Jáma Engerth
Attraction · Czechia
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A quiet forest clearing northeast of Kladno's Ostrovec district hides one of the region's deadliest 19th-century coal mines, worth a slow pass for the memorial tucked among the trees. Sunk in 1868 and in production from 1873, the shaft was named after Wilhelm Engerth, the state railway's first general director, and eventually reached 425.65 m, striking a 9.48-metre coal seam far underground. On 23 February 1876 a dynamite explosion here killed 18 miners, the first major disaster in the Kladno coalfield, and a 4.5-metre stone pyramid topped with a cross still marks the spot, restored after 2000. By 1889 alone the mine had already raised over 2.1 million tonnes of coal, some of it fed by an aerial ropeway that carried coal in from the nearby Bresson mine in just eleven minutes. Mining stopped in 1945, the shaft was filled the following year, and the site was only fully remediated in 1999, leaving little today but forest and the old monument to mark nearly eight decades of hard labour underground.
The mine's name survives today in Engerth, the smallest and newest of Kladno's housing estates, built mostly in the 1980s over the ground where it once stood. The estate lies northeast of the Ostrovec district, above a garden allotment colony and boxed in on three sides by forest: the Rovina, Velká rovina, Na Vyhaslém and Kamenný vrch woods, known locally as Kameňák. The Kladno-Ostrovec station, on the line to Kralupy nad Vltavou, sits close by. Mining here ended in 1945, and only the estate's name now recalls it.
minememorialindustrial heritageforest