This anonymous 1875 letter to Tom Foster of the Shenandoah Herald offers a raw, firsthand glimpse into the anger and desperation roiling Schuylkill County during the aftermath of the Long Strike in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields.
Sent from Mahanoy City, PA on September 24, 1875 and printed a week later, the note – signed simply “A Molley” – threatens violence while explaining why many Irish mineworkers felt robbed by coal operators.
As a primary source from the turbulent Molly Maguires era, the letter helps illuminate worker grievances, ethnicity-driven tensions, and the fraught relationship between miners and the local press.
The “Long Strike,” as it became known, was a failed effort by an early mineworkers’ union to take on the coal companies in Schuylkill County. It failed amid starvation among miners’ families, with plenty of violence and property destruction in its aftermath.
Here’s the letter as it was published:
Shenandoah Herald, October 2, 1875:
Mahanoy City Sep 24
to Ton Foster Edetor Hearld
Dear Sir: You can Publish the folowing if you Like. if not, you can go to Hell whear you will go aneyhow.
ye Keep publishing the sitewation of afares and if ye are a fare Dealing Man why the Blue Blases Dount you tell the publick what has caused the present State of afares.
Purups your Big Mouldey Hed Dount Know it But i will tell ye the s-n of a B-s of operators and Boses has robd us out of
30 per sent instead of 20[.] But it has took the meen skunks 40 to get it, and we intend it to cost them 40 to Keep it.
now mister tom thats the true sitewation. i am against shooting as mutch as ye are. But the unions is Broke up and we Have got nothing to defind ourselves with But our Revolvers and if we dount use them we shal have to work For 50 cints a Day, and i tell ye the other nationalateys is the same as we are onley they are to Damd cowardley, ye can think and say what ye Like it is all the same to us.
But i have told ye the Mind of the children of Mistress Molly Maguire, all we want is a fare Days wages for a fare Days work, and thats what we cant get now By a Long shot. and than thay will Be no shooting [.]
thay sayed thay was going to give the 20 per sent they
swindeld us out of to the consumers to incrise the traid. But thay put it all in thare own pockits [.] we Have whatcht the prises and thay Have sould coal for as mutch this year as they did Last.
But you can take my word for it and i never tell Lies Because it is a sin, But we will make it a Hot as Hell For them if they keep it.
A Molley
This letter comes from the transcriptions collected by Dr. Kerby A. Miller and held in the collections of the University of Galway in Ireland. It originally appeared in Kevin Kenny’s book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguire.
Read more about the Molly Maguires and the Coal Region
“Something more than a river” – The West Branch in “Sons of Molly Maguire”
“The hour of doom” – The Molly Maguire executions in Pottsville on June 21, 1877
The Murder of Frank Langdon | Audenried, Pennsylvania, 1862
Alexander Campbell | From the shores of Ireland to a gallows in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region
Erecting the gallows at Pottsville for the first Molly Maguire executions | 1877
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Thank you Jake! What a vivid letter and piece of historical evidence. I grew up in Schuylkill County, in the Yorkville section of Pottsville in a row home where, up and down our street, my family and I were surrounded by retired miners suffering from black lung. In nearby Summit Hill, Carbon County, up the hill from Lansford, I had a wonderful uncle who’d personally grown up in a family of miners. As a child of the 50’s, I was mystified in my own environment, growing up enveloped by history, but assuming, as children do, that the world had always been just as I was privileged to experience it. My imagination and my aprreciation of history are refreshed by you posts. Please keep it up!