Anthracite Coal Industry
From an area of a bit more than 1,400 square miles in Northeastern Pennsylvania came the power that fueled the industrial age in America. Anthracite was taken from the ground for two hundred years. It broke the dependency on overseas coal and manufacturing, promoted the building of the first canals and railroads, and initiated the birth of large companies with great economic and political power.
At its peak, America’s first gigantic industry was mining 100 million tons each year with over 180,000 people employed. The coal companies formed the United States’ first cartel and executed the first price fixing. Often, they had their own employee housing and their own employee stores. Some, like Reading Anthracite, hired their own private police force which the local civil authorities were, by law, required to support. Some issued their own script for payrolls.
The coal industry dominated all aspects of life in this region. The social fabric was sewn with the layers of immigrants seeking work in the mines. They came to struggle with making a life and, in their unions, with the mining companies. They left their ethnic churches towering over the towns with names such as Coaldale, Minersville, and Ashland. These communities, originally built next to collieries, sit in the midst of a land scarred black with mine refuse.
The area itself has been transformed with so many decades of mining and canal and railroad building. Large areas of “black desert”, strip mines, polluted water, and abandoned buildings and equipment form the landscape. But it has a strange beauty to it.
Although my parents moved from Shenandoah to Philadelphia in 1948, I spent much time in and around their hometown my whole life. My grandfather and others in my family were miners; their houses butted up against waste dumps and strippings on which my brothers and I played.
This work is not an attempt to offer a history of hard coal mining, nor is it sociology, environmental crusade, or a study of labor relations. It is a photographic interpretation of the land and what happened here. The pictures were made over many years and many miles beginning in 1999.
