Puits Simon was one of the most important coal mines of the Lorraine Basin in the French Moselle region. It owes its name to the engineer Guillaume Simon, managing director of the Compagnie des Houillères de Petite-Rosselle from 1905 to 1913. Behind the scenes, the mine belonged to the empire of the Wendel family, known for, among others, Bureau Central and Mine des Grimpeurs.

The deposit was identified thanks to a series of boreholes drilled between 1817 and 1849, but the excavation of shaft Simon No. 1 did not begin until 1904.

This mining site consisted of five mine shafts, of which this location comprised shafts 1 and 2. Shaft 1, with a depth of 478 meters, went into operation in 1907. Barely a year later, excavation work for shaft 2 began. At the same time, construction started on the shower building, the administration building, the workshops, and the thermal power plant. These were completed in 1910. For Shaft 2, which reached a depth of 498 meters, mining began in 1914, on the eve of World War I.