Sometime in the summer of 1869, a correspondent from the Boston Advertiser sat down on a log in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, with two Welsh-born coal miners named Thomas R. Williams and William Pritchard.
Both men were members of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association – the WBA – the first successful trade union for anthracite mineworkers in Pennsylvania, founded in 1868 by Irish immigrant John Siney in the St. Clair, Schuylkill County.
The interview took place during a volatile stretch for the union. The WBA was pressing mining and railroad companies on wages and working conditions, and Siney – who had developed his interest in organized labor while working in England’s industrial heartland before emigrating to Schuylkill County in the early 1860s – was still building the organization’s reach across the coalfields.
Williams and Pritchard spoke plainly about the dangers of underground work in Carbon County, the politics of coal prices, and what it meant to spend a life in the mines.
Weeks after this conversation took place, everything changed.
On September 6, 1869, a fire broke out at the Avondale Colliery in Plymouth Township, Luzerne County. The mine’s shaft was the only entrance and exit to the mine and the fire and smoke rendered it useless to the trapped miners below. One hundred and ten workers died and it remains the deadliest mining disaster in Coal Region history.
The catastrophe galvanized public support for Siney and the WBA, and within months Pennsylvania enacted its first mine safety law.
Read the interview below:
A TALK WITH A COAL MINER.
The Life of a Miner and its Dangers.
A correspondent of the Boston Advertiser writes from the Pennsylvania coal region:
The Lehigh Navigation Company have a village at Summit, with a network of railroad, gravity road, inclined planes worked by steam power, and collieries, shafts and breakers in all directions.
Under the guidance of Mr. Phillips, one of their mining engineers, a man brought up and always employed in and about the collieries, I visited their works, and was introduced to Mr. Thomas R. Williams and William Pritchard, who are both miners.
They came out in their mining dress, and we sat upon a log together for a half hour. They were both from Wales, were miners, and the sons of miners. Williams had worked 18 years for the Navigation Company, and Pritchard about 6 years.
Pritchard is President of the local Association, and was recommended to me by John Siney, President of the Central Association. Upon my mentioning the subject the coal supply, strikes and wages, Williams burst out with a denunciation of the newspapers that had articles against the miners.
“They talk about men’s wages in cities. Have they to work like we do? We are like soldiers in the front of the battle – we have the hardest of it. The papers are running us down, and say we are lazy and quarrelsome: it isn’t so; there’s not a man been bro’t before a justice in all the strike.”
He doubtless referred to his own community, “We are not anxious to have coal go up; but when it does, we want our share of the increase in price.
We have a hard life. After a man has worked 20 years in a mine he can stand it no longer. We buried a man a few days ago who was only 40 years old. He died of the bad air in the mines.”
“Was it not partly of bad whisky?” I inquired.
“No, he was temperate; he was not a drinking man. I am a temperate man myself,” said Pritchard, who had answered for the deceased, and who then struck into the conversation: “I belong to the Temple of Honor Temperance Society.”
He looked as if he told the truth.
“Do the miners lay up money?”
“Not much; what they earn in summer they spend in winter,” said Pritchard. Williams said he owned his house, built on land leased of the Company, and the lease would expire in five years.
“Have you any savings banks?”
“No; and we have no money to put into them if we had one; and if we do have any money we can leave it with the Company (Lehigh Navigation Company) and it’s a good Company, and there’s not a better in all the mines.”
“We are no Molly Maguires,” said Williams, “I don’t know any such men: and they say we are rebels and it is not true: my son went into the army, Company D of the 5th United States artillery; he is now working in the mines. We are true men.
“And so you came from Wales?” I asked.
“Yes, we did,” said Pritchard.
“And your fathers and ancestors were miners?”
“Yes, they were, and my father is there still,” said Pritchard.
“Were they healthy people?”
“Yes, always healthy.”
“And do you enjoy good health?”
“Oh, yes,” was the ready reply; but seeing the drift by the time I had got it down (for I was writing all the time we were talking), Pritchard qualified it with “but my health would have been better if I had worked above ground. We have to blast a great deal. We have to use a keg of powder every week in the breast, and a keg every three days in the gangways; that injures the health.”
Then they both tried to blame the transportation companies for high prices.
“When we made the contract,” said Pritchard, “transportation was $2.28 from Mauch Chunk to Elizabethport, now it is $3; we think the transportation companies have raised prices when they need not have done so, and the blame of the high prices belongs to them. If they would do in this country as they do in England it would be well.
There the price of tolls – is fixed by law. Here they fix the price as they please. And the operators crowd the workingmen down on the one side and crowd up the price of coal on the other.
And they say we are ignorant. We have to be; we have no time but to work.”
Williams said he wanted to go and see the schools opened that day, as he was a Supervisor – I think that was the term – but he had no time.
These men are said to be above the best in intelligence, but they did not seem to be able to give me an intelligent idea of their organization nor of their grievances.
Neither they nor John Siney had copies of the constitution of the [W.B.A.] Society.
Mr. Siney disclaimed any intention of interfering with the operators If they desired to employ other men they might. But it is pretty well understood that not even the strong arm of the State could render secure the life of a miner who worked in violation of their rules.
The miners say they do not desire the present high prices, but it is certain they are unwilling to abate their demands, and any day may see another strike.
As a general thing, the miners’ quarters looked pretty well – better, in all the anthracite region than I have seen elsewhere. Nor did I see much intemperance, nor hear, directly, of cases of violence.
Read more about John Siney and the WBA
A tribute to a Coal Region labor leader | John Siney
Visiting John Siney’s grave in St. Clair
“We condemn the system” | Mineworkers protest in Hazleton, PA in 1869
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