Diane Brendel, a plucky retired elementary school teacher who spent six years fighting Consol Energy about mine subsidence that destroyed the historic home she'd restored with her husband, Roy, in Spraggs, Greene County, died Monday morning in her sleep. She was 61.

The Brendels' home, a sprawling 12-room stone and stucco house built by Major George Washington Ernest Thralls in 1939, was the finest example of Spanish Revival architecture in southwestern Pennsylvania when the coal company undermined it on Thanksgiving Day 2000.

Mrs. Brendel, who broke a 30-year tradition of hosting her family's Thanksgiving meal that year, returned that evening to her home, which was already beginning to pull apart as it subsided, despite coal company assurances that it would not.

"I sat there in the night listening to my entire house crack apart. It was the most horrendous thing I'd ever been through," Mrs. Brendel said last November, shortly after she and her husband, citing unhealthy conditions caused by black mold throughout the house, agreed to an out-of-court settlement with Consol for an undisclosed amount.

Years of battling with the coal company to fix the home had already taken their toll on her health, and she suffered from anxiety, panic attacks and depression.

"We became the poster child for longwall mining opponents and the media," she recalled in the November interview, "when all we wanted for our retirement was to lounge around the pool and do some gardening."

Terri Taylor, a documentary filmmaker from Pittsburgh who made the 2003 film "Subsided Ground, Fallen Futures," which features the Brendels in its account of longwall mining's effect on people in the southwestern Pennsylvania coalfields, remembers her as tortured by the ordeal.

"She was indignant about the injustice that her family, and all people living above the coalfields of southwestern Pennsylvania, suffer daily," Ms. Taylor said.

In the last year she had started exercising, lost weight and was much more active, said Laurine Williams, who with her husband, Murray, owns the Thomas Kent Jr. Farm, another historic property outside Waynesburg that was undermined and subsided.

"This is a real shock," said Mrs. Williams, who kept in close touch with Mrs. Brendel about the problems they had getting the state Department of Environmental Protection, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the U.S. Office of Surface Mining to protect their properties. "She went through more than anyone should."

Mrs. Brendel was a graduate of Waynesburg College and earned a master's degree in education from West Virginia University. She taught in the Central Greene School District at Wayne Township Elementary School in Spraggs and worked with her brother at Shields Greenhouse, also in Spraggs.

She was active in a variety of environmental causes and organizations, including the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. She enjoyed reading and gardening, and was an avid boater.

The Brendels have been living in a trailer behind the gutted ruins of their house, which was listed in the National Historic Register, but were putting the finishing touches on a new home, built nearby with salvaged tile, wood, windows and stone from the old house. She was getting ready to host a Thanksgiving gathering for the first time in eight years.

"She was really looking forward to moving in. We just got the stained glass windows from the old house installed," said Mr. Brendel. "I'll be completing the house just as Diane and I designed it."

Mrs. Brendel also is survived by her daughter, Michelle Bowser of Waynesburg; a brother, Leigh Shields of Spraggs; a sister, Elyn Nimmo of Riverdale, N.J.; and a grandson.

Friends will gather from 6 to 8 p.m. today at Behm Funeral Homes, 182 W. High St., Waynesburg.

Memorial contributions may be made to The National Audubon Society, Dept. W, 700 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.