Sergeant John Williamson was a young laborer from the Coal Region village of Eckley who enlisted in the United States Army in 1861. One year later, he was killed during the brutal fighting at Charles City Crossroads in Virginia. Today, a photograph preserves the story of his short life in his hometown. Read the Full 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.
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 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.
Around the turn of the 20th century, about 2,000 people lived in Mahanoy Plane, in the shadow of the inclined railroad that hauled coal up Broad Mountain toward Frackville. Breakers, engine houses, and repair shops lined the tracks. What began as a railroad outpost became a bustling Coal Region village. Read the Full Story.
Around 1905, this photograph captured miners deep beneath Scranton preparing to send a car of anthracite coal up a shaft that may have stretched 1,500 feet to the surface. Read the Full Story.
Two thousand miners filled the streets of Mahanoy City in September 1900, marching together in one of the largest labor actions the Coal Region had ever seen. Their strike would ripple far beyond that moment, helping set the stage for the dramatic gains won just two years later. Read the Full Story.
In the late 1930s, Jack Delano photographed the silent ruins of the Shenandoah City Colliery, a once-massive operation left to decay as the Great Depression and industrial change gutted the anthracite industry. This is what collapse looked like in real time across Schuylkill County. Read the Full Story.
In 1965, photographer Jack Delano looked back on the many months he spent living in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region during the Great Depression, documenting abandoned mines, bootleggers, and families hanging on by a thread. His words add new depth to the images many of us know so well. Read the Full Story.