A cold winter settles over the former site of the Maple Hill Colliery outside Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where the abandoned headframe still rises from the snow-covered landscape.

In this photograph from the Library of Congress, taken in 2000, the structure stands alone amid bare shrubs, frozen ground, and the distant ridges and culm banks that once defined life in northern Schuylkill County.

Maple Hill was once one of the largest operations of the anthracite fields. Its network of seventeen veins – ranging from the narrow Buck Mountain seam to the massive Mammoth Vein – fed a steady flow of hard coal to markets across the country.

By 1928, the colliery had shipped more than 16 million tons. Two decades later, that total stood at more than 27 million, a testament to the scale of industry that shaped Pennsylvania Coal Region communities like Shenandoah.

Mining ended here on June 25, 1955.

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Read more Coal Region history

Incredible photographs document the Maple Hill mine near Shenandoah in 1938

Kehley Run Colliery’s UMWA Local Band | Early 20th century

“Big Change Now At Hand” – The Coal Region in the late 1920s

A dark and ominous sketch of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania | 1910

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