A 1903 Pennsylvania Coal Patch

Stedman – a coal patch town in the Laurel Creek valley of the southern Schuylkill-Carbon anthracite field in Pennsylvania. It's a place of steeply sloping mountains with long ridges, plunging into a narrow valley where the creek makes barely a trickle in late summer and thunders like a runaway train after a heavy rain or sudden spring thaw. The mountainsides are forested with hemlock, mountain laurel and new-growth hardwoods. Most of the mature hardwoods in the valley have long since been harvested for mine timbers. Rising to a height which challenges the mountains is a huge bank of cast-off mining refuse called culm, through which the women and children of the village sometimes clamber with baskets and burlap sacks. They collect bits of coal out of the slag, to warm their homes and cook their food – a practice which the Allegheny Anthracite Company officially forbids but most often tolerates as a matter of keeping the peace at no additional expense to the shareholders. In 1903, the dominant structures in the valley are the Company's No. 3 colliery buildings. Of these, the largest is the breaker, built into the hillside with trestles and inclined planes attached to its sides, anchored to the earth like the tendrils of a parasitic plant. At its highest point, the breaker towers to 150 feet above the valley floor. Two hundred yards to the west of the breaker is the head of the mine shaft, a vertical tunnel piercing the earth to a depth of two thousand feet, passing through strata of quartzite, sandstone, shale, slate and three major anthracite coal seams – the Bushkill, the Hauto, and, at the deepest point, the Tuscarora. Constructed at the head of the shaft is the headframe, a skeleton of wood and steel with two eight-foot sheave wheels at the top, over which steel cables run from the machinery shed to the cage, a steel structure which is raised and lowered through the shaft, carrying workers, supplies, tools and coal. In a long, sooty brick shed with four tall black smokestacks are the boilers and machinery which drive the hoisting apparatus and the pumps and ventilation fans which keep the underground tunnels and slopes and drifts of the mine tolerably dry and free of dangerous gases. Smoke billows from the stacks when the boilers are fired and the mine is working. The main street is Allegheny Street. Unpaved, the street and its tributary alleys are frozen and rutted in winter, and a hogwallow of mud or a dust bowl the rest of the year. Allegheny Street is a half-mile north-south thoroughfare which runs uphill from the colliery gate on the north to a dead end on the flank of Fleming Hill on the south. Halfway up the street, Saint Gabriel's church and parish school dominate a full block. Across the street is the smaller Welsh Methodist church. Across the valley, one can see the gilded bulb domes of Saint Cyril's Russian Orthodox church, the newest church in Stedman. At the top of Allegheny Street is The Manse, the home of Christopher Ingram, superintendent of the No. 3 colliery. This house is made of red brick, with steeply gabled slate roofs, beveled glass windows, a turreted entry foyer and a wide, dark-green-painted wooden verandah on three sides, commanding a panoramic view of the colliery directly below and the sweep of the Laurel Creek valley to the east and the west. The earth under the village and the entire valley has been drilled and tunneled and blasted into an anthill of giant proportions. Every so often, a parcel of ground will tremble and yawn when the roof falls in on a stretch of the workings below. Below the surface, as miners work into the coal seams, moving away from the shaft or the slope, they leave pillars of coal to hold up the roof. When they come to the end of the seam, they turn and work back the way they came, removing from the pillars as much coal as they dare. This is called robbing the pillars. It's the most dangerous work in the mine. Every miner and laborer who works at robbing the pillars prays that, when the roof falls – as it almost certainly will – it will fall behind him, not on him or into the gangway between him and the way out. The houses in Stedman are of simple wood frame construction, with board-and-lath siding, built side-by-side, two dwellings to a unit, four rooms each, two below and two above. Henry Gwynn, like many others in the village, has built a crude breezeway in the back, which leads from the kitchen to a shed. When the heat of summer descends in late June, he dismantles the coal stove and moves it, piece by piece, from the kitchen to the shed. It remains there until early October. Heat from the stove is a blessing in winter, a curse in the summer. Read more in Up Home: Stedman 1903-1909, coming in the fall from www.windstormcreative.com. (Couldn’t resist inserting a plug).