This striking photograph, captured in 1864 during the Civil War, shows the United States Navy’s USS Canonicus fueling up from a coal schooner along the coast of Virginia.

The Canonicus, a powerful Monitor-class ironclad, played a critical role in naval operations along Virginia’s waterways in 1864 and famously participated in the bombardment and capture of Fort Fisher near Wilmington, North Carolina, in January 1865.

Coal powered the Union fleet, and the fuel of choice for the U.S. Navy was anthracite, the hard coal mined primarily in Northeastern Pennsylvania that burned almost without smoke. Anthracite provided the steady, efficient energy needed to sustain the immense Union blockade – a maritime strategy aimed at strangling the Confederacy’s economic lifelines.

In a 1906 reflection, Admiral Robley D. Evans highlighted the critical yet often-overlooked role anthracite coal played in the Union victory in the Civil War:

“It is a fact not generally known at present that anthracite was the naval fuel of the Civil War, on the Northern side at least. Only by the use of that fuel was the Federal fleet enabled to maintain the greatest blockade the world has ever known, on thousands of miles of coast-line, from the Virginia Capes to the Mexican boundary on the Gulf of Mexico…”

The demand for anthracite coal during the war years spurred rapid industrial growth throughout the Coal Region, transforming once-sleepy valleys and sparsely populated hillsides into bustling mining communities.

Towns and villages emerged almost overnight during the 1860s, supported by outside investment and infrastructure development that forever reshaped the economic and social landscape of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

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Read more about the Coal Region and the Civil War

Patriotic Profiteers: The Lykens Valley Coal Company and the Civil War

Illustration shows the Gilberton Colliery during the Civil War | 1863

“A very thrifty, interesting place” – A visit to Tamaqua during the Civil War

“Revolutionary Disloyalty” – A coal miners’ rebellion in Schuylkill County during the Civil War

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