A replica of a classic beehive coke oven was constructed in 1964 as a tribute to the coal and coke heritage of the Overholt family at West Overton Village, where the ruins of the family's coke ovens from 1874 until the early twentieth century remain north of the Big Barn along Felgar's Run. At age 22, Henry Clay Frick entered the coke business by buying 123 acres of coal lands with his Overholt cousins and soon secured a $10,000 loan from Pittsburgh banker and friend Thomas Mellon. Within two years, in 1873, Frick and Co. owned 400 acres of coal lands and 200 beehive ovens, and by age 30 Frick was a self-made millionaire. Around the turn of the twentieth century, making coke involved charging ovens with coal, leveling it for even baking, quenching it with water to halt the conversion process, drawing the coke from the ovens, and loading it into railroad cars for transport. The H.C Frick Coke Company became a leader in mechanized operations, though many producers continued labor-intensive manual methods despite technological innovations. In southwestern Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Coal Seam yielded high-grade bituminous coal readily convertible into coke for the region's many blast furnaces, and as owners built banks of beehive ovens, the area became known as the Connellsville Coke Region, the nation's foremost coke-producing region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At its peak in 1916, the Pittsburgh seam produced 40 million tons of coal, and about 46,000 beehive ovens converted most of it into coke, making beehive ovens the standard method of coke production in that era. Abraham Overholt, Henry Clay Frick's maternal grandfather, had long mined coal at the West Overton mine for his own use and for the homes of workers and family in the village. Around 1870, Aaron Overholt, Abraham's grandnephew, formed A.S.R. Overholt & Company, and by about 1874 it operated the West Overton Mines and Coke Works with a bank of 64 beehive coke ovens at West Overton on the West Overton Branch of the Broadford and Mount Pleasant Railroad, later a branch of the Pittsburg and Connellsville Railroad and eventually the Mount Pleasant Branch of the B and O Railroad. The Overholt Coke Works used all the coal mined at West Overton. A single charge of the ovens used 100 bushels of coal and yielded 36 railroad cars, or 22,500 bushels, of coke weekly. The West Overton Mine and Coke Works employed fifty men and boys in 1875, expanded to 110 beehive coke ovens with 129 employees by 1882, and the Overholt coal mines ceased operations in 1923.