Digging deep into a coal region’s decline
Penn professor of history Walter Licht spent 10 years researching Pennsylvania coal country for his new book. Candace diCarlo
Anthracite coal once powered America’s locomotives, factories and iron forges and was the preferred source for heating homes across the country, due to its purity. But beginning in the first half of the 20th century, it began to be replaced by cheaper forms of energy, such as bitumous coal, hydroelectric power and natural gas. Communities in Northeastern Pennsylvania that had been built around the anthracite mines, such as Pottsville and Hazelton, fell into steep decline.
Walter Licht, Penn professor of history and department chair, spent 10 years researching those communities with SUNY-Binghamton Professor of History Thomas Dublin. Their book, “The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century,” won the 2006 Merle Curti Award for best book published in American social history and the Philip S. Klein Prize of the Pennsylvania Historical Association, awarded for the best book in Pennsylvania history published in the last two years.
Licht explains there are numerous reasons for the decline of anthracite, as its great asset became its great liability. “It’s produced way below the ground [and] it’s an expensive coal to mine,” he says. Plus, anthracite is incredibly dangerous to retrieve—mines are constantly threatened by collapse, underground flooding and massive explosions that can be triggered by one small spark. “On any given day, you can have a community of widows and orphan children.” Once miners retired, the perils of the profession remained inside their bodies as “black lung” disease, making life, “very uncertain for the families in these communities.”
To supplement income and to support families after the death of a miner, children and women were sent to work in textile mills and garment factories. Women had always taken in piecework during the hard times, but began to be important breadwinners as the mines started to close. Licht says there is still plenty of anthracite buried in narrow and deep places that is collected only through strip mining. “This is a collapse not because the coal gave out.”
For their research, Licht and Dublin tracked down residents of these northeastern Pennsylvania communities who were in high school from 1946 to 1950—a time of huge anthracite industry collapse. The researchers obtained lists of alumni and sent out 2,500 questionnaires inquiring about education and employment history; they received 800 responses. Two-thirds of the respondents left their depressed communities in search of work; 13 percent left, but returned later; and 20 percent stayed in these communities, in spite of everything. “Of the people who leave, we were quite surprised to find they don’t go far,” says Licht. Whole communities moved to South Philadelphia or Fairless Hills, working at auto and steel plants. Groups of the men carpooled back to the anthracite region (in Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Carbon, Schuylkill and Northumberland counties) on the weekends. “[There] is such a commitment to this place—and it’s a hard place to love because the earth is so scarred,” Licht adds. “It defies economic reasoning.”
Licht emphasizes that during the collapse of the anthracite mining industry, these “coal crackers” got little help from outside groups. Between predatory venture capitalists, and a corrupt mining union that didn’t bail out anthracite mines, many communities fell on hard times. The state’s Redevelopment Authority was created in 1956 to encourage businesses to move to these depressed towns, but some actually suffered in the long run, as companies moved in, took advantage of tax breaks and then uprooted their facilities to a cheaper place.
Originally published on January 18, 2007.
