This photograph, taken in the late 1930s by Jack Delano, shows an abandoned mining operation at the Shenandoah City Colliery in the heart of Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields.

In the Coal Region, the Great Depression hit doubly hard as the economic catastrophe ravaging the globe also hit just as the namesake industry for these communities in Eastern Pennsylvania began to collapse.

Large scale deep mining, especially at the southern end of the anthracite coal fields in Schuylkill County, had become extremely expensive just as the market for anthracite coal began to crater as more of the American economy switched from coal and steam to oil and petroleum.

Scenes like this one were common across Schuylkill County as the anthracite industry retreated and many “coal castles” of Pennsylvania fell into disrepair and desolation.

Watch our interview with author Mitch Troutman about bootleg mining in the Coal Region during the Great Depression below.

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Read more about the Coal Region during the Great Depression

A 1938 photograph shows desolate Coal Region landscape during the Great Depression

A dying Pennsylvania coal town found creative ways to feed local children during the Great Depression

“A Town That Wouldn’t Say Die!” – Lykens, Pennsylvania in 1937

“Unsafe and unprofitable” – The closure of the Brookside Colliery in 1938

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