The anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, five hundred
square miles of rugged hills stretching between Tower City and
Carbondale, harbored coal deposits that once heated virtually all
the homes and businesses in Eastern cities. At its peak during
World War I, the coal industry here employed 170,000 miners, and
supported almost 1,000,000 people. Today, with coal workers
numbering 1,500, only 5,000 people depend on the industry for their
livelihood. Between these two points in time lies a story of
industrial decline, of working people facing incremental and
cataclysmic changes in their world. When the Mines Closed tells
this story in the words of men and women who experienced these
dramatic changes and in more than eighty photographs of these
individuals, their families, and the larger community.
Award-winning historian Thomas Dublin interviewed a
cross-section of residents and migrants from the region, who gave
their own accounts of their work and family lives before and after
the mines closed. Most of the narrators, six men and seven women,
came of age during the Great Depression and entered area mines or,
in the case of the women, garment factories, in their teens. They
describe the difficult choices they faced, and the long-standing
ethnic, working-class values and traditions they drew upon, when
after World War II the mines began to shut down. Some left the
region, others commuted to work at a distance, still others
struggled to find employment locally.
The photographs taken by George Harvan, a lifelong resident of
the area and the son of a Slovak-born coal miner, document
residents' lives over the course of fifty years. Dublin's
introductory essay offers a briefhistory of anthracite mining and
the region and establishes a broader interpretive framework for the
narratives and photographs.
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