In 1875, artist and travel writer John Bachelder gazed down into the valley near Tower City, Pennsylvania, and struggled to find the words. What he saw defied easy description — a landscape torn between the industrial and the sublime, where coal breakers loomed like “enormous black spectres” against a backdrop of ridgelines fading blue toward the distant Susquehanna River.

The source is a railroad travel guide, published in 1875, and it accompanies an illustration of the Brookside Colliery – a working mine perched at the terminus of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad’s branch line above Tower City at the west end of Schuylkill County.

This chapter of the guide was designed to sell tourists on the scenic drama of the anthracite coal fields.

Bachelder’s writing and illustration captures the tension between natural beauty and industrial scale, between the “practical and the ideal,” that defined life in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region in ways that photographs from the period rarely capture. This illustration and the description that came with it are a window into that world.

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The tourist will not only pass through the exceedingly interesting geological regions marked by the Pine Grove and Lorberry coal-fields, but, continuing through Tower City, will meet continually scenes of great scenic interest, culminating at the terminus of this ‘branch’ [of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad at Brookside, — a spot which cannot fail to please the lover of Nature in her wildest moods.

The view which here awaits the gaze of the visitor is one of singular combination. Artificial hillocks, the dust and débris of mines, rise thick and high about you; coal-breakers, like enormous black spectres, rear their dizzy heights, to the very top of which the dull mule clambers with his freight of coal.

The oddity of the scene is attractive to the stranger; and this is in the midst of, and surrounded by, the most striking landscapes. As you gaze straight down the perspective of the valley, and mile beyond mile fades in blue distance, you feel that the vision must reach the distant Susquehanna at Harrisburg.

Here is the artist’s opportunity for toil and pleasure: the practical and the ideal are most completely and artistically blended.

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Read more about Tower City and the Brookside collieries

An 1872 description of the Brookside Colliery above Tower City

Video shows Brookside Colliery at work in early 20th century

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

Fire On the Mountain – The Brookside Colliery Fire of November 1869

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