By Joe Blundo

March 22, 2017 - In 1906, a reporter for an industry journal made a trip to an important coal town called Columbus, Ohio.

He described a walking tour that took him to more than two dozen coal companies clustered near Broad and High streets.

That's to say nothing of related businesses, such as Jeffrey Manufacturing, which made mining machines.

When I think of coal mining, I think of the "Little Cities of the Black Diamonds" as the former boomtowns in the hills of southeastern Ohio are called. A new book, "Carrying Coal to Columbus: Mining in the Hocking Valley" (History Press, 176 pages, $21.99), makes plain that Columbus had a big stake in those diamonds, too.

The book — by David Meyers, Elise Meyers Walker and Nyla Vollmer — presents a parade of entrepreneurs using Columbus as the launching point for their ventures in mining or the industries supporting it: canal boats, railroads, blast furnaces, logging and more.

The first shipment of coal from the Hocking Valley arrived in Columbus in 1830 aboard a horse-drawn wagon.

Then came canal boats, which permitted the transport of much-larger quantities, but it could take as long as two weeks to get a load of coal from Nelsonville to Columbus, the book says.

What really made the market explode was the arrival of railroads, which cut that Nelsonville-to-Columbus trip to seven hours in 1869.

"Our valley smiles as it never did before

. . . when the cars come murmuring through cut and curve with their long line of heavy loads of black diamonds," wrote a journalist for the Hocking County Sentinel.

But it wasn't all laughs, as we know.

Boom and bust cycles, labor strife (the United Mine Workers of America union was formed in Columbus, by the way) and environmental abuse were also part of the scene.

At its peak in 1918, coal mining accounted for about 50,000 jobs in Ohio, the authors say. In 2015, the total was less than 2,500. President Donald Trump has a lot of work to do if he's going to fulfill his promise to restore coal jobs.

Meyers, a Columbus State Community College administrator, has written several other local history books with Walker, his daughter. Vollmer lives in the Hocking County town of Haydenville, a boomtown frequently mentioned in the book.

Columbus' prominence in the industry surprised the authors, too, Meyers said.

"The more you dig into it, the more you find out these things are all connected, and I started running across the names of all these people in Columbus that were just raking in the money."

He ends the book with a list of prominent magnates in Ohio's coal industry. About half of them are buried in Green Lawn Cemetery.