24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Lucas, IA

Lucas is a historic coal-mining city in Lucas County, Iowa, that began as a railroad station established by the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad in 1866.

The town was named after Lucas County and Robert Lucas, the first governor of the Territory of Iowa; its plat was filed on May 9, 1868, and it incorporated on March 18, 1887.

Coal transformed Lucas: in 1876 the Whitebreast Coal and Mining Company sank a 250-foot shaft a mile east of town, and in 1878 it platted the company town of Cleveland, which held 380 people by 1880 but had almost vanished by the 1930s.

John L. Lewis, the legendary president of the United Mine Workers of America, was born on February 12, 1880, in the Cleveland coal camp next to Lucas, the son of Welsh immigrant miners.

Lewis got his first coal-mining job at Lucas's Big Hill mine, which worked a four-foot coal seam 274 feet underground.

In 1919 Lucas was home to the second most productive coal mine in Iowa, the Central Iowa Fuel Company's Mine No. 2, which produced 217,169 tons of coal that year and employed 360 men; the last mine in the Lucas area closed in 1923.

The John L. Lewis Memorial Museum of Mining and Labor opened in Lucas in 1990 and preserves the area's mining heritage, along with Paymaster Park on the Big Hill mine site and Bandstand Park with its 1906 town bandstand.

Lucas's population peaked at 1,320 during the coal boom in 1890; at the 2020 census it had 172 residents in 76 households.

Lucas stands on the north bank of White Breast Creek, and the site of its last mine is now Mine Pond and the Mine Pond Campground in the Lucas Unit of Stephens State Forest.

Hymn writer George Bennard, composer of 'The Old Rugged Cross,' was a notable son of Lucas.