On this 25th anniversary of 9/11, I went looking for how Coal Region residents remembered Pearl Harbor in 1966. I came across this remarkable article by Jack Lindermuth for the Shamokin News-Dispatch about two Pearl Harbor survivors from Shamokin, PA. He shared their stories with readers on December 7, 1966. Read the full story.
A 12-pound artillery shell left behind by New York troops had been lying around Anthony Burns's house near Pottsville, PA for a year as the Civil War drew to a close. Someone brought it inside and the results were horrifying. Read the story.
"Over here you don't see any baseball. Soccer is the game." Clarence Morgan of Port Carbon, PA wrote home to his mother and shared that he had tried playing soccer, but quickly learned he preferred American football to the "beautiful game." Read more.
The 48th Pennsylvania fills its ranks at Camp Curtin — and loses its first man before leaving Harrisburg In early September 1861, Coal Region regiments were pouring into Camp Curtin for three years' service. Before Colonel Nagle's 48th Pennsylvania even left for the front, a train at the Harrisburg depot killed Private William Millet — the regiment's first casualty, and he never saw a battlefield. Read the letter.
A father visits his son at war - and ends up behind Union lines in Virginia Peter Byrne came to Washington to check on his son, a lieutenant in the 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery. He left having crossed into Virginia in a borrowed uniform, stood behind an artillery battery in the pouring rain, and talked his way back across the Chain Bridge using a pass that called him "Colonel." Read the full letter.
On Labor Day 1902, UMWA president John Mitchell stood before 50,000 people in Philadelphia and made the case for the striking miners of Pennsylvania's Coal Region. This photograph captures that moment. His words still resonate. Read the story.
"I'm willin' for the sake of the poor creatures who never have enough to eat that my man shall strike." A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Esther Nixon traveled to Shenandoah, PA during the 1900 Coal Strike to interview working class mining families about the intense labor battle between the United Mine Workers and the coal operators. Read the full story.
Through the coal country with a camera... This photograph was taken in a school classroom somewhere near Shenandoah, PA and appeared in an 1892 magazine article by journalist and photograph Frances Benjamin Johnston. Read more of the story.
"An atomic bomb of joy" | Shenandoah's Victory Parade draws 20,000 | August 1945 On the eve of Japan's formal surrender, 20,000 people filled the streets of Shenandoah for a Victory Parade that the Evening Herald called "an atomic bomb of joy." Confetti rained from the buildings, Spanish-American War veterans drew cheers, and a sign in the crowd read: "To Our Buddies Who Won't Come Back." Read the full story.
A soldier kneels at his young wife's grave - then marches back to war. Luther Dodson's wife Sarah died of tuberculosis at 25, less than a year after their wedding. He came home on leave that August, visited her grave at dusk, and wrote about it in a letter that stands as some of the most moving passages in this entire series. Then he went back to the front. Read the letter.