"What a terrible thing a battle is..." On July 21, 1861, the Civil War turned truly bloody at Bull Run. A soldier with ties to Pittston was there - among the first onto the field, and the last to leave - and wrote home to describe the retreat, the dead left behind, and the moment the war became something no one could take back. Read the full letter.
A Luzerne County soldier sat down in a just-vacated Confederate camp at Bunker Hill, Virginia and wrote home to a woman in Wilkes-Barre in July 1861. The rebels had left so fast they didn't take their food. The writer shares his unvarnished thoughts about his rebel foes. Read the letter.
"The Christian men to whom God has given control..." Reading Railroad president George Baer meant his reply to a Wilkes-Barre photographer to be private. Within weeks it had been telegraphed across the country and handed the striking miners of 1902 the perfect villain. Read both letters in full.
"The battle lasted half an hour" After months of drilling at Camp Slifer and a long march south, Charles Cyphers finally had a battle to report. Writing fast from Martinsburg on July 7, he gave Pittston Gazette readers their first eyewitness account of Hoke's Run — and the dozens of locomotives the rebels had burned on their way out of Martinsburg, VA. Read the full letter.
"The enemy's balls whistled like hail about our ears." Sergeant Francis Woodhouse stood his ground as cannon fire tore through the lines at Hoke's Run and watched two Pittston men fall wounded beside him. He came through without a scratch and wrote home four days later with one of the most vivid firsthand accounts in this series. Read the full letter.
A Fourth of July firefight at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Captain Alfred Dart's Fourth of July opened with a skirmish across the Potomac River. He found time to write home to Carbondale on the holiday. Read the full letter.
George Shafer was 17 years old and had just survived his first Civil War battle when he sat down to write his mother in Carbondale, PA. He wanted her to know he was safe — and wondered what the town was doing to celebrate the Fourth of July. Read the full letter.
During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a Wilkes-Barre letter writer condemned corporate greed and the brutal suppression of striking workers, calling for solidarity among laborers. Published on August 1, 1877, the plea coincided with a deadly clash in Scranton, where militia fired on strikers, foreshadowing decades of labor struggles in the Coal Region. Read the full story and letter.
The 1913 Cameron Colliery bathhouse in Shamokin, PA. Featured in The Colliery Engineer magazine, this 1912-built facility provided heated tubs and steam heat, modern conveniences like electric lighting, and lockers for 224 miners, with multilingual rule notices—an early example of worker welfare in the anthracite fields. Read the full story
A photograph of Corporal Harry Kimmel appeared in a July 1942 edition of the West Schuylkill Press-Herald of Tremont, PA. Learn more about the World War II soldier from Donaldson, PA. Read the full story.