In the sparkling sunshine on a summer morning, the prospect was deceptively cheery: a straight row of simple, wooden-framed houses, some freshly painted red, fell and then rose again with the undulating wooded terrain. Amid sheltering trees and flowering shrubs, a lone resident labored in his ornamental garden.
"Back then, of course, there would have been no trees or lawns. Vegetable gardens and chicken coops would have occupied all the available space," explained Jeanette Daniels, our guide, as she led our group down the street that constitutes the sole commercial, residential and social artery of what had been the coal company town of Eckley, Pa.
"Furthermore," she added, "everything would have been covered in a thick layer of black dust."
"Back then" was the second half of the 19th century when Eckley was one of some 350 "patch towns" that dotted the long wooded ridges and valleys of eastern Pennsylvania like so many sooty ant colonies.
Today, it's the Eckley Miners' Village, a popular state-run historical site, and one of the featured attractions on our two-day, self-guided tour of the southern anthracite coal fields, which stretch roughly from Hazelton southwest to Pottsville. This area is not to be confused with the northern anthracite fields centered around Scranton.
For me, it would be primarily an intellectual journey back to America's gritty, and frequently ugly, industrial past. For my wife Stacie and her 12-year-old nephew, Adam, it would be more a journey of understanding and appreciation.
Both of Stacie's grandfathers (and Adam's great grandfathers) had worked in these mines, along with dozens of assorted uncles and cousins. Theirs was not an easy or pleasant life -- just better than the one that they had known as peasant farmers in their native Poland.
The 20-minute video presentation at the visitor's center had highlighted miners' difficult 10-hour shifts and the equally difficult (and longer) days of their wives.
Ironically, Eckley had been one of the nicer patch towns, which Daniels attributed to the fact that the original Sharpe, Leisenring and Co. mine owner lived there on-site rather than in Pottsville, the coal mining metropolis of the southern anthracite region.
Today Eckley is the last of the patch towns. Founded in 1854, it peaked in the 1880s with some 1,000 employee-residents simultaneously working two "breakers," the enormous wooden superstructures in which the freshly mined "black diamonds" were broken, graded and sorted. Now there are only 50 or so residents -- all retired miners (or their widows) and their families.
That there is anything left at all is owing to Eckley's lucky stars -- not the ones that illuminate the clear night sky, but the ones at Paramount Studios who chose Eckley as the backdrop for a 1968 movie about the Molly Maguires, the controversial Irish mine workers and saboteurs of the 1870s.
In preparation for the film, Eckley underwent a $3 million demodernization effort, which also included the construction of a half-size imitation breaker. So authentic had Paramount's stage crew re-rendered what was left of the original village that in 1971 the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission converted all of it into a 100-acre living museum, granting lifetime residential rights to all current property owners.
The first stop on the Eckley tour was the 1861 Immaculate Conception Church, located on the east (Irish) side of town. It was there that we discovered that Daniels had grown up on the same street in nearby Hazleton as my mother-in-law. A bit of a coincidence, but in this part of Pennsylvania, just about everybody has some coal miners in their family tree.
Next was a restored miners' duplex, featuring primitive furnishings, simple religious adornments and doorstops made from lumps of coal.
"Homes were rented out only to married men, who could then take in single boarders if they wished," Daniels said. "And there were no living rooms because everyone worked all the time. The social room was the kitchen -- except in the summer when the cooking was done in the summer kitchen, or shanty in back so as to keep the main house cool."
"Not cool at all" was my nephew Adam's response when Daniels pointed out that by age 7, most miners' sons were already working as "breaker boys," pulling pieces of shale from among the coal as it was broken between the teeth of rotating mechanical drums.
Our tour resumed on the other side of the studio-built tracks where Eckley's predominantly Protestant mine bosses and operators lived in appreciably better circumstances. Daniels, who has been a volunteer guide at Eckley for more than two decades, returned the narrative to the Molly Maguires.
"Some people look on them as victims, some as vigilantes. It all depends upon who is writing the book and their point of view," she said.
The movie sided with the Mollies, but years earlier, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novella, The Valley of Fear, took the part of the mine owners.
In the case of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the point of view changed: after having convicted and executed their leader, John Kehoe (whose character was played by Sean Connery in the movie) and nine others in 1877, it granted them posthumous pardons in 1979.
The demise of the Molly Maguires meant a new round of hardships for the miners. Daily wages for skilled miners were cut from $3 to $2. It wasn't until 1898, when most of the miners were from Eastern Europe, that legal agitation by the nascent United Mine Workers finally began to improve their lot.
Fortunately for his immediate family, at least, my wife's Uncle Joe had lived long enough to be included in the landmark Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act's black lung settlement of 1969.
Discovered in 1791
Our next destination took us back to the beginnings of the anthracite boom and a town called Summit Hill, perched atop a ridge known as Sharp Mountain about 25 miles northeast of Allentown.
Getting there was more than half the fun as we threaded our way past derelict corrugated metal breakers, glimmering black "spoil piles" high enough to ski down, and dozens of abandoned strip-mining pits (known as strippings) out of which spindly white birch trees had begun to grow.
In the far corner of Ludlow Park, beyond the white lattice gazebo and memorials to the local townsmen who fought in the Civil, Spanish-American and both World Wars, stood our objective: a granite monument to frontiersman Philip Ginter who discovered anthracite here in 1791. A year later, the first anthracite mine was founded, and what had been dismissed as an infertile wilderness became a hotbed of commercial activity.
Coal had been well known to the indigenous Lenni Lenape Indians who referred to it as "the rock that burns." The problem was that anthracite -- hard coal -- didn't burn easily, especially compared to the more common bituminous, or soft, coal.
The invention of a method of forcing air (which contains combustible oxygen) into the coal in 1810 solved the ignition problem, and the mine shafts were opened to large-scale production -- and the large-scale immigration that followed.
Three miles back down Sharp Mountain is Lansford, site of the No. 9 Wash Shanty and Mine, which, at the time of its closing in 1972 had been the oldest anthracite mine in continuous operation in the country. The 1855 mine has since reopened for tours. Visitors can also tour a small museum and visit the wash shanty, an open-air laundry where the miners would divest themselves of their gritty work garments and accompanying layers of sweat and soot.
Getting the coal out was dangerous, back-breaking work. But getting the coal to market was no simple trick, either. At first, it went by ox wagons (themselves prone to accidents on the twisty, inclined roads) to Philadelphia, a distance of as much as 100 miles.
The first commercial railroad in America was built in 1831, linking the Schuylkill Coal and Iron Co. mines in Tamaqua with Port Clinton on the Schuylkill River, a distance of 21 miles.
For the next 70 years, tiny Tamaqua would be one of America's most progressive towns. Among its many claims to fame was that it was the third city in America to get electric lights (in 1886) -- three years ahead of New York City.
In my wife's family, Tamaqua is also where Uncle Frank had been born, while his father worked as a telegraph operator in the 1881 gingerbread railroad office that still stands in the center of town.
Today Tamaqua is typical of the dozen or so surviving anthracite coal towns whose glory days are behind them. Ornate Victorian storefronts have either been boarded up or taken over by second-hand dress shops, video stores and Chinese restaurants. But you can still buy coal statuary at Gem Jewelers on East Broad Street and get a "Black Diamond" steak at the vintage 1950s Tamaqua Diner.
More to learn
There was more to be learned about these black diamonds, and our next stop was the Museum of Anthracite Mining in Ashland, also run by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
There a docent aptly named Chip served up a quick course on anthracite, which is subterranean organic peat that has been pressurized and heated over millions of years.
"That's what makes it so rare," Chip Klingerman explained. "The only other state that has anthracite is Rhode Island, but theirs is so compressed that it can't be burned. Of the original 30 billion tons of anthracite, only an estimated 7 billion remain. And it is still being mined, though now almost exclusively via strip mines."
From the exhibits in the five-room museum we learned about the different kinds of mines (drift, slope, tunnel, and shaft), timbering (soft woods were preferred because they would tip the miners off by bending before breaking), drainage, safety, ventilation, drilling and blasting techniques.
For Adam, the highlight of the trip was the adjacent Pioneer Tunnel Mine, an early 20th-century drift mine (one that burrows laterally into the mountain) that re-opened as a tourist attraction in 1962.
"Cool" he said, as the steel doors swung open and a battery-powered engine pushed our three rickety wooden railway cars slowly into the 52-degree darkness.
As we rumbled along, our guide, Howie Smith, a solidly built, middle-aged man with 18 years of experience in the K&S; Mines, pointed out the 10 major veins, including the Mammoth, whose seven-foot thickness makes it the single largest anthracite vein in the world.
After we were 1,800 feet into the mine (and 400 feet below the surface), we took a 20-minute walking tour to better understand what working in the mines had been like.
Adam was impressed by the reproduction stable where, as Smith explained, "12-year-old boys began their mining careers tending the mules. And they better do it right, because it was easier to replace them than a mule."
Nothing could have prepared us for the display of true darkness when Smith switched off the overhead electric lights. He then showed us the feeble improvement made by the carbide headlamps worn by the early miners.
Back out in the sunshine it was all aboard the Henry Clay, a 1927 steam "lokie," which -- after being primed with a half-dozen shovels of home-hewed coal -- pushed us backward through the pine and birch forest to a vantage point overlooking the Mahanoy River Valley.
There a new guide pointed out a nearby bootleg mine operated clandestinely by out-of- work miners during the Depression and the distant ridge that hides what's left of the town of Centralia.
In 1962, an accidental fire at the local dump ignited an open seam of coal. It was two years before anyone noticed, and by then it was too late: now deep inside the earth and burning at temperatures approaching 1,500 degrees, the fire has proven impervious to all attempts to flood or smother it.
Out of the mines
Mining was a hard life, but there was time for fresh-air recreation. Beginning in 1926, one of the most popular spots to go was Knoebels (the "k" is not silent) Grove Amusement Park, located in a wooded glen near Elysburg. Founded with just a carrousel and a creek-fed swimming pool, Knoebels now has more than 40 rides but still manages to retain that old-time flavor. And best of all, it's strictly pay as you go -- no hefty full-day admission price and no charge for parking.
Miners were also fond of spiritual refreshment, which is why a tour of the Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville was next on tap. Founded by German immigrant David Yuengling in 1829, and now run by his great-great- grandson, Yuengling is said to be America's oldest brewery.
Our two-day tour ended in Shenandoah, one of the roughest of the early mining towns and a natural breeding ground for the Molly Maguires. Later, Shenandoah would become famous as the boyhood home of Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, to whose big band music Uncle Carl and Aunt Francie remember dancing at the Lakeside Ballroom in rural Ryan Township.
Today, it's the site of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Miners Memorial, an open-air, brass triptych honoring the men who went down in the mines.
Aided by the words of historian and miner advocate Rosanne Hall, we collectively came to the understanding and appreciation each had been seeking:
"Guided only by a dim light that carried him through the night of day. His blackened face and weary eyes etched the strength and unshakeable pride of the Pennsylvania anthracite miner. Many yesterdays, todays and tomorrows were built by his hard working hands using only a pick and a shovel."
An ideal day
8 a.m.: Up and at 'em with a hearty miner's breakfast and onto the winding two-lane roads that lead past the remains of the world's largest anthracite mining region.
10 a.m.: Take a guided tour of Eckley Miners' Village.
Noon: Chili dogs (with onions, of course) and root beer floats at Jimmy's, a Hazleton institution of lower cuisine since 1937.
1:30 p.m.: All aboard the Pioneer Tunnel Mine tour in Ashland for the 35-minute journey deep into America's industrial past. Afterward, cross the park to the Museum of Anthracite Mining to learn more about mining.
5 p.m.: All play and no work at Knoebels Grove Amusement Park in Elysburg, where the most thrilling ride might be just being there, amid all the trees and the memories of what amusement parks used to be like.
9 p.m.: Nightcap of draft Yuengling with all the coal-mining stories you can handle at one of Mahanoy City's black-collar bars before retiring to where the other 2 percent lived -- in late Victorian splendor at the Kaier Mansion B&B.;
When you go
Getting there: Pennsylvania's Black Diamond Country is located about three hours north of Baltimore. To get there, take Interstate 83 north to Harrisburg, where you connect with Interstate 81, also heading north. Interstate 81 essentially bisects the southern anthracite region, with all the major attractions lying within 10 to 20 miles on either side.
Attractions:
Eckley Miners' Village, Rural Route 2, Box 236, Weatherly, PA 18255
570-636-2070
www.phmc.state.pa.us
* Hours: Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5 p.m.
* Admission: $3.50 ($1.50 children)
Wash Shanty Mine and Museum, 9 Dock St., Lansford, PA 18232
570-645-7074
* Hours: Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.
* Admission: $3 ($2 children)
Museum of Anthracite Mining, 17th and Pine streets, Ashland, PA 17921
570-636-2070
www.phmc.state.pa.us / bhsm / toh / eckley / eckley. asp?secid=14
* Hours: April through Novem-ber from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
* Admission: $3.50 ($1.50 children)
Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine & Steam Train, 19th and Oak streets, Ashland, PA 17921
570-875-3850
www.pioneertunnel.com
* Hours: Memorial Day through Labor Day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; April-May and September-October, mine tours at 11 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 2 p.m.; train tours by reservation only
* Admission: tunnel, $7 ($4.50 children); train, $5 ($3.50 children)
Knoebels Amusement Park, Route 487, Elysburg, PA 17824
800-487-4386
www.knoebels.com
* Hours: June through August from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., weekends in May and September
* Admission: free to the park; rides 50 cents to $2
Yuengling Brewery, Fifth and Mahantongo streets, Pottsville, PA 17901
570-622-4141
www.yuenglingbrewery.com
* Free tours: Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., Saturdays in June, July and August at 11 a.m., noon and 1 p.m.
Lodging:
Kaier Mansion, 729 East Centre St., Mahanoy City, PA 17948
570-773-3040
Kaier@ptd.net
* An 18th-century Victorian mansion with five guest rooms; rates from $65.
Information:
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, State Museum Building, 300 North St., Harrisburg, PA 17120-0024
717-787-3362
www.phmc.state.pa.us
* Extensive statewide listing of historical sites with links to regional, county and local attractions.
Schuylkill County Visitors Bureau, 91 Progress Ave., Pottsville, PA 17901
800-765-7282
www.schuylkill.org
* Lodging, dining and general tourist information.