The Grove Shaft, dug between 1836 and 1861 to a depth of 625 feet, took three years to complete and employed 150 men and boys under the Wooldridges, with twenty-five mules stabled underground to pull coal carts on an underground railroad. White workers, free black workers, enslaved workers, and boys as young as eight labored together with picks and shovels, working two 12-hour shifts six days a week, while a company hospital staffed daily by three local physicians cared for miners’ health needs. Steam engines raised coal in corves that were dumped into cars of the Chesterfield Railroad, Virginia’s first gravity and horse-drawn railroad, which carried about 200 tons daily to the James River wharves in Manchester in south Richmond for shipment to ports including Washington, Baltimore, and New York, where the coal was used in blacksmiths’ forges, in producing gas and coke, in manufacturing iron, glass, copper, and chemicals, and as a source of energy. During the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, demand for local coal increased as the Richmond and Danville Railroad hauled Mid-Lothian Company coal to the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond for casting cannons for the Confederacy. Mining slowed after 1865, and Confederate veteran William B. Wooldridge failed in an effort to issue stock to reorganize the Mid-Lothian Coal Mining Company before his New York creditor, R.S. Burrows, took over to rework and reopen the mines. In February 1882, a violent methane explosion at the Grove Shaft trapped and entombed 32 men, and miners from nearby Etna, Deep Run, and Clover Hill pits joined mine superintendent George Dodds in futile rescue attempts while Dr. Philip S. Hancock organized a relief committee that, with members of Jerusalem Baptist Church, now known as Winfree Memorial, and the Midlothian Masonic Lodge, raised support for the miners’ families for many years.