Lackawanna Anthracite Coal Tour Hours:
April 1- November 30 10:00AM-3:00 PM
Prices:ADULT (13-64) $10.00; SENIOR (65+) $9.50; MILITARY $9.00;
CHILDREN (3-12) $7.50; UNDER 3- FREE
Anthracite Heritage Museum
Open Year-Round; Monday through Saturday 9:00am to 5:00pm; Sunday:
12:00pm to 5:00pm. Closed most holidays
Admission
(12-64 years of age): $6.00; Reduced (65+ years of age): $5.50;
Youth (3-11 years of age): $4.00; Active Military Duty and Family--
FREE
History 101
Coal deposits are scattered around the globe, but the coal from
a 500 square mile region of northeastern Pennsylvania is special.
During the Paleozoic era, 300 million years ago, what is now rugged
and mountainous terrain was a steamy plain filled with swamps.
Tropical plants grew and died here, and as decaying matter, sank to
the bottom of these swamps to form a dense organic substance known
as peat. Over millions of years, shifts in the earth's plates and
other landscape changes compressed prehistoric peat deposits into
mineral layers known as coal. In northeastern Pennsylvania,
however, the ordinary process of coal formation was accelerated by
a violent upheaval known as the Appalachian Revolution. In this
"revolution," rising mountains literally folded over, splitting
open and thrusting up rock and peat formations from deep inside the
earth. The extra pressure from this process yielded coal that was
more pure, harder, and of higher carbon content than other types of
coal. This coal is anthracite and over 95 percent of the Western
Hemisphere's supply comes from this special region in northeastern
Pennsylvania.
The Appalachian Revolution contributed to another, more recent
upheaval: the Industrial Revolution. Anthracite kept millions warm
in growing cities, fired furnaces in the industrial northeast,
spawned extensive transportation networks, provided jobs for
immigrants seeking better lives, gave rise to the development of
modern corporations and management practices, and spurred the
government to take up activities for economic development and
social justice. What initially appeared to be just black rocks
became black diamonds, creating astounding wealth for some
Pennsylvanians and holding so many more in poverty. The story of
anthracite is complex and stirring, encompassing not only the
pioneering, entrepreneurial spirit of early capitalism and
masterful technological and engineering feats, but also the
difficult lives of the men and boys who mined, broke and loaded
millions of tons of coal and the women and girls who helped hold
the mining communities together. Their hard, dangerous, and usually
low-paid work brought anthracite out of the earth and into the
cities to fuel historic transformations in manufacturing,
transportation and market integration. The Industrial Revolution
was well underway in Europe when, according to folk legend, a
hunter in Carbon County stumbled across "the black stones." This
seemed an appropriate description at first, because anthracite was
not only harder and denser than the more familiar types of soft
coal, such as lignite or bituminous, but also more difficult to
ignite. Once lit, however, anthracite proved to burn longer and
more efficiently than its cousins. Turning these "black stones"
into fuel required the ingenuity of inventive men like Jesse Fell
of Wilkes-Barre and David Thomas of the Crane Iron Works in
Catasauqua, who devised techniques that turned anthracite into the
premier fuel source of nineteenth and early twentieth-century
America.
At the time, northeastern Pennsylvania was not an easy place to
transport goods. Opening up the isolated and mountainous region
required the efforts of a generation of capitalists and
politicians, who used their resources and influence to create a
transportation network that made the coal revolution possible.
Canals were the first step in unlocking the great potential of
anthracite fields. These man-made waterways connected the four
fields of anthracite - in Carbon, Schuylkill, Luzerne and
Lackawanna counties - to inland rivers and then to eastern cities.
Railroads, consuming the iron rails produced in anthracite-fueled
furnaces, then extended these transportation routes and came to
dominate the markets. Coal barons, with thousands of acres under
their control, became a railroad cartel and held the anthracite
region and its people captive in order to supply Philadelphia,
Baltimore and New York City with anthracite. This revolution in
transportation led to corresponding revolutions in the fueling of
industries and the heating of urban residences, which in turn
required an army of miners, laborers, mule drivers and slate
pickers to extract and process anthracite from "the black
hell."
Courage, a dose of fatalism and the relief of getting out alive
after another workday were feelings that cut across the ethnic and
religious differences of those working underground. The
above-ground laborers at the colliery - at the coal breaker,
stables, machine shop, or powder house - also shared a certain awe
of the massive size and power of the operation, coupled with
resentment toward the autocratic bosses. Even "breaker boys,"
children who bloodied their fingers picking out bits of rock from
the crushed coal, felt the social distance between themselves and
the owners and managers, learning soon to doubt the company's
interest in their own welfare. Too often families and communities
mourned for fathers, brothers, and sons crushed in a tunnel
collapse or burned to death in an explosion. Yet the mine workers
found dignity in their work and in providing for their families, a
pride that was sometimes ignored, belittled or deemed radical by
mine owners and those far away from the coal fields. These feelings
of pride, dignity, and injustice led the workers to risk their jobs
and their lives again and again in unionizing efforts that at times
turned violent and even deadly. Often the region lived in a state
of civil war. The struggle between labor and capital defined the
latter stages of the anthracite revolution, during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. The conflicts were about
fair wages, underground safety and above-ground social justice for
working families, who saw their own interests and the mine owners'
interests in supplying coal to the nation inextricably linked. In
the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, or the "Great Strike", mining
communities rallied in support of the drive to organize,
cooperating in order to survive during the dreaded but necessary
strike. Owners asserted their right to manage their property as
they pleased, and demanded their workers be subservient to the
"business of mining." Anthracite workers, however, had finally
gained some leverage in their struggle with the railroad oligopoly:
stopping the flow of anthracite to the nation's factories and
furnaces created a crisis serious enough to warrant the
intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Despite the production of anthracite reaching an astounding 100
million tons by 1917, the owners' efforts to isolate the coal
fields, and to exploit them and their laboring peoples as private
"colonies," didn't work out as they planned. The Great Depression
of the 1930s hit the region particularly hard, and the primary
market for anthracite, the urban northeast, turned to cheaper fuel
alternatives such as electricity, oil and natural gas. The
anthracite railroad cartel remained locked in its labor battle,
resorted to leasing its operations to small and often non-union
operators, and did not develop new markets or technologies for
their precious coal. Anthracite tonnage by 1938 was 46 million,
less than half the tonnage of twenty years before. With fewer and
fewer jobs in the anthracite industry, sons no longer followed
their fathers into the mines, businesses closed and communities
began to empty. By the later decades of the twentieth century, the
once booming coal region had become economically depressed, slowly
coming to terms with the most recent chapter in the anthracite
story: the painful deindustrialization process that many
Pennsylvania towns and cities continue to experience. In sharp
contrast to the imperatives of the free market and the "fountain"
of private enterprise in the past, by the 1950s through the 1970s,
the state and federal government played crucial roles in
diversifying the economy and rejuvenating the region's
opportunities for the good of the people. In anthracite's heyday,
huge coal breakers dotted the landscape and marked the numerous
collieries in northeastern Pennsylvania. Described in 1906 as
"enormous preying monsters," breakers crushed and separated
anthracite into different sizes, processing it for market. Then,
nearly 175,000 anthracite workers supported a million people.
Today, the above-ground strip operations employ fewer than 2,000
workers, and new monsters are on the scene: drag lines scrape away
layers of earth, exposing the tops of nearly vertical veins of
anthracite. These enormous, electrically-powered machines resemble
cranes, but the largest of them can hold two buses in their
scoop.
Those who can remember the experience of working hundreds,
sometimes thousands, of feet underground will be gone. Still, the
heritage of anthracite is alive in people's minds and hearts in the
region; as in the past, the communities have proven resilient in
the face of hardships. The anthracite boom was, and is, a
remarkable, revolutionary saga, mixing economic and technological
triumphs with human and environmental tragedies. As Donald Miller
and Richard Sharpless write at the close of their book, The Kingdom
of Coal, "Anthracite's final legacy is a warning to all Americans
that human lives and natural resources are finite and precious,
that they can no longer be sacrificed indiscriminately on the altar
of private greed." (explorepahistory.com)
Logging Requirements:
To complete this earthcache, you must complete 4 of the
following.
1. Take a picture of yourself AND/OR GPS in front of a piece of
mining equipment and tell its purpose.
2. Locate the giant "black diamond" of coal between the store
and the miner's cart. If anthracite coal weighs 94 pounds per cubic
foot, how much do you think this weighs?
3. How many bells signal the decent of the miner's cart into the
mineshaft? If you take the tour, what does it feel like during the
decent?
4. What is the purpose of the vertical wood columns in the
mineshaft? (Hint: It's not what you'd expect!)
5. Compare the size of the coal veins presented during the tour
(Clark bed and No. 1 Dunmore bed). What were the vertical sizes of
the two coal veins? Why do you think causes these coal veins to be
so drastically different?
6. What does the "tipple" do?
7. What landform in Pennyslvania's ancient geologic history gave
rise to the vast quantities of coal in Northeast PA? How is
anthracite coal different than other types?
Send your answers to me via my email address. Any answers posted
below will be deleted and credit will not be given for the find.
Enjoy your visit!
Congrats drpeterson3, IFoundWaldo, RACC_ChemProf, and Captain
Greenock on the FTF!