"We are like soldiers in the front of the battle." Weeks before the Avondale disaster killed 110 men and changed Coal Region history, a Boston reporter sat down on a log with two Welsh miners in Summit Hill, PA and asked them what their lives were actually like. They didn't hold back. Read the full story.
Two stuffed figures swayed above a street in Wilkes-Barre, PA street in the summer of 1902. The message to every "scab" in Luzerne County was unmistakable. A photograph from the Coal Strike captures how close the tension was to boiling over. Read the story.
A crowd gathered at the Mahanoy City, PA train station in May 1918 as a locomotive carried local men off to war. In the middle of it all, a 14-year-old boy watched his brother leave—one small moment in a much larger story of a region sending its sons into World War I. Read the Full Story.
In 1938, Jack Delano photographed a man identified only as a “bootleg miner” in Pennsylvania’s anthracite fields. When regular mining jobs vanished during the Great Depression, men dug coal illegally to feed their families. Read the Full Story.
In this photograph taken just after the Civil War, two miners stand at the entrance to the Lykens Valley Drift at Bear Gap near Wiconisco, PA. Opened in 1831, the tunnel once stretched miles into Big Lick Mountain. Within a generation, new technology would push mining far deeper underground. Read the Full Story.
“There was no better or braver soldier than... John Dougherty.” At the Battle of South Mountain in September 1862, a Pottsville railroad worker turned US Army officer fell leading his men into battle. I recently visited the grave of this Irish-born Civil War hero in Pottsville, PA. Read the full story.
Men bathing in a stream, spreading out under the trees for a nap, watching an eagle pass overhead — Charles Cyphers' fourth letter from Camp Slifer captures the quiet, restless rhythm of soldiers waiting for the war to find them. Read the full letter.
Rumors were flying back home about hungry, mistreated soldiers at Camp Slifer. Michael McCarty — a County Longford man turned Luzerne County coal miner — had heard enough. He shared a letter from his friend Corporal Devenney at the front to set the record straight. Devenney had gained four pounds since enlisting in the US Army. Read the full letter.
Ten days after Antietam, a young soldier from Wiconisco Township, PA sat down to put it into words for his father back home. Private Joseph Workman of the 96th Pennsylvania had just walked the battlefield days earlier. "I saw an awful sight," he wrote. "We had to move away from there on account of the stink." His letter, recently digitized by the Library of Congress, provides insights into what he witnessed at the Battle of South Mountain as well. Read the full story.
“Profane swearing is… a most debasing practice.” In the middle of the Civil War, a Coal Region newspaper turned its attention from the battlefield to something closer to home: the language of local workers. Its advice was simple, direct, and a little out of touch with reality. Read the Full Story.