Big Brutus

A Kansas Portrait

The newspapers called it a coal monster, and a monster it was. Dubbed "Big Brutus," the enormous power shovel towered 15 stories high and weighed 11 million pounds. It took a year to assemble it in Cherokee County and when completed in June 1963, Big Brutus, with it's 90-cubic yard shovel, could move 150 tons of coal in one bite, enough to fill three railroad gondolas.

Although designed to last a quarter of a century, the big shovel worked for only a decade due to a combination of environmental problems and falling coal prices. By 1973 Big Brutus was obsolete. Deeming the shovel too big to move and too expensive to dismantle, its owners stripped Brutus of its electrical and auxiliary equipment, leaving it to rust, a dinosaur of the technological age.

A non-profit corporation dedicated to the mining heritage of southeast Kansas now operates Big Brutus as a museum and the focal-point of a mining era theme park. So the coal monster of southeast Kansas lives again in West Mineral.