A soldier from Carbondale, PA spent a night in the very hallway where Colonel Elmer Ellsworth had been shot dead days earlier - the floor still stained with his blood. Then he shipped out to fight Confederate artillery on the Potomac River. He wrote home to describe all of it. Read the full letter.
When the whistle blew at the end of a shift, the breaker boys of Pennsylvania's Coal Region had a day's worth of coal dust to scrub off. This Philadelphia Inquirer photograph from 1900 captures a part of everyday life for the thousands of child mineworkers at the turn of the 20th century. Read the full story.
While researching Letters from War: 1861, a single line in a Coal Region newspaper stopped me cold. A sergeant had written home describing the murder of a Black man by Union soldiers. This is the investigation into what really happened on June 1, 1861 and the lynching of a man named Frank Jones.
On June 1, 1861, an African American man named Frank Jones was murdered by soldiers near Camp Slifer in Chambersburg. A sergeant from Luzerne County wrote home to describe it. His letter is one of the most disturbing documents in this series — and an unflinching look at deep-rooted racism lurking beneath the Union war effort. Read the letter.
One of the first Coal Region soldiers to die in the Civil War never saw a battlefield. Henry Yeager of Pine Grove was 21 years old when he fell ill at Camp Slifer near Chambersburg. He died on June 1, 1861 - not from enemy fire, but from spotted fever. His body was sent home draped in American flags. Read the story.
"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.