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I came across this little piece and I thought it might be interesting to some. The copyright expired.
copyright has expired; this is a public domain document; this chapter was written in 1909 by Rhodes, a leading historian of the era.
CHAPTER II, pp 51-85
My relation of the occurrences at Reading and Scranton has taken us amongst the population of the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania. No history of the time can be complete without some reference to the Molly Maguires whose activity caused a profound sensation in the coal region and attracted considerable attention from the rest of the country.
Legend has it that a mysterious handprint on the wall of the old jail in Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe), PA was left by Alexander Campbell, a Molly leader, who was hanged the next day in 1877. He is said to have left it there as a sign of his innocence. I've toured the Old Jail Museum but you can't really get close enough to touch the print.
The whole history of anthracite coal mining in North East Pennsylvania is fascinating.
In the mid-19th Century, the occupation of mining coal was extremely difficult, hazardous, unhealthy, and tedious. The miners, nearly all recruited from immigrants recently arrived from England, Ireland, and Wales were hungry for work. They were employed in back-breaking hard labor, long hours, and poverty wages. It was a kind of slavery. The coal company owned your modest hastily built wooden house. To cook and heat the house you agreed to buy the company coal. You had to buy your supplies from the company store. Often you weren't even paid in cash, but in company currency called "scrip" that could only be redeemed in the company store. Boys as young as 8 or 9 starting working in Breakers, picking out impurities from the coal coming down the chutes (although they were supposed to be 12, no one checked birth certificates).
If you were sick of working in the coal mines and ran away, the coal companies had their own security police forces that would treat you as a fugitive slave ... catch you ... and bring you back to work in the mine.
The rise of the Molly Maguires is not surprising.
By the late 1870's and going into the 1880's the Eastern European immigrants started to arrive en masse. I remember seeing a historic document - a letter from a Pennsylvania coal mine manager to his employment recruitment agent in Philadelphia - instructing the agent to hire only "Polanders" (sic) and Slavs ... because the Irish and Welsh were troublemakers and prone to organize strikes.
There is a living living history museum called Eckley Miner's Village that is an actual company coal "patch" town that has been preserved for over 150 years down to the present day. I call it 'the poor man's Colonial Williamsburg'. You see the actual semi-detached 3 and 4 room wooden houses, the company store, the mule stables, the tavern, the doctor's house and office, and the two churches. At one point, after the Civil War, Eckley grew to have 1,000 residents. It is located near the city of Hazleton, PA. Just outside Hazleton is the site of the Lattimer Massacre where innocent coal miners were killed ... but that's another story!
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