In November 1864, Schuylkill County mine superintendent Gilliard Dock took up his pen and journaled about his daily routine at the coal mine just north of Pine Grove, PA. Dock was active in his journal that fall, writing about politics, the prospects for his mining operation, and the chaotic state of American politics in the fourth year of the Civil War. Read the full story.
John Gillespie came home from the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry in June 1865, months after the Civil War ended. On Halloween night, he was shot on the streets of Tamaqua. He died twelve days later. Read the full story.
"You will imagine how painful it was to see our brave men lying dead around us, and to hear the groans of the wounded..." This letter from a Schuylkill County soldier on the front lines of the Mexican-American War in 1846 wrote this letter home to a friend in Pottsville. It was later published in the Miners' Journal newspaper. Read the full letter.
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.
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.
When the Soviets sealed off West Berlin in June 1948, Lt. Joseph Elonis of Donaldson was already flying C-54s into the blockaded city around the clock. He wrote home to the West Schuylkill Press-Herald about what it looked like from the cockpit - and what was at stake. Read the story.
After a striking miner was shot dead on September 21, 1900, Pennsylvania sent the National Guard into Shenandoah, PA - artillery, machine guns, and all. These photographs from an official Guard publication document the occupation of the mining town. Read the full story and see the images.
In 1875, a travel writer gazed down into Williams Valley near Tower City. Coal breakers loomed like "enormous black spectres," ridgelines fading blue toward the Susquehanna — the industrial and the sublime, side by side. Read the story.
Inside an alleged Molly Maguires gathering place at Mahanoy City. Allan Pinkerton's detective agency described it room by room - the bar, the dining hall, the upstairs meeting room where a murder was allegedly planned. The Emerald House at Mahanoy City still stands today at 324 West Centre Street. Read the story and more about the Molly Maguires.
“The years 1857–58 were desperate in the coal fields.” On a hill above a patch town in Schuylkill County, families gathered to hear the news of a nation coming apart. One man read aloud from a newspaper while others listened, argued, and tried to make sense of a distant crisis that was moving closer each day. Read the Full Story.