An illustration from November 1860 shows the class divide in America during the holiday season in the mid-19th century.
Winslow Homer was a cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly Magazine and would later gain renown for his illustrations during the Civil War. In 1860, however, his artwork was geared at showing the divide in America at Thanksgiving.
On the left side of the piece, we see how high society spent the holiday. On the right, Homer directed the attention to the working class of American society. The lower right in particular is relevant to the experience in the Coal Region.
A dirty, exhausted man comes home from work to his family on Thanksgiving Day. Many of the mines in the anthracite coal fields worked through the holidays in that time period.
Read more about the Coal Region at Thanksgiving
A Thanksgiving Night bar-room murder in a Schuylkill County patch town | November 1868
Coal mines operated on Thanksgiving Day as World War II raged | November 1943
Schuylkill County’s first Thanksgiving – November 1845
A Thanksgiving sermon in the aftermath of the 1902 Coal Strike
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