Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette
	Chris Dellamea, of Beckley, W.Va., who has visited more than 400 coal patches in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and Ohio, in front of an abandoned coke oven near Mount Pleasant, Westmoreland County, that was part of the Hecla 1 coke ovens, which were closed by HC Frick Coke Co. in 1929.

Chris DellaMea rises early on Sunday mornings and drives the crooked gray lines on his map to nondescript towns, noteworthy, if only obscurely so, for rusty coal tipples, overgrown coke ovens and clapboard duplex houses.

Those one-time company towns are called "coal patches" in Pennsylvania and "coal camps" in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. The interesting ones for DellaMea still show the fast-vanishing vestiges of Appalachian coalfield life, which stretches back more than a century.

During the past eight years, the Beckley, W.Va., man has traveled through four states to photograph more than 400 settlements orphaned by mines that played out long ago.

In southwestern Pennsylvania, he has visited dozens of small map dots, including Gallatin, Essen and National Hill in Allegheny County; Muse, Hazel Kirk and Cokeburg in Washington County; and Oliphant Furnace, Dawson and Shoaf in Fayette County, where the last of the region's beehive coke ovens were shut down in 1972.

"When I started, the mine power houses, tipples and company stores in these towns were starting to be demolished," DellaMea, 33, said in a drawl that drips Appalachian molasses. "I wanted to capture the end of an era."

DellaMea's photographs, many posted on his Web site, www.coalcampusa.com, are postcards from the portals, images of a past altered by aluminum siding and decking, time and decay.

The towns still often bear the names of the mines they are clustered around or the mining companies that built every structure in them, from homes to company stores to churches. DellaMea finds them clinging to the sides of mine-scarred hills and bracketing streams still running orange with mine drainage.

Last month, DellaMea traveled 50 miles east of Pittsburgh on Route 22, then south on Route 819 to the coal patch of Forbes Road, built around the Jamison Mine 3, which closed in the 1950s. He parked on the berm, between the post office and the veterans memorial, and hiked up steep Kunkle Street, a digital camera tucked into his shirt pocket.

"These are all standard Western Pennsylvania coal patch duplex houses," he said, nodding at the tidy homes, some of them so thoroughly remodeled, decked and sided that their coal company roots are distinguishable only to a trained eye.

DellaMea said he almost never talks to people unless a clear opportunity presents itself or they ask him what he's doing. None did that day.

"I only pass through these patches once. Sometimes, I'm there five minutes; sometimes, two hours, but I try not to intrude," he said as he pulled out the camera. "I'm not trying to zoom in on anyone's private life. When I take a picture, it's because they are just living in a structure that might be historical."

DellaMea walked down to Fire Station Road, which runs past the three-story-high gob pile of mining waste on the edge of town and a cluster of brick buildings overrun by weeds and ineffectively fenced to exclude graffiti artists and explorers of history.

"This was the boiler house or bath house. The smaller building with the concrete roof may have been where they stored explosives for the mine. Those homes over there," he said, pointing to larger houses on high ground across a small creek, "were probably foreman's row, where the bosses lived."

DellaMea comes by his fascination with old coal camps honestly. His grandfather came from Italy to dig coal in southern West Virginia, and, as a kid in Beckley, where he grew up, DellaMea recalls playing around coal tipples and on burning mounds of waste.

"I remember walking on those gob piles when I was 6 years old and they were on fire," he said. "And I've always been a history buff."

He started photographing coal camps in West Virginia in the late 1990s using a single-use camera, then moved to southwestern Pennsylvania and upgraded to the digital camera he uses now.

The first patch he visited in Pennsylvania was Milcroft, on Indian Creek in Fayette County. He stopped there while coming home from Ohiopyle, where he'd had his first date with Lisa Strohm, the woman who would become his wife.

Other memorable patches he's visited in Pennsylvania include Marianna, in southern Washington County, where the mine closed in 1988. Many coal mining structures and houses dating from the early 1900s still stand, as does the company-built St. Nicholas Russian Church of Orthodox Old Believers.

In Shoaf, DellaMea's pictures show beehive coke ovens built in 1904 by the Henry Clay Frick Coke Co. Near Ligonier, he photographed a wooden coal tipple weeks before it collapsed.

"I walk through these patches and it's like being in an echo of history," DellaMea said. "You'd think I'd get tired of the story of old immigrants moving into Western Pennsylvania's coal patches, organizing the union, working the mines. But, you know, I don't."

He has seven albums full of photos, the Web site, and no formal photographic training. He'd like eventually to produce a calendar or a book.

Other parts of the country are more actively preserving their coal-mining heritage, DellaMea said.

In Eastern Pennsylvania, near Hazelton, Luzerne County, Eckley Miners' Village is the host of Patch Town Days, an annual anthracite mining festival. West Virginia has a Coal Heritage Route through company mining towns, and in Stearns, Ky., one of the nation's last company-built mining towns, tourists can rent a coal-patch home for a night.

"Some of the coal-patch houses survive here, but the rest of it, the tipples, the mine buildings, you can't use them for anything and they become attractive nuisances," DellaMea said. "Whole towns can eventually disappear and we can lose all of the history."

DellaMea said he planned to continue traveling to the region's coal patches to snap his pictures and compile his scrapbooks, although the price of gasoline is putting a crimp in his hobby.

"If I thought this stuff was going to be here forever, I wouldn't be doing this," he said, clicking another snapshot. "But it's not going to be here much longer. Not much longer at all."