“With many regrets at leaving our families and friends behind us, we still had the consolation to know that we have enlisted our lives and honors in the most noble cause…”
In April 1861, as volunteers poured into Camp Curtin, a Schuylkill County printer-turned-soldier captured the surge of patriotism, noise, and uncertainty at the very start of the Civil War - writing his letter on a tin pan between drills as his war began.
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Built in 1851, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad depot on East Union Street is Pottsville's oldest surviving railroad building — and it has a Civil War history worth exploring.
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“The people flocked in by thousands… it seemed as if its whole population had been poured forth.”
On a cold April day in 1861, Pottsville, PA came to a standstill as hundreds of young men marched to the railroad depot and into a civil war that had just begun.
Crowds filled the streets, handkerchiefs waved from every window, and the sound of cheers followed the train as it pulled away.
The soldiers went into history as the "First Defenders."
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In the winter of 1875, the Long Strike pushed Coal Region families to the breaking point.
Harper’s Weekly captured the moment in a stark illustration titled “The Last Loaf,” showing women and children gathered around a small outdoor oven, baking the only bread they had left while a silent breaker loomed behind them. It’s a raw look at how desperate life became as wages collapsed and the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association fought its final, losing battle.
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On a recent drive through Pottsville, I pulled off the road for a quick photo—and ended up staring at one of the city’s oldest surviving witnesses to history.
It’s the last remnant of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad’s original passenger depot: a brick head house built in 1851.
One important moment in American history still hangs over the place.
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Two days after ten alleged Molly Maguires were hanged in Pottsville and Mauch Chunk, a letter signed “Fiat Lux” appeared in the New York Sun—and it turned the headlines of the day on their head.
Instead of cheering the executions as many contemporary newspapers did, the writer blamed the Reading Railroad, coal operators, and a rigged system that kept immigrant mineworkers in brutal poverty, arguing that not all the guilt lay with the men on the gallows.
It’s a sharp, early indictment of corporate power in the Coal Region.
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Step into 1861 Pottsville, where railroad stations buzzed, coal cars lined the tracks, and iron foundries thrived.
An illustration from a travel guide reveals a booming town on the brink of war and rich with industrial promise.
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The development of the rich veins of coal that run beneath Schuylkill County fueled an industrial revolution in the 1850s. And much of the coal that supplied the iron furnaces, steam ships, and kept millions of Americans warm as a home heating fuel traveled to market through America's fourth largest city: Philadelphia. In late 1852, … Continue reading “The great coal depot” – Illustrations of Port Richmond in Philadelphia in 1852
