In June 1859, the coal miners of Wiconisco Township, Pennsylvania put down their tools.
It is the earliest documented strike we’ve found from northern Dauphin County’s anthracite collieries and a window into the early stages of labor relations between employees and employers at the southwestern edge of Pennsylvania’s Coal Region.
The grievance was straightforward: miners earning 42 cents per car of coal were demanding 50 cents. Company president James L. Sutton traveled from Baltimore to negotiate a settlement. Whether he found one, the Harrisburg Telegraph didn’t say.
What the paper did capture was a community at a crossroads. The Short Mountain Coal Company alone employed 250 men. Combined with the neighboring Lykens Valley Coal Company, more than 500 workers kept the mines running – men whose wages were actively building the rapidly expanding towns of Wiconisco and Lykens. A prolonged strike threatened all of it.
From the Harrisburg Telegraph, June 30, 1859:
STRIKE OF COAL MINERS.
The coal miners in the employ of the Short Mountain Coal Company, in Wiconisco township, in this county, have been on a strike for an advance of wages, for a week past.
The miners have been receiving 42 cents per car load of coal mined, and demand an advance to 50 cents per load. Thus far the parties have come to no terms, unless a settlement of the difficulty was effected yesterday or to-day, the President of the company – James L. Sutton, Esq., of Baltimore – having been expected at the mines yesterday, with the view of a settlement.
A continuance of the strike for any length of time would occasion much inconvenience and loss to the company, and seriously affect many families of workmen dependent wholly upon their daily wages for support. It is to be hoped reconciliation may be effected.
There are employed, of miners and other workmen about the works, some 250 men. The workmen, other than miners, receive from $5 to $7 a week wages.
What makes the case a peculiarly hard one is that the workmen outside the mines make no complaint and are satisfied with their wages, but because of the strike of the miners, who are the smaller portion of the employees, they are also thrown out of work.
The Lykens Valley company, in the same region, are operating actively. They employ about the same number of workmen as the Short Mountain company.
The operations of these two companies have made the region very prosperous. The villages of Lykenstown and Wiconisco are spreading every year in extent and greatly increasing in population, and any check to their prosperity would be greatly to be regretted.
They are an industrious, thrifty, and hard working people, and the whole region around them is benefitted by their labor and toll, and blossoms and blooms as a vast garden. It is one of the most flourishing and important portions of Dauphin County.
The Short Mountain Coal Company shipped coal again at the end of July 1859. The Harrisburg Telegraph reported that month that several men were arrested for an attempt to “take vengeance” on those who returned to work at Short Mountain, suggesting that the strike was broken and that the miners didn’t get their pay increase.
It would take many more decades for the mineworkers of northern Dauphin County to successfully unionize with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
Read more about the Short Mountain Colliery in the Civil War era
Illustration of the coal mines at Bear Gap, Wiconisco Township, PA | 1862
At the Lykens Valley Slope in Wiconisco, PA | 1860s
“Strike among the coal miners”- Labor unrest in Wiconisco Township during the Civil War
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Another great story about our local towns
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I suppose my GGgrandfather Ernest Schindler living in lykens/wiconisco at the time was part of this. He would have been age 20 at the time of that strike and I know he worked at the short mountain mine. His father had died in Germany and he traveled to the US with his Motherwho arrived through the port of Baltimore in 1850. He would have been 11 years old at the time of his first big adventure.