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CHAPTER 1
ANTHRACITE MINING
Background on Anthracite Mining
The incident at Lattimer and the story of European immigration into northeastern Pennsylvania begins with the discovery and eventual marketing of anthracite coal. About 600 million years ago, in a swampy environment, trees and other organic material fell into water, and the sparse supply of oxygen thwarted bacterial decomposition. The sea advanced over the coastal swamps, which then contained peat deposits. Sea sediments of sand, silt, and clay covered the peat. When the sea retreated, the pressure of the sediments forced moisture and poisonous gases out of the peat. Lignite, or brown coal, formed. Eventually, geological pressures along with the development of faults and folds in the earth transformed the coal into anthracite, a metamorphic rock. The creation of anthracite is the final product of the geological process known as coalification. Anthracite by definition contains more than 87 percent carbon. Though difficult to ignite, it burns longer and cleaner than any other type of coal (Rogers 1858, 970–1000; Wallace 1987, 7).
The anthracite coal region in Pennsylvania is located in the northeastern section of the state and covers about 484 square miles (figure 1.1). The area contains most of the world’s supply of anthracite. The coal is located in several narrow bands divided into three fields—southern, middle (sometimes subdivided into the eastern middle and the western middle), and northern, and they run in a northeasterly direction. The bands are part of the northern portion of the Appalachian region. Most of the coal is found in seams, or “veins,” that can be a few inches to as much as forty to sixty feet thick. The veins in the northern and middle fields are nearly horizontal or tilt at a moderate angle. The southern field has veins that have been subject to more dramatic lateral forces, creating undulating and dramatic folds. Erosion in the southern field is prominent, exposing some of the veins, making it initially easier to mine (Jones 1914, 4–5; Wallace 1987, 5).
Figure 1.1. Map showing northeastern Pennsylvania, with major cities and the major anthracite coal fields: Northern Field, Western and Eastern Middle Fields, and the Southern Field. (Image drawn by V. Camille Westmont.)
Anthracite coal was first mined in the Wilkes-Barre region in northeastern Pennsylvania in 1775. Within a few decades, this resource was found farther south in the Schuylkill and Lehigh regions (Wallace 1987). Farmers or village artisans often operated the early mines. Unlike in other nineteenth-century industry, coal miners generally worked in small, unsupervised teams. The extraction effort tended to focus on the excavation of outcroppings on the land surface. This open-pit mining required low skill and little capital. The men would shovel the coal into wagons, where it would then be taken to local railheads, and then to canals. By the 1830s, many of these open-pit mines became exhausted, and more sophisticated mining techniques developed, like drift and slope mining. Drift mining is the process of creating a horizontal tunnel into a mountain coal seam and then following and mining the vertical coal seam. Slope mines require digging a tunnel down a slope and into a seam. These new techniques required greater engineering skills and capital investment than surface mining (Keil and Keil 2015, 6–7; Luther 1881, 48; Miller and Sharpless 1985, 85–86; Wallace 1987, 8). For more than a century, the process of extracting coal remained simple, without heavy machinery. In 1902, a journalist described, “The process of mining is simple, and tools are the rudest. They are pick and shovel, bar, hand and machine drills, the latter an auger, turned by a crank—and powder and squibs” (Rhone 1902, 56).
Anthracite extraction played a critical role in the development of the American industrial revolution. By the 1820s and 1830s, East Coast industries began to replace waterpower with coal. Beginning in the 1830s, coal also became an increasingly important source for residential heating and cooking. The annual output of Pennsylvania anthracite increased from 21,000 tons in 1830 to 3,300,000 tons in 1847. The growing iron industry east of the Alleghenies was fed by the increased output of coal, and as a result, iron became cheaper and more accessible to East Coast industries (Chandler 1972, 151, 156–58; MacGaffy 2013, 4).
Early American industrialists promoted an ideal of economic progress based on republican virtues. They believed that a harmony between employer and employees would protect republican society (Palladino 2006, 43–44). Skilled miners were scarce in the early development of the industry and the miners usually garnered the respect of the coal operators, who frequently worked alongside them in the mines. Companies attracted miners from England, Scotland, and Wales. These workers, skilled at their trade, accepted a level of industrial discipline, like quotas for output, in exchange for adequate housing and a free supply of coal. There was no great status difference between employer and employees. They shared similar ethnic and religious backgrounds and the belief in mutually beneficial economic growth. Workers and employers continued this relationship through the 1820s and 1830s. “The vision of ‘republic’ industry—or at least financial independence—seemed a real possibility” (Palladino 2006, 45–46; also see Wallace 1987, 177–79).
By the 1830s, three primary canal companies developed to transport anthracite coal to urban markets and seaports in the northeast. New York and Philadelphia investors financed these operations: the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, the Schuylkill Navigation Company, and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. The first railroads developed in the early 1830s as feeder lines that connected the mines to the canals. Horses pulled the first freight. By 1833, steam locomotives were beginning to be used on a regular basis on some lines. Freight terminals developed in the region’s earliest urban centers like Pottsville, Mauch Chunk, and Carbondale. Philadelphia developed as the primary port for export to New York and New England (O’Bannon et al. 1997, 14; Powell 1980, 7; Taylor 1951, 41).
Consumers were demanding higher quality coal without soil and slate. The development of the breaker answered this call. Joseph Battin patented the basic breaker design in 1843, and the first models appeared in the anthracite region in the mid-1840s. Coal was hauled to the top of the breaker and dumped into a hopper. The hopper released the coal onto a set of screens that separated the coal by size. Conveyed by gravity, a rotating cylindrical mud screen would separate the coal dust and soil from the rest of the coal. Then the coal passed through the breaker rolls, which were cylinders studded with teeth, and broke the coal into smaller pieces. These pieces fell onto screens and finally into storage bins. The coal then passed down chutes where slate pickers manually removed any bits of slate or other impurities (Wallace 1987, 15–16).
Coal mining developed into a major industry by the 1850s and 1860s because of the growing demand to heat houses in the Northeast. Coal also fueled industries, which helped to catalyze the Industrial Revolution (Richards 2002, 7). With the growing demand for coal and the ability to increase production and bring to market a better product, there became a need for more workers. In the 1850s, the Irish fleeing starvation and tyranny ably filled this need. They were a new people, bringing with them new customs and cultural practices. Some observed a “sharp distinction between the ‘turbulent’ Irish miners and their more respectable ‘right thinking’ English and Welsh counterparts” (Palladino 2006, 54). “‘The Irish,’ according to Benjamin Banner, editor of the Miners’ Journal, demonstrated a ‘tendency to retain a distinct, exclusive, nationality’—a tendency eschewed by the ‘quieter and better class of emigrants’” (quoted in Palladino 2006, 54).
By the 1880s and 1890s Slavic and Italian immigrants, the newcomers to the region, began to outnumber their predecessors in many of the anthracite communities. The new immigrant increased in numbers from about 2,000 in 1880 to more than 89,000 in 1900. In the same era, those whose families originated in northern and western Europe remained about the same at around 100,000. The growing population of southern and eastern Europeans created a new nativist sentiment and xenophobic fears among the Anglo-Saxon residents, who are often referred to in the contemporary literature as the “English speakers” (Turner 1977, 10). The coal operators were aware that these new foreign laborers were escaping persecution and tyranny in their native lands. Owners imported more workers than was needed, thus creating a labor surplus. The workers were perceived as interchangeable and disposable, and those in the large unemployed ranks could easily replace them. The coal barons had leverage to keep the wage scale low and their profits high. The Yale Review reported in 1898 that “It is also because of a definite and conscious purpose among employers to have on hand a full supply of cheapest available labor. ‘Whenever I have had a serious strike, one of my best weapons has been to get in foreign workmen,’ was the frank admission of one of the mine owners” (Brooks 1898, 306).
In the nineteenth-century United States, the new industrialists, including the coal operators of northeastern Pennsylvania, were seen as a new type of hero. They were developing new sources of energy by inventing and investing in new machinery. Operators helped to open new lands for cultivation, and they were perceived as bringing modern civilization and order to ignorant, lawless, hungry, and diseased millions. The new capitalist was seen as a special breed of people who were transforming nature into something that was productive and modern (Wallace 1987, 229). Throughout the anthracite region, ceremonial dinners honored the accomplishments of inventors, engineers, and capitalists. Interestingly, the anthracite coal city of Pottsville contains an iron-clad statue standing on a pedestal of the southern statesman Henry Clay. Erected in 1855, it stands sixty-five feet high and can be seen for several miles. While Clay believed that the United States should be self-sufficient in agriculture, he became a hero to northern industrialists because he supported the idea that the country should also be independent in manufacturing. In the face of southern opposition, he advocated for a protective tariff that helped the Pennsylvania iron industry, which in turn supported the coal industry. The anthracite coal town of Ashland is named after his estate. There is also a mine named after Clay (Wallace 1987, 243–44).
By World War I the anthracite coal industry in northeastern Pennsylvania employed about 180,000 workers, the majority living in small patch towns near the coal operations. The living conditions in these patch towns were substandard when compared to the average American household. Many of the coal towns consisted of planned, symmetrically built company houses. The typical patch town had the mine bosses and supervisors living in larger houses, usually on higher grounds. Downhill, or at a lower elevation, sat the duplexes, which the local community called double houses. The company store and the school were usually centered in the community. On the periphery of the planned core settlement were shanty enclaves, small communities constructed in a rather unplanned fashion by the new immigrants with the goal of keeping dry and staying out of the weather. Sanitation and health conditions were substandard at best.
While men’s pay was miniscule, women, when not caring for children and gardens, often took on odd jobs to help meet family expenses. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, some of the larger coal towns attracted silk factories and cloth mills employing women at very low wages. These mill owners were escaping organized labor in the urban Northeast and Middle Atlantic states. Despite living in these poor conditions, the new immigrants’ plea for better living and working conditions were often easily dismissed by capital. Collective action by the workers was often portrayed in the American press as being associated with radical anarchists. Benjamin Bannan, editor of the Miners’ Journal and an advocate of the coal operators’ free-labor ideology, wrote in 1865 that there was little difference between organized labor and organized crime, and there was little difference between a strike and a riot (Palladino 2006, 131). Bannan frequently targeted ethnicity rather than inequality as a major cause for labor unrest, often blaming the new immigrant for any labor conflict. Bannan and others often linked the rise of labor unions to the stereotype of the Irish miners’ “clannishness” and “intemperance.” However, these critiques often overlooked the fact that the “respectable” Welsh, English, and native-born miners also worked to organize (Palladino, 2006, 169).
Mining Conditions
In the nineteenth century, the British had developed some of the best engineering practices for mining. However, in the interest of saving time and money, many colliery operations in northeastern Pennsylvania ignored these best engineering practices for the sake of making a quick profit. Many of the mines in the anthracite region had poor ventilation, were inadequately timbered to stabilize the ceilings, and were prone to explosions, roof falls, fires, and floods. Hundreds of miners were crippled and many more killed each year because coal barons ignored these advances in mining safety. They disregarded geologists’ reports and continued to use cheap technology at the cost of thousands of human lives. “The monotonous day-to-day toll of lives went largely unnoticed by the public, but the total was grim evidence of the human cost of mining coal” (Miller and Sharpless 1985, 108).
Wallace (1987, 6) notes that the coal operators bemused themselves with illusions. “They told themselves and the world that the absence of high enough tariff on British iron was keeping coal prices too low to make a profit and those careless miners and Irish revolutionaries were largely responsible for the high rate of disasters. These illusions helped the owners and operators … to keep on producing coal to fuel the Industrial Revolution” (Wallace 1987, 6).
Whenever an accident found its way into the court system, English and American judges and juries often ruled in favor of the industrial entrepreneurs. The “fellow servant” rule asserted that an injured employee could not hold an employer responsible if a fellow employee caused the accident. It also asserted that the employee was free to leave his master’s employment if he considered the conditions unsafe. If a worker continued his employment with a negligent “fellow servant,” the worker assumed the risk of the job. The rule would eventually include the risk imposed by an employer who did not provide a reasonable, safe workplace. Because of the precedents in early court cases, issues such as contributory negligence, the “fellow servant” rule, and assumption of risk virtually nullified the employer’s risk and responsibility to his workers (Wallace 1987, 279–80).
Coal operators blamed careless miners for the high rate of accidents and deaths rather than their own reluctance to install expensive safety measures. Between 1869, when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania first recorded the statistics, and 1900, a total of 10,116 mineworkers died in coal-mining operations. In 1870, there were between five and six deaths per one thousand workers, and by 1900 the number had declined to about three deaths per one thousand mine workers (Dublin and Licht 2005, 24). Roof falls and blasting accounted for the majority of the casualties. Benevolent societies tried to provide relief for miners and their families. However, the rate of casualties outpaced the resources of many of these groups. When a worker entered a mine in the morning, he did not know if he would see another day. Peter Roberts, writing in 1901, described the conditions of living in a coal patch town. “Those who, unfamiliar with mining communities, visit them for the first time, generally observe the large number of maimed among the inhabitants. Persons having lost an arm or a leg, or bearing on their face and hands blue scars, or with impaired eye-sight or total blindness, are familiar scenes in mining regions” (Ro...
