John Alfred Esser (15 December 1848–10 June 1932), mine operator, was born in Mauch Chunk (later part of Jim Thorpe), Pennsylvania, and was the son of George P. Esser, a hotel keeper, and Eliza, or Elizabeth, Hunsberger Esser. His father died when he was young. Esser grew up in the small town in Pennsylvania's mountainous eastern coal-mining region. Briefly attending public school, he took his first job at a local grocery store about age eleven and later worked as a clerk and bookkeeper. In Mauch Chunk on 23 December 1869 Esser married Esther Hyndman. Two of their four daughters and one of their two sons died in childhood.
Late in the 1860s Esser took a job as paymaster of the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, from which he transferred into the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company's mining section. The mining operations in the Lehigh Valley coalfields were among the most technically sophisticated in the United States at the time, and several members of his wife's family worked in the management of some of the local mines. Esser moved up in responsibility and by 1880 was working as a general accountant in the main office in Philadelphia.
In 1881 Esser began managing the finances of the Connellsville Coke and Iron Company, southeast of Pittsburgh. Baking the impurities out of bituminous coal produced coke, a highly purified carbon fuel that burned relatively cleanly at high temperatures and was in demand for blast furnaces in the steel industry. The Leisenring family, pioneers in coal and coke production, sold the company late in the decade to Henry Clay Frick, a notoriously hard-nosed mining executive who was even then beginning to consolidate the mining and steel interests of Andrew Carnegie into what would become the mammoth United States Steel Corporation. While superintending work at one of Frick's mines in 1891, Esser was convicted in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, of using threats and intimidation to force striking union men back to work in the mines.
The coal from some of the veins in the southwestern Virginia county of Wise, which had the state's largest deposits of coal and the most mines, were particularly well-adapted to coke production. The Leisenring family purchased mines and mining rights there and in June 1896 hired Esser as superintendent of the Virginia Coal and Iron Company's mine at Stonega. Several railroads provided transportation connections with markets in the East, South, and Midwest. Within a few years additional lines increased the ease with which Esser and the other mine owners and operators could ship coal and coke to numerous markets.
In 1899 Esser aided members of the Kemmerer family of Pennsylvania in acquiring a coke plant in the Wise County town of Dorchester. Together they incorporated the Colonial Coal and Coke Company in January 1900. Esser served as general manager for the company, as well as for the Wise Coal and Coke Company and the Sutherland Coal and Coke Company, which the Kemmerers established later in the decade. He also chartered the Empire Coal Land Corporation in August 1907 and purchased more than 10,000 acres of coal- and timber-rich land in Tazewell County. Esser opened new sawmills and coke plants near Richlands, but the operation was never able to recover from the recession of 1907. The corporation was placed in receivership in 1911.
About 1901 Esser developed a coke-processing site near Norton at Esserville, which was named for him. He incorporated the Esser Coal and Coke Company in 1905, but it went into receivership in May 1911. Characteristically undaunted, after working for two years as general manager of the Norton Coal Company he purchased his former coal and coke company from the receivers in September 1913. He re-formed it as the J. A. Esser Coke Company, Incorporated, in 1914, with his wife, daughter, and son as the other officers and directors. In 1920 the company employed about 125 men, extracted about 75,000 tons of coal from the mine each year, and produced and sold about 48,000 tons of coke annually using 102 coke ovens. It was the only coal company in the county that produced nothing but coke. He and his company also owned the company town of Esserville. Until the drop in demand for coke ruined the market late in the 1920s, the J. A. Esser Coke Company continued to operate on the same large scale. A grandson laconically stated many years later that Esser had made and lost three fortunes during his life, reflecting the volatility of the coal and coke industry.
Esser helped found the Stonega Presbyterian Church and in 1897 served as the first superintendent of its Sunday school. The founding president in 1902 of the First National Bank of Norton, he held that office until 1909. By the 1920s Esser also owned a profitable farm. A Republican, he served as postmaster at Dorchester from October 1901 to March 1911 and at Esserville from June 1923 to February 1930. Esser's wife died on 12 February 1923. John Alfred Esser was on his way home from the coke ovens at Esserville when he died of a heart attack in Norton on 10 June 1932. The local newspaper reported that when people learned of his death they remarked, "Eighty-three years old and in the harness till he dropped." He was buried in Highland Cemetery, in Norton.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Men of Mark in Virginia (1909), 5:142–143 (portrait facing 143), Philip Alexander Bruce, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, and Richard L. Morton, History of Virginia (1924), 6:231–232 (portrait facing 231), and Arthur M. Hull and Sydney A. Hale, eds., Coal Men of America: A Biographical and Historical Review of the World's Greatest Industry (1918), 426; some recollections in oral history interview of grandson George Esser by Frances A. Weaver, June–Aug. 1990, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; First Presbyterian Church, Mauch Chunk, Pa., Marriages, Book 2; State Corporate Commission Charter Book, Record Group 112, 57:422–423, 64:417–418, 85:274–275, Library of Virginia (LVA); Virginia Coal and Iron Company Records (1875–1910), University of Tennessee Special Collections Library, Knoxville; Colonial Coal and Coke Company Journal (1903–1913), Local Government Records Collection, Wise Co. Court Records, LVA; Norton Crawford's Weekly, Wise County: Her Industries, Resources and Prominent Men (1920), 14–15; Ralph Emerson Kennedy, An Economic and Social Survey of Wise County, University of Virginia Record Extension Series 12 (May 1928), 15, 54–55; Death Certificate, Wise Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, LVA; obituaries in Norton Crawford's Weekly, 11 June 1932 (quotation) and Roanoke Times, 11 June 1932.
Image in Men of Mark in Virginia, vol. 5.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.
How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter, "John Alfred Esser (1848–1932)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Esser_John_Alfred, accessed [today's date]).
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