The Coal Miners' Monument at Mid-Lothian Mines Park

The headframe on the Midlothian Business Alliance's own mark is a coal mine. Most people who see the logo do not know that, and most people who walk the trails at Mid-Lothian Mines Park do not know that thirty-two men are still down there.

Since April 2025 there has been a stone that says so.

The inscription is collective rather than a list of names:

Board of Supervisors Vice Chair Dr. Mark Miller put it this way at the dedication: "These miners were killed hundreds of feet below the ground, buried in anonymity and erased from the annals of history." And: "May the thousands who walk these trails each year spend a moment remembering those who perished and the contributions they made to our community. You are not forgotten."

The Rev. Pernell Johnson of First Baptist Church of Midlothian spoke, and Sgt. Scott Kennedy of the Chesterfield Sheriff's Office played the bagpipes.

Mark and Susan Goodin walked the park, read the interpretive signs, and decided the men needed something more than a panel. They spent more than two years making a documentary about the mines, No Time to Grieve, funding it themselves. They brought in Midlothian native Peppy Jones, a local historian and a former executive director of the Mid-Lothian Mines & Railroad Foundation, produced designs, and asked the county for permission to place a privately funded monument in a public park.

Then they screened the film and raised the money from the people who came.

Susan Goodin, at the dedication: "It was a labor of faith and love. We had a ceremony about a year and a half ago where we read out the names of everyone who died here. We know exactly who is still down there. It's an active grave."

The film is on YouTube, in full, free.

The Mid-Lothian Coal Mining Company was chartered in 1835 on a 404-acre tract held by the heirs of William Wooldridge. It sank four shafts. The Grove Shaft went down about 625 feet and took three years to dig. Roughly 150 men and boys worked it in two twelve-hour shifts, six days a week — white, free Black, enslaved, and boys as young as eight. Twenty-five mules were stabled underground.

May 20, 1876. A methane explosion killed eight.

February 3, 1882. A second methane explosion killed thirty-two. Rescue attempts failed and the men were never recovered. The newspapers of the day carried all thirty-two names; the superintendent said the gas testers had found nothing to burn that morning, and the cause was disputed at the time. Harper's Weekly ran an illustration of it two weeks later.

That explosion ended large-scale mining in Midlothian. A 1920s attempt to pump out and reopen the Grove Shaft failed, and operations here had ceased by the early 1920s.

The Grove Shaft was not the worst of it. The county's own chronology in the park records fifty-five men killed in a Pump Shaft explosion in 1855, followed by flooding, and ten more drowned the following year trying to drain the old works. A disaster at Black Heath in the late 1830s killed dozens more; sources disagree on both the year and the toll.

One more thing belongs in an honest account. The names printed in the 1882 newspapers were grouped by race, eight white and twenty-four Black. Researchers including University of Richmond professor Mary Finley-Brook and Midlothian historian Audrey Ross have argued that the park's older signage does not do justice to the enslaved men who worked and died in these pits, whose bodies were often never recovered and whose names went unrecorded. The 2025 stone does not list names either. It is a memorial, not a roll.

Three claims about Midlothian turn up in every economic development brochure, and all three are true, and all three start here:

Midlothian's business history did not begin with a shopping center. It began with a hole in the ground, and the men who went down it.

Mid-Lothian Mines Park, 13301 N. Woolridge Road, Midlothian, VA 23112. Open daily 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Free. About 44 acres.

There are 1.6 miles of trail on five marked routes, some paved, with boardwalks, bridges and a pedestrian underpass beneath Woolridge Road. You can see the two-story granite Grove Shaft ruins — dry-laid, without mortar, built between roughly 1835 and 1870, and described by the Commonwealth as possibly the oldest standing coal mining structure in the country. Also the Murphy Slope ruins, a reproduction headstock built as it looked in 1836, two observation decks, Loch Lothian, the Wooldridge family cemetery, a 450-seat amphitheater, and a series of interpretive panels installed in 2009. Parking is limited.

Mid-Lothian Mines Day is Saturday, October 17, 2026 — free admission and parking, trolley tours of the park, living history, mining and railroad exhibits, music and children's activities. Guided tours run several times a year; arrange one through Parks and Recreation at 804-751-4946.

And for any business or group looking for something local to put its name behind: Chesterfield Parks and Recreation takes donations and adoptions of park components — benches, trees, plantings, amenities and monuments — through [email protected] or 804-748-1623. That is the same route the Goodins used.

Last updated September 16, 2026.