Back in the spring of 2019, I had the chance to make a visit to the grave of innovative labor leader John Siney near St. Clair, Pennsylvania. Siney played a central role not only in the labor story of the Coal Region, but of organized labor as a whole as the nation industrialized rapidly in the years after the Civil War.
The monument to John Siney is a modest one by today’s standards, but for a man that died virtually penniless of miner’s asthma at age 49 in 1880, it’s quite impressive. It was erected in 1888 after a fundraising campaign to construct a monument to the labor leader who set an example that lived on after his death.
My visit to Siney’s grave came on a warm spring evening – the cemetery was peaceful and calm. It’s a place where I reflected not only on the legacy of this Irish immigrant turned workers’ champion, but of those who came to this same spot in the years after his death.
Among those who visited was the hero of the miners that led the United Mine Workers of America to success in the first decade of the 20th century – John Mitchell. He visited in 1905 during a stop in St. Clair.
And while researching recently, I came across yet another labor leader who documented his own pilgrimage to Siney’s last resting place.
Terence V. Powderly was 20 years old and working near Scranton when news spread of the Avondale Mine Disaster on September 6, 1869. The disaster left 110 men and boys dead when their only exit from the mine burned. The entire shift in the Steuben Shaft suffocated in the darkness.
In the days that followed, the young Powderly traveled to the site of the disaster. When he arrived, he encountered John Siney, leader of the Schuylkill County chapter of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association preparing to make a speech to the grief-stricken crowd around the burned out mine.
Powderly documented the scene in his autobiography:
Early in September, 1869, while I was employed at Dunmore, an explosion occurred in the mines at Avondale some twenty-three miles south of Scranton. On the 9th, a day or two after the explosion, I went to Avondale and for the first time saw and heard John Siney, then the moving spirit of the Miners and Laborers’ Benevolent Association, who came from his home at St. Clair in Schuylkill County to lend his effort in behalf of the stricken people of Avondale.
…Siney…was the first man I had ever heard make a speech on the labor question. I was just a boy then, but as I looked at John Siney standing on the desolate hillside at Avondale, with his back toward a moss grown rock the grim, silent witness to that awful tragedy of ignorance, indifference, thoughtlessness, and greed, and listened to his low, earnest voice, I saw the travail of ages struggling for expression on his stern, pale face.
I caught inspiration from his words and realized that there was something more to win through labor than dollars and cents for self. I realized for the first time that day that death, awful death such as lay around me at Avondale, was a call to the living to neglect no duty to fellow man. John Siney gave expression to a great thought at Avondale when he said: “You can do nothing to win these dead back to life, but you can help me to win fair treatment and justice for living men who risk life and health in their daily toil.” The thought expressed in that far away time became my thought…
Powderly went on to become a labor leader himself and championed the rights of workers in the Coal Region and beyond. He served as mayor of Scranton as a member of the Greenback Party in the wake of the 1877 Railroad Strike that saw violence break out in the city. But he’s most remembered as the leader of the Knights of Labor, a labor union that rose rapidly and fell as quickly in the 1880s and 1890s.
At some point, Powderly made the journey to St. Clair to see Siney’s grave as well.
He spoke about his trip in an interview with James B. Morrow that appeared in Railroad Worker magazine in 1915.
In the interview, Powderly discusses Siney’s compilcated legacy among workers and his own record as a labor leader:
“Changes, too, have occurred among workingmen. John Siney, a tall, raw-boned Irishman, brought the miners together in this country for the first time. One hundred and nine coal diggers were burned to death at Avondale in Pennsylvania.
I heard Siney say, as he stood, back against a huge rock: ‘This tragedy happened because there is only one opening in the mine. Every mine should have two openings. I beg of you to see that the law of the State is changed.’ It was changed and largely through the influence of this honest, courageous, kind and sensible man.
“But John Siney was abused and suspected by those to whom he consecrated his life. He died a pauper from tuberculosis, and a fine monument was raised over his grave, which was something of a mockery, I thought. He asked for bread and after he was dead they gave him a stone.
At John Siney’s Grave.
“One October day, when the sun was going down in the west, I visited John Siney’s grave in the little cemetery at St. Clair, near Pottsville. By and by I heard voices and, looking into the street, saw seven miners going home from their work. ‘Who was John Siney?’ I asked them through the pickets of the fence, but they were foreigners and couldn’t understand. Other foreigners passed, nor could they understand.
“Then came three Irishmen, faces black, shirts open at the neck, lamps in their hats. ‘Whose grave is that?’ I inquired, pointing toward the monument.
“‘Can’t you read?’ a sawed-off chap inquired. ‘That’s the grave of John Siney.’
“‘But who was John Siney?’
“‘Why, he was the miners’ best friend.’
“‘You must have thought a great deal of him.’ I said.
“‘We do, now that he is dead. But, God forgive us, we abused him when he was alive and let him die in want. That is the way many of us treat our friends. We denounced Powderly worse than we denounced Siney, but since his death we have changed our opinions.’
“‘I hadn’t heard that Powderly was dead,’ I said.
“‘Oh, yes, he is dead,’ the little sawed-off chap replied. ‘He died last winter in Florida.’
“‘But didn’t you tell the man of his mistake?’ a friend asked me, when he heard the story.
“‘No,’ I answered. ‘That little Irishman is praising and praying for me daily. If he knew I were alive he would be cussing me as hard as ever.’
I find this account fascinating – a story of a Coal Region labor leader who played a role in a nationwide union reflecting on his predecessor’s work in the same region and attempting to do the same thing. The two men’s stories are interwoven in fascinating ways.
On my next visit to Washington, DC, I’ll be making a trip to Rock Creek Cemetery to make a pilgrimage to Terence Powderly’s grave and take a moment to reflect on his important contributions to workers’ rights in the United States.
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