The pictures would never have been seen if he hadn’t picked the book up out of the trash.

The man noticed it lying in a waste basket of a coal mining company that was getting ready to shut down. He snatched it up and gave it to a friend, who happened to be Betty Ales-DeVoss’ brother.

He had the book in his house for years, Betty said, and one day she found it and was looking through it.

“And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make an album so that we could share it with the people of this area,'” she said.

For towns in southeast Kansas, coal mining was a way of life and those roots can be seen in the book “Southeastern Kansas: Coal Mining Towns,” which is now available.

The book – about two years in the making – was originally a scrapbook that had been made by Ira Clemens, owner of Clemens Coal Co. The scrapbook is thought to have been used as a recruitment tool to encourage people to move to southeast Kansas to work in the mines.

Betty Ales-DeVoss, left, and Nanette Azamber-Krumsick have published Southeastern

So DeVoss had the scrapbook and the idea, “but I didn’t have the know-how.” And that’s where Nanette Azamber-Krumsick came in.

DeVoss knew Krumsick from the Frontenac Christmas lights committee. She was the only one interested in the idea, DeVoss said.

Krumsick did all of the legwork for the book and dealt with the computer, DeVoss said.

Krumsick said it took some effort to get the book off the ground. She tried scanning the old-fashioned scrapbook pages into the computer, but the scanning bed was too small to fit the entire page. Pittcraft Printing ended up doing the book, she said.

Between 1900 and 1920, Clemens went to towns throughout the area and took pictures of the mining communities and wrote a little summary about what each town had to offer.

“Franklin, Kansas,” Clemens writes in the book, “is strictly a mining community, located about seven miles north of Pittsburg, Kansas; population approximately 1,500; two churches and two schools, paved streets, artesian water works, and electric lights.”

DeVoss grew up in Franklin, where her father – from Yugoslavia – supported her and 12 other siblings by working in the mines. For her, the book is like going home again.

“These are our roots,” she said. The book looks at 34 communities, some of which aren’t around anymore.

The pictures capture a time when Pittsburg still had segregated schools, Frontenac’s main street was unpaved and kids posed with horses at the Deer Park Swimming Pool in Columbus.

“It was just a different life than children have now,” DeVoss said.

“It’s all the things that we take for granted, but it was a big deal back then,” Krumsick said. “1900 to 1920: It was still pretty primitive around here.”

Krumsick’s family immigrated from France, and her grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the mines.

“This book reconstructs what it was like when their parents and grandparents settled it and sacrificed,” she said. “And the things that they had to go through to survive.”

People have heard about life in the mining towns, Krumsick said, but they don’t really get a feel for it until they can actually visualize it.

“It’s really a pictorial history of southeast Kansas,” Krumsick said. “I think that’s one thing that this book hopefully will do: It (the miners’ sacrifices) will not be forgotten.”

Future generations won’t know about all of these old mining towns and the way they lived, DeVoss said, but this book will help keep those memories alive.