone to Mrs. Dodd's house when the mine exploded.

She didn't hear it.

But her father, Ralph's grandfather, did. He went to Mine No. 1 and joined the rescue team.

John Tate and other rescuers pulled out a few of the dead miners and went back into the mine. And then, No. 1 blew up again. The first explosion in 1908 killed 18 men. The second killed 42.

Teams eventually recovered 27 bodies, but another 33 were left in the mountain. With the 1903 blast leaving 169 men dead in the mine, 201 men are still buried there today.

Just weeks before each blast, mine inspectors gave Mine No. 1 glowing safety reviews. But after the 1908 blast, the inspector blamed Union Pacific Coal Company's method of mining for the disaster. It was called gouging, a system in which coal is mined immediately after the mine is opened because it yields coal more quickly at the start of the operation.

Gouging allows methane gas to gather in rooms already mined while miners are digging for coal deeper in the mountain. Had Union Pacific dug deep into the mountain first and mined the coal on their way back toward the entrance, they would have been able to flood mined rooms with water. This would have prevented the build up of methane gas, and saved lives.

The 1908 explosions left 31 widows and orphaned 103 children. In settlements with Union Pacific, each widow who lived in Hanna got $800 plus $50 for each child. Widows who returned to their homelands abroad got $350. The settlement barred any future claims against the company.

"It took a lot of years for that town to come back together. They just didn't have anybody," said Briggs, who grew up in Hanna.

"But I'll tell you one thing about that little town: The people are very, very close. They never had anything, but you were always welcome in their homes. People would play cards in the evenings, just get together. It was like that for years."

Memorial days

Going to school in Hanna in the 1930s, Ralph Penman noticed that a lot of the houses had two different names. Older children kept the last names of their fathers killed in the 1903 and 1908 explosions. Younger children took the names of fathers who moved into Hanna and married the widows.

"I was aware of that, but I guess it didn't dawn on me until later in life that was the reason for it," said Penman, 85, who now lives in Rawlins.

After the 1908 explosion, Union Pacific closed No. One Mine for good.

Most of the widows stayed in Hanna, with no way to return to families in England, Finland or anywhere else.

Eva's mother stayed, too. Five of Eva's brothers and sisters had already married and moved out of the house when the explosion killed their father. Only Eva and her sister, Annie, remained.

"They stayed in Hanna. Everyone was too poor to do anything else," Penman said.

Union Pacific was opening new mines in Hanna. And they were hiring new men.

Eva's mother boarded three men in a shed-turned-bunk house behind her home. Eventually Eva would marry one of them, George Penman, and Annie would marry another, James Fearn. The third, William Freeman married the girl next door.

George Penman worked in the Hanna mine until it closed in 1954. Union Pacific was converting to diesel, and it didn't need the coal to power its engines anymore. George's only injury was to his foot when a piece of coal fell on top of it.

Over the years, grass overtook the hill that had once been the entrance to No. One Mine. The mine has become a tomb, marked by a forgotten rail spur, but it is also a bond connecting almost everyone in the town.

"The Hanna I knew, those people were just a tight knit community all the time I lived there. I think a lot of us went back to those two explosions. Everyone was kind of tied together. That's what your father did, he was a coal miner," Penman said.

Memorial Day has always been a big spectacle in Hanna, Penman remembers:

"With the mothers and the wives, I guess that was something that was always there in their hearts."

This, the 100th Memorial Day after the 1908 disaster, will be marked in much the same way it has been since the disaster, even though Hanna itself has moved on. The last mines have closed there and miners have moved to work in other area mines. Most have been reclaimed, Anderson said. Arch of Wyoming still has a load out facility and buildings on the north side of town, but Hanna's residents mostly commute to work at the Sinclair refinery, the prison in Rawlins or other area towns. Ranchers still come through Hanna and people have also come back to retire.

"I don't know if it was the isolation or just the make-up of the town, but there was a tremendous faithfulness there. And the people still come back," Anderson said.

"There was just amazing ties created among the people and they are always so happy to see each other."

Today, people will visit the four-foot slab of memorial erected near No. One Mine to honor all the men who lost their lives there. They will visit the Hanna Cemetery and tell family stories passed down through the generations.

And the marble memorial will be ready for them. Earlier this year, Penman, his grandson and the high school journalism class worked through a windy, nasty day to clean the memorial. They cleared trash and tumbleweeds from the wrought-iron fence, blew sand from the marble and laid down 30 bags of new chips.

Penman has done this work for the last 20 years - tending this memorial, pulling weeds, clearing it of sand blown in by Wyoming's wind. It's his way of staying connected to Hanna's history, and his history, buried forever under the grassy hill.