Lieutenant John Ryan of Pottsville was captured during Pickett's Charge and spent nine months in Libby Prison. He came home with scurvy, dysentery, blackened teeth, and an ulcer eating through his leg. Explore more of his story of survival during the Civil War.
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.
In 1875, a travel writer gazed down into Williams Valley near Tower City. Coal breakers loomed like "enormous black spectres," ridgelines fading blue toward the Susquehanna — the industrial and the sublime, side by side. Read the story.
In a letter to the "Miners' Journal," Private James K. Helms of the 6th Pennsylvania describes the scenes as the US Army crossed the Potomac River at Williamsport, MD in June 1861. The young soldier's account vividly describes their first march toward the enemy in Virginia. Read the full letter.
Inside an alleged Molly Maguires gathering place at Mahanoy City. Allan Pinkerton's detective agency described it room by room - the bar, the dining hall, the upstairs meeting room where a murder was allegedly planned. The Emerald House at Mahanoy City still stands today at 324 West Centre Street. Read the story and more about the Molly Maguires.
“The years 1857–58 were desperate in the coal fields.” On a hill above a patch town in Schuylkill County, families gathered to hear the news of a nation coming apart. One man read aloud from a newspaper while others listened, argued, and tried to make sense of a distant crisis that was moving closer each day. 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.
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.
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.