When an unnamed New York Times correspondent stepped into central Pennsylvania’s Lykens Valley in the late summer of 1874, he admired the beautiful surroundings. Two towns tucked into a narrow valley, surrounded by high wooded hills, impressed on his thoughts. Nature piqued his interest as he wandered along unfettered mountain streams south of the villages and experienced a seemingly untouched wilderness. The correspondent mused about the area’s potential as a summer resort, its clean air refreshing to any American city goer. Turning his writings to the industry which built these towns, he painted a deceptively bright picture of the dirty work being completed. He wrote of the mines as a wonder to be seen by all. Here was a place where men worked in the dust-filled darkness while “enjoying the equal temperatures, the steady work, the good wages, and the numberless attractions of underground life.”[1]
What he missed in his wanderings about the little town with the “musical Indian name” was the everyday struggle occurring in the mountain pass above the towns of Lykens and Wiconisco.[2] These chronically underpaid miners and laborers toiled in the depths of the Lykens Valley and Short Mountain collieries, turning out thousands of tons of coal annually, and securing an impressive profit for investors in cities far from the reaches of the southern anthracite coal fields. Oftentimes living purely on company store credit, these miners faced untold dangers in an economic system that treated them as expendable commodities.
The Lykens Valley Coal Company had not always been this way. For years it was considered to be among the most prosperous and industrious collieries in the anthracite region while also concerning itself with the welfare of its workers.[3] When an economic downturn in the late 1850s brought down a number of independent mining operations in Schuylkill County, an entrepreneurial Welshman named Henry Thomas bought into the Lykens Valley coal field. He would build a company into a small empire, profiting from a union tearing itself asunder. The Civil War helped to build the Lykens Valley Coal Company into an impressive corporate behemoth, while creating conditions which would nearly result its own destruction.
Two men, out for a Sunday hike in 1826, uncovered a significant vein of anthracite coal. Peter Kimes and Jacob Burd made the discovery in a slender mountain pass known as “Bear Gap,” several hundred feet above the valley floor.[4] This outcropping lay at the southern tip of the largest anthracite coal field in the world, stretching across the mountains and valleys of eastern Pennsylvania. The “Bear Gap” anthracite sat in a fortuitous position, just 15 miles from the Susquehanna River in the northern reaches of Dauphin County, commonly referred to as the “Upper End.” [5]
By 1831, these surface veins were being tapped by the Wiconisco Coal Company, a corporation owned by a succession of Philadelphia business owners, the most substantial being banker Simon Gratz. The Wiconisco Coal Company would ultimately be reshaped into the Lykens Valley Coal Company (LVCC) in the mid-1830s.[6] Transportation became a key to the company’s initial successes, and the Lykens Valley Railroad was among the first built in the region to carry anthracite to market. Upon completion of the Wiconisco Canal, a project funded mostly by an internal improvements bill passed in the Pennsylvania Legislature, Lykens Valley anthracite reached markets stretching down the Susquehanna River to Harrisburg and into the Maryland Tidewater in starting in 1845.[7]
The 1830s and 1840s brought economic uncertainty, ultimately dampening the rise of industrialization throughout the young country. The shift from a mostly agrarian nation, to one of industry, gave the fledgling economy fits. The anthracite region of Pennsylvania fared no better in these disastrously cyclical conditions. The fiercely independent collieries of Schuylkill County, across the mountains east of the Lykens Valley workings, struggled through the downturns.[8] Lykens Valley suffered as well, especially when the primitive railroad line to Millersburg on the Susquehanna wore out in the 1840s. The company’s fortunes would continue to waver until the economy began to right itself in the 1850s.[9]
In the thirty years following the formation of the LVCC and the LVRR, two communities had sprung up along the banks of the meandering Wiconisco Creek, a tributary of the Susquehanna that watered many of the numerous farms in the region. Wiconisco and Lykens grew together as the origin point of Lykens Valley Red Ash, a soft variety of anthracite popular throughout the Northeast at the time. Homes were laid out by the company and business owners slowly arrived in the community as growth continued. By 1860, Wiconisco Township had more than 2,500 residents, many of whom had jobs in the anthracite industry or supporting that industry.[10] Powder makers, engineering firms, saw mills and blacksmith shops all directly supported work at the Lykens Valley colliery. Many businesses not immediately associated with the company made significant profits as well. Hotels, farms, stores, saloons, and churches satisfied the townspeople’s needs in a variety of ways.
At the colliery itself in 1860, business was booming. The Lykens Valley workings occupied the right face of Bear Gap, working the coal back towards the east. At least eight separate tunnels, or drifts, accessed several veins of anthracite. Miners and laborers put in long hours blasting and removing the coal and rock. This would be removed from the earth by mules in mine cars. The cars would be wheeled out and taken to a large wooden structure inhabiting the western slope of Bear Gap known as the “breaker.”[11] Within this structure were a series of rotating screens and conveyors run by steam engines that would help to break and separate the coal from the rock. The sorting process would also be used to separate the coal itself into different sizes, which had different uses. Smaller coal pieces, known as nut coal, would go to individual consumers for heating homes or cooking. Larger coal would be used in transportation or iron forging. Necessary to the process was a small army of boys, known in the region as “breaker boys.” These workers, many as young as 11 or 12 years old, worked long hours picking slate and rock from the coal to ensure a clean product. And so, as fears of war came to the forefront in 1861, this was life in the mountains of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region.
Those rugged coal fields in eastern Pennsylvania were in fact broken down into several different regions, each containing different cultural and economic circumstances at the time of the Civil War. In the northeastern section of the anthracite field, known as the Wyoming region, one company dominated the business. This company, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad controlled the business in this region, made up of the growing communities of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, and Hazleton, further south in Luzerne County.[12] The railroad cut a swath through the rocky terrain on its way to the considerable markets in Allentown and Philadelphia. The DL&W also linked with another region around Mauch Chunk and Lehighton, known as the Carbon region. In 1792, it was said that anthracite was first discovered in the mountains towering above the twisting freshets of the Lehigh River. Since then, the industry grew into a major operation.
These regions grew in a wholly different way than the Schuylkill County coal fields. The monopoly employed on production and shipping present in the Wyoming and Carbon regions contrasted sharply with the largely independent operations present in the ridges and valleys near Pottsville, along the Schuylkill River. Small mining operations sprung up on mountaintops and in steep ravines where miners could easily access veins of valuable anthracite. What occurred in the Schuylkill region that did not occur in the northern field was brutal competition. Independent organizations fought to out-produce rival companies, leading to a glut of coal on the market, which in turn drove down commodity prices. While the DL&W could control production from a central corporate hub, these smaller companies faced ruin if profits tailed off. Numerous small companies failed in this marketplace, especially during the perilous years in the 1840s and in the mid-1850s.[13]
Differing sharply from this competitive marketplace was the corporate holdings of the LVCC. Whereas corporations and small operations competed harshly in the other parts of the anthracite region, the company here faced only light competition for a largely untouched market. The connections by river, canal, and later railroad, to the markets and industries of Harrisburg and the Maryland Tidewater meant the corporation had a comfortable share of the market for anthracite. In fact, by the time of the Civil War, anthracite had only just begun to filter in from the other regions.[14] Production, transportation, and sales all worked seamlessly together to put a product on the market at reasonable prices, unlike the vicious price wars present in Schuylkill County. This corporate harmony, where the LVCC owned a controlling portion of the railroad and canal it shipped by, meant that on the eve of Civil War, the region was prepared to develop rapidly as the profits rolled in.[15]
The businessman who would most profit from LVCC during the Civil War was born just as the company itself was being forged. Born in July 1830, near Swansea, Wales, Henry Thomas was destined to come to power in the anthracite kingdoms of Pennsylvania. After arriving in America in 1852, armed with the knowledge and business wherewithal of the Welsh coal fields, he raised himself from clerk to mining engineer in the mine offices of Pennsylvania.[16] By the end of the 1850s, he was prepared to make his first major moves in the industry. In 1861, Thomas and a Baltimore business partner put down $19,500 to lease the “Coal lands… houses, breaker, and coal wharf improvements” from the LVCC.[17] Thomas took over the company in January 1861, just as the communities of Lykens and Wiconisco prepared for war.
The martial fever of late winter and spring 1861 filled these two towns with men in uniform. A young boy remembered “the war horse danced and pranced before the admiring multitudes.”[18] These were the men of the Washington Rifle Company, drilling on Lykens’s new parade grounds, next to the railroad bridge over the Wiconisco Creek.[19] As the secession crisis peaked and Fort Sumter fell, the machinery of war began to turn. Fortuitously for Thomas and his new holdings, the workings at Lykens Valley were ready to deal with new demand. The Telegraph, the Republican newspaper in Harrisburg, noted in April 1861 that the company was finishing improvements and was prepared to produce “no less than 200,000 tons this season.” In fact, the 1861 season would finish just shy of that mark, at about 189,000 tons.[20]
War brought great profits to the businessmen of the Lykens Valley, and throughout the anthracite region. Demand, which had stagnated in the late years of the 1850s, spiked to new, almost unheard of levels. Anthracite forges had begun to turn out immense amounts of iron for the Union war effort, especially from the furnaces of the Lykens Valley’s favorite customers in Harrisburg.[21] A surprising new customer also presented itself to the owners of mining companies. The Federal government required millions of tons of anthracite to run its fleet of steam-powered warships attempting to blockade the South.[22] As the men of northern Dauphin County went off to war, the home front continued to press on with the inexhaustible demands of war production.
Henry Thomas no doubt helped his new corporate darling through his shrewd business practices and ability to make business contacts. He had moved his family from the wild, dirty streets of Wiconisco to a more refined existence among the Dauphin County elite in Harrisburg.[23] He and his young wife, Virginia, and their children adjusted to the move to the city. During this time, in 1861 and 1862, Thomas apparently forged important relationships with the top businessmen and politicians in Harrisburg. Thomas, of strong Unionist and pro-business politics, quickly fell in with associates of Simon Cameron, who was serving as President Lincoln’s Secretary of War, but he maintained close and controversial ties with his financial backers in Harrisburg. While their relationship remains shrouded in mystery, there is some evidence that points to Thomas having connections to the immense amounts of patronage and contracts coming out of the War Department during 1861. This would spell trouble for the Cameron supporters in 1862, following Cameron’s embarrassing resignation in the face of numerous scandals.[24]
The Lykens Valley would continue to produce anthracite at a fever pitch throughout 1862, stopping only when occasional accidents slowed progress. One of these accidents occurred on Februrary 7, 1862. When miner John McCaas and several other laborers were working a vein of coal “a fall of the top rock extending 30 yards and 5 feet thick occurred.”[25] McCaas was killed instantly and five others were seriously injured. The community would struggle with these accidents throughout its history, illustrating the perils of the industry. Ultimately, 1862 would see the LVCC produce 184,611 tons of coal, very close to the previous year’s number.[26]
The next year, 1863, would prove to be one of numerous challenges for both the company and its lessee, Henry Thomas. Much of this struggle harkened back to Thomas’s business and political connections in Harrisburg in 1862. Following Simon Cameron’s resignation and exile to a diplomatic posting in Russia, he sought to make a return to politics in Pennsylvania.[27] His goal, upon returning to Harrisburg in November 1862, was the United States Senate. However, this would require the nomination from a Unionist party dubious of Cameron. His cronies sought to push the Cameron platform and successfully placed Cameron as the candidate on the ballot. They also realized that a Democratic majority in the Pennsylvania Legislature would block his planned ascendency to the Senate. To this, Cameron and friends invoked a policy seeking to essentially bribe Democratic legislators to vote for Cameron. Henry Thomas was among the plotters.[28] In the end, the plot would fail and a scandal erupted on the floor of the Pennsylvania Capitol.
Thomas was accused of bribing two Democratic legislators from Schuylkill County, Conrad Graber and Edward Kerns. At a dinner party in the days before the election in January 1863, Thomas was accused of attempting to bribe the pair to vote for Cameron with the result being the gift of a sizable construction contract for a new railroad spur in the Lykens Valley. Thomas also intimated that he could connect the legislators with a lease on a coal company worth $75,000.[29] Neither man accepted the bribe and Thomas effectively burned his bridges with the Democratic Party in the anthracite region. Thomas, in his testimony, described Cameron as if “we were father and son,” and had banking business together “which amounts to several hundred thousands of dollars a year.”[30] In describing Simon Cameron as a regular visitor at his home and business partner, Thomas illustrated the closeness of their relationship.
Amid the scandal and investigation in March 1863, the first of numerous labor struggles began in the Lykens Valley. Throughout Schuylkill County in 1863, labor strife became commonplace. Irish laborers, overwhelmingly Democratic, sought better working conditions and an equal footing with Welsh and English miners in the region. The struggle became so heated that the provost marshal for Schuylkill County’s district, Charlemagne Tower, sought and received military support against the strikers.[31] The face of labor strife in the Lykens area was much different, however. The Irish, while present, never had a significant foothold in the holdings of the LVCC. Workers were mostly German, Welsh, or English. What could be the root of the strikes that would grip the company in 1863, if not for ethnic tension?
The Patriot & Union, the Democratic mouthpiece in Harrisburg, described a nasty dispute in March. They wrote that the miners “are on a strike for increased wages, and fears are entertained that a riot will ensue resulting in the flooding of the mines and otherwise damaging the property of the proprietor, Mr. Harry Thomas…”[32] The Dauphin County sheriff was called in by Thomas to quell the dissension. Miners returned to work the next day, according to the Patriot & Union. However, miners would again put out in May, when they again struck for higher wages. Again, the sheriff helped keep the peace and the miners promptly returned to work.[33] The evidence suggests that Thomas temporarily increased the wages for the workers following the strikes, but ultimately returned them to pre-strike levels.
The dissension from miners no doubt came from the painfully low wages they were receiving. Gilliard Dock, who met on numerous occasions with Henry Thomas in the summer of 1863, commented on the low wages of the workers. “The cost of living is so great that the men are not willing to submit to a reduction of wages. On the other hand, they are continually striving to get an advance.” He also described the company as “paying the lowest wages of the coal region…”[34] Thomas and his political persuasions no doubt tested the patience of his workers as well. Many in the mining community were members of the Democratic Party, who had an ear for the struggles of the workingman. Thomas, however, had begun to work in the trenches for the Republicans in Dauphin County, acting as chairman for meetings in advance of the 1863 elections. This combination of factors left the miners of the Lykens Valley in a state of frustration and increased their levels of uncertainty about the corporation they supported with their labor. The strikes and the unrest they created resulted in a significant fall in production. In 1863, only 140,000 tons were shipped to market in comparison to the previous year’s 184,000 tons.[35]
The rise of Henry Thomas, the political operative, ushered in a new era in the Lykens Valley. An increase in investment in the summer of 1863, specifically from New England, also came during this transitional time. Thomas submitted his request to be released from his lease in early June 1863, and states he wished to sell his lease to Boston businessmen Thomas J. Lee, Henry Groves, and Josiah Caldwell. The company, at a meeting in Philadelphia, accepted the release after Thomas paid $10,000 to the company. This shift, from the Thomas leadership of 1861-1863 to the new “Yankee” leadership of New England would have tectonic consequences for the industry in this region.[36]
Unlike much of the other narrative in the case of the LVCC in the Civil War, the backdrop of this transition has been discovered. Gilliard Dock, as mentioned previously, visited the Lykens Valley several times during the late summer of 1863 and had numerous interviews with Thomas and Josiah Caldwell as they considered him for the role of mine superintendent. Caldwell, the new lessee of the company, would ultimately pick his brother for the position, much to the chagrin of Dock who complained that “the thing was a ‘set up’ to give his brother a good job.”[37] Dock, despite the snub, continued to monitor the situation in the Lykens Valley mines, where he would eventually become superintendent in 1866. He noted the transition from Thomas to Caldwell and the Boston businessmen with sarcasm and cynicism. Dock reveals that Thomas “made a very handsome thing by selling out his lease” and that Caldwell made more than “$150,000 when he sold the stock to his friends.” The businessmen of Boston had taken notice of the immense profits being made by men such as Henry Thomas, and wished to get into the business. Dock thought very little of these men, especially of Caldwell, who he accused of “foisting onto the market” and of taking “large money out of the pockets of credulous stockholders.”[38]
The career of Henry Thomas continued on the upswing after his “handsome” sale of the Lykens Valley lease. However, soon after his sale of the Lykens Valley lease, his newly found wealth was almost immediately threatened by the incursion of the Army of Northern Virginia onto Pennsylvania soil. General Robert E. Lee took direct aim at Harrisburg as the point where the army wished to go, putting everything Thomas had worked towards in jeopardy. Much to the irritation of his Democratic neighbors, Thomas fled the city for the safety of New York or Philadelphia.[39] The Lykens Valley coal fields were also threatened by the incursion of the rebel army into Pennsylvania. The southernmost coal field in Pennsylvania, the ridges and flat plain of the Lykens Valley would have been a tidy place for the rebels to capture and hold, much as General Stonewall Jackson had aimed to do in the failed 1862 invasion of the North.[40] That campaign went for naught, and the battles in southern Pennsylvania would be the last real threat to the industrial heart of Central Pennsylvania.
The fits and starts of 1863 continued over into 1864 for the Lykens Valley region. Under new management, the mines continued to be developed, but at a much slower pace than in 1861 and 1862. The lack of connections to Harrisburg were illustrated through the Harrisburg media’s apathy towards the news and situation of their Dauphin County neighbors. Few stories were reprinted in the newspapers of Harrisburg as had been done in the years prior. Much less is known about the conditions in the mines during these years as well. What we can chart is the fact that Caldwell certainly became rich from his scheming in this time period. Caldwell began to tie into another New England corporate incursion into the Lykens Valley coal fields.
The Summit Branch Railroad Company had been chartered in 1851 to build a spur railroad through the Bear Gap, where the Lykens Valley mines were located, and several miles up Bear Valley to access another gap in this mountain range.[41] It was designed to be a small but prosperous spur line that would connect to the Lykens Valley Railroad in Wiconisco. The company had done little to develop these plans in the 1850s and had mostly acted as a shell for the funds of several Boston businessmen. By 1862, however, work was being done on a new tunnel about five miles east of the Lykens Valley workings at a location known as Buehlerton. A small farming community, Buehlerton, now known as Williamstown, was the access point for the Summit Branch Company to the valuable anthracite of this region.[42] Caldwell worked out a lease with this corporation as well, and began operations to build a rail line extending the Lykens Valley Railroad to the Buehlerton operation sometime in 1864, but construction would not begin until the summer of 1865.
The Harrisburg political career of Henry Thomas, however, remains out in the light of contemporary sources. The newspapers of the day, the Republican Telegraph and Democratic Patriot & Union, reported frequently about his exploits. In 1863, he became chairman of the local Unionist (Republican) Party and was in charge of organizing the meetings of the party in Dauphin County. Typical of the political bile present before the election of 1863, the Patriot & Union acidly accused Thomas of cowardice and corruption. Of his former holdings in the mines, they wrote, “Being possessed of that immense interest in the Lykens coal banks, he monopolized the trade, and in a single season put up the price of coal $2 to $3 per ton higher than it was. That’s energy for you.” On that little event where Thomas escaped Harrisburg on the eve of invasion, they noted “Mr. Thomas is a patriotic man… He set out for New York before the rebel invasion, leaving the property which he had accumulated in our midst to be defended by his coal pensioners and the ‘copperheads.’” They ended with this scathing conclusion. “So much for Mr. Thomas. We commend his and his ticket to every poor man who likes to buy high coal, to all foreigners who don’t want to vote for 21 years and to the admirers of skedaddlers and the lovers of energy generally. Thomas is the man for them.”[43] Thomas certainly had the ability to stoke the hatred of those on the opposing side of the political spectrum.
As the Civil War came to a close, the anthracite industry continued to build itself on the inflated demand of the wartime economy. With little regard to the sudden drop in coal usage that would come with peacetime, the industry went heedlessly forward with new investment. The LVCC was no exception. New workings were begun and the initialization of a new corporation in the “Gap” would herald in the new, peacetime economy in this part of the anthracite coal fields. The Franklin Coal Company came about out of the confusion involving the New England investors and became an operation under a wing of the LVCC.[44] This would be a choice that would soon be regretted by those involved.
The war did come to an end in April 1865, and with it, the shocking news of the assassination of President Lincoln. In the weeks following the assassination, Lincoln’s body was brought to Harrisburg to lie in state at the Capitol. A mourning parade ushered the body from the railroad depot to the Capitol building, several blocks away. In a blinding rainstorm, thousands looked on and wept as Lincoln’s body rolled slowly past. Alongside the coffin, making their way towards the low-set building on the hill were several men escorting the body of their martyred leader. Among these men, the pall bearers who would carry the heavy wooden coffin of Lincoln, was one Henry Thomas.[45] Here was the man who had pulled himself from lowly clerk to anthracite king and political boss, on a rainy day in April 1865.
With the end of hostilities came turmoil in the economic system that the anthracite region had worked under for the past four years. The high, insatiable demand for coal waned and yet, production continued. Soon, a glut on the market meant the price plummeted. Dozens of operations in the coal fields went bankrupt including the Franklin Coal Company in the Lykens Valley. Superintendent Gilliard Dock, who was pulled back into the Lykens Valley immediately after hostilities, ultimately sued the LVCC for more than $6,000 due to the bankruptcy.[46]
The aftermath of the Civil War and flailing economy that immediately followed devastated the business of the LVCC. Unfortunately, this affected the miners and laborers rather than the owners and operators. Dock remembered the dull days when he spent long hours mediating with the workers, who could work enough hours to make ends meet. He remarked in the 1866 Report of the Short Mountain Coal Company that “Many of the men come into the office on pay-day and find the store-bill absorbing all their wages.”[47] This revelation reveals something that has been previously not acknowledged by local historians in the Lykens area. These miners were being paid on company credit and not making real money, thus creating a system that resembled slavery or indentured servitude but without allowing the worker to ever remove himself from the system. Previously, it was thought that these men were paid on basis of their work and these mines operated outside the realm of traditional anthracite mining norms. This document proves otherwise, revealing that at the end of a war that helped to free untold millions from bondage, these men were being held in economic servitude to a corporation.
The Lykens Valley would continue to produce coal into the 20th Century before fizzling out during the early years of the Great Depression. The cycle of boom and bust economics that would torture the American economy throughout the 19th Century devastated the Lykens Valley and wider anthracite regions on numerous occasions, the most perilous being the 1877 collapse, which nearly bankrupted the entirety of the Lykens Valley, communities and all. However, the industry would survive, and on a small scale, continues to survive to this day. One small scale mining company continues to operate in this region, working coal veins tapped by these men’s forefathers during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. The legacy of the Civil War era continues to make itself known, despite the collective memory of the mining industry beginning to fade. Streets where business once thrived contain nothing but empty storefronts. Where towering coal breakers once stood, mounds of black dirt and stone foundations remain. Tunnels and open gashes scar the earth, often flooded with the orange, acid mine drainage that continues to be one of the region’s most pressing environmental issues. The early years of the anthracite industry in Lykens and Wiconisco firmly established these communities, yet remain today as only shadows of their former liveliness.
Henry Thomas continued to be an influential businessman for the rest of his life. He was active on the political and community scene in Harrisburg until the late 1860s, when his daughter, Lilley, was severely injured in an assault on the seedy streets of Harrisburg.[48] He owned a major hotel, a large three story mansion downtown, and what is today known as City Island in the middle of the Susquehanna River. On moving to Philadelphia, he seemed to have continued his interest in the Lykens Valley area, and maintained a presence in the minds of those who knew him during the war years. Henry Thomas died in 1878 of Bright’s Disease at age 47, leaving an estate believed to be worth more than $200,000.[49] He is almost entirely forgotten today, much as the golden days of the Lykens Valley have been, as one of Central Pennsylvania’s leading industrialists in the middle part of the 19th Century.
Featured Image: Bear Gap in 1862
This paper was written in November 2013.
Endnotes:
[1] “Summer Resort Among the Kittatinny Mountains.” New York Times, August 9, 1874, 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Voss-Hubbard, Mark. Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics Before the Civil War. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 33.
[4] Kelker, Luther Reily, History of Dauphin County, Volume 3. (New York: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1907)
[5] Ibid., 415.
[6] Voss-Hubbard, 33.
[7] Churella, Albert J. The Pennsylvania Railroad: Volume 1, Building an Empire, 1846-1917. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) , 233.
[8] Palladino, Grace. Another Civil War: Labor, Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840-1868, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)
[9] Barrett, J. Allen. Lykens-Williams Valley History, Directory, and Pictorial Review, (Harrisburg, PA: Telegraph Printing Press), 48-49.
[10] U.S. Census, population schedule. Wiconisco Township, Dauphin County, PA. (1860). ancestry.com, 2013.
[11] Beers, F.W., Map of Dauphin County, 1862. Digital. Philadelphia: Pomeroy, A., 1862. MG-11Map Collection #76, Pennsylvania State Archives. PDF File, Map.
[12] Palladino, 34-36.
[13] Ibid, 8
[14] Eggert, Gerald G. Harrisburg Industrializes: The Coming of Factories to an American Community. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 129
[15] Lykens Valley Railroad and Coal Company. Ledger, 1846-1927. Penn Central Railroad Collection, MG-286. #1024, 1 Volume. Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, PA (Herein called LVCC Ledger)
[16] Erskine, Norman White. Norman White, His Ancestors and His Descendants, (New York: 1905), 122
[17] LVCC Ledger, January 1861.
[18] Miller, Dr. Charles H. Lykens, Twenty Years Ago. (Lykens, PA: Register Press, 1877), 24.
[19] “Reception at Lykens,” Evening Telegraph, August 2, 1861.
[20] “Upper End Items,” Evening Telegraph, April 12, 1861. &
“Lykens Valley,” Miscellaneous Documents Read in the Legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, (Harrisburg, PA: A. Boyd Hamilton, 1862.) , 554-557.
[21] Eggert, 84.
[22] Tucker, Spencer. The Civil War Naval Encylcopedia, Volume 1. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011) , 655.
[23] 1862 Baptismal Record, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Harrisburg, PA. ancestry.com, PDF
[24] Eggert, 79-84.
[25] “The Accident at Short Mountain,” Evening Telegraph, Harrisburg, PA. February 14, 1862.
[26] Pennsylvania Office of the Auditor General. “Lykens Valley.” Reports of the Several Railroad Companies of Pennsylvania for 1862, (Harrisburg, PA: Singerly & Myers, 1863), 121-125
[27] Bradley, Erwin Stanley. Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Secretary of War: A Political Biography. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966)
[28] Bergner, George. “Sworn Testimony of Henry Thomas,” The Legislative Record: The Debates and Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Legislature for the Session of 1863. (Harrisburg: Telegraph Press, 1863). 754-756
[29] Ibid., “Sworn Testimony of Conrad Graber,” 751-752
[30] Ibid., “Sworn Testimony of Henry Thomas,” 755.
[31] Palladino, 128.
[32] “Rumored Strike,” Patriot & Union, Harrisburg, PA. March 20, 1863.
[33] “Trouble Brewing,” Daily Patriot & Union, Harrisburg, PA. May 21, 1863.
[34] Dock, Gilliard. 1866 Report of the Short Mountain Coal Company. Gilliard Dock Collection, MG-022. Box 1, Folder 1. Dauphin County Historical Society, Harrisburg, PA
[35] Pennsylvania Office of the Auditor General. “Lykens Valley.” Reports of the Several Railroad Companies of Pennsylvania for 1863, (Harrisburg, PA: Singerly & Myers, 1864), 92-96
[36] LVCC Ledger, May-July 1863.
[37] Dock, Gilliard. Gilliard Dock Collection, 1863-1870. Dock Family Collection, MG-43. #43m.1, Box 3, Folder 23. Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, PA, ‘September 7, 1863’
[38] Ibid., September 6, 1863
[39] “Tribute to Energy,” Patriot & Union. October 10, 1863.
[40] Mingus, Scott L. Flames Beyond Gettysburg: The Gordon Expedition, June 1863. (New York: Savas-Beatie, 2011), 3.
[41] Act of Incorporation of the Summit Branch Railroad Company, (Philadelphia: William F. Geddes, 1851)
[42] “Affairs at the ‘Upper End,’” Harrisburg Telegraph, June 27, 1862.
[43] “Tribute to Energy,” Patriot & Union, October 10, 1863.
[44] Kornblith, Gary J. and Michael Zakim ed. Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth Century America. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 259.
[45] Coggeshall, William. Lincoln Memorial: The Journey of Abraham Lincoln. (Ohio: Ohio State Journal, 1865) 147-149
[46] Dock Journal, September 30, 1867
[47] 1866 Report of the Short Mountain Coal Company, 9.
[48] Frew, Ken. Building Harrisburg: The Architects & Builders, 1719-1941, (Harrisburg, PA: Historical Society of Dauphin County, 2009), 75-76
[49] “Death of Mr. Henry Thomas,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 20, 1878.
Bibliography
Primary Documents
“Affairs at the ‘Upper End,’” Harrisburg Telegraph, June 27, 1862.
“Death of Mr. Henry Thomas,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 20, 1878.
“Reception at Lykens,” Evening Telegraph, August 2, 1861
“Rumored Strike,” Patriot & Union, Harrisburg, PA. March 20, 1863. Accessed March 24, 2013.
“Summer Resort Among the Kittatinny Mountains.” New York Times, August 9, 1874.
“Tribute to Energy,” Patriot & Union. October 10, 1863.
“Trouble Brewing,” Daily Patriot & Union, Harrisburg, PA. May 21, 1863.
“Upper End Items,” Evening Telegraph, April 12, 1861
1862 Baptismal Record, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Harrisburg, PA. ancestry.com, PDF
Act of Incorporation of the Summit Branch Railroad Company, (Philadelphia: William F. Geddes, 1851)
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Wynning History 