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. Purchased in 1962 from the Bucyrus-Erie Company of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The machine’s cost was $6.5 million. To ship the shovel to Cherokee County, 150 railroad cars were needed, and once there it took a year to build.
Now sixty …