--- title: Coal Veins date: 2022-09-14T15:45:00-04:00 author: University of Maryland canonical_url: "https://terp.umd.edu/coal-veins" section: Articles --- # Coal Veins *September 14, 2022* — by [Liam Farrell](/authors/liam-farrell) - *Photo via Library of Congress* > Waves of immigrants have long clashed in Pennsylvania coal country, where a UMD anthropologist is digging into the commonalities between old and new. *coal miners — Miners pause before descending into a Hazleton, Pa., coal mine in 1905. While coal increased in profitability during that era, it was also extremely dangerous for its workers.* **THE SON OF IRISH** immigrants, Thomas Walsh was orphaned as a child but was 38 years old and supporting a young family of his own by the time he started his shift at a northeastern Pennsylvania coal mine on May 3, 1911. He had turned a chance meeting with a dressmaker named Catherine on a streetcar into a marriage that had given them 2-year-old Mary and 3-month-old Florence. They wed despite the disapproval of Catherine’s mother, a native of Ireland whose own miner husband had died in 1898; now the owner of a paid-off house, she suspected Walsh was only interested in her daughter for her modest wealth. It was still a boom time for people living among the mountains laced with pure and shiny anthracite coal, prized for heating, manufacturing and steam production. A sliver of Pennsylvania was providing more than 15% of America’s energy, increasing wages and finally giving the brigades of miners who toiled underground the chance to put away small savings. Profits took their toll in blood, however; in 1910, 59,000 employees in Luzerne County dug up almost 29 million tons of coal, but more than 200 of them died in mine accidents. *Thomas Walsh headshot — Thomas Walsh, the author’s great-grandfather, was killed in a mine accident in northeastern Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy of Liam Farrell)* --- **WHILE GROWING UP** on Long Island in the 1970s, Shackel thought he would be an architect until he spent a college summer in Illinois doing archaeological work. Up at 5 a.m. for nine weeks, he surveyed an American Indian village site and burial mounds in preparation for a major interstate project. “I almost didn’t want to come back home,” Shackel says. “It was a new adventure.” *children of miners play — Children of miners play near their homes in Hazleton, Pa., while surrounded by coal debris. Generations of European immigrants cycled into the industry before it collapsed in the mid-20th century. (Photo by Keystone View Company, via Library of Congress)* --- **IN THE WAY** that official documents often bleach out visceral detail, my great-grandfather’s death certificate simply says “killed by a fall of rock.” The 1911 Department of Mines of Pennsylvania report—which notes fatalities’ nationality, occupation, age, and number of widows and orphans—says he and Charles Notari, a 23-year-old single Italian laborer, died at the chamber’s face, the frontline of digging. An article in the May 4, 1911, edition of the Pittston Gazette said it took two hours for the “badly mangled” remains to be unearthed—“Mr. Walsh was a man of exemplary habits and was well liked by all who knew him”—and were given to “Undertaker O’Malley.” But according to family lore, officials from the Pennsylvania Coal Company unceremoniously left Walsh’s body on the kitchen floor, saying, “There he is.” For miners who survived, economic fortunes were robust for only a few more years. The region reached its peak around World War I, when investors started buying up mining operations as tax shelters and assets for sale instead of production. Anthracite, which was already dangerous to reach because of its deep, narrow and twisted veins, became even more costly as workers had to burrow farther underground, leaving the market vulnerable to competition from oil, natural gas and hydroelectric power. The textile industry provided an economic cushion at first, both for the region and for Catherine, who continued to work as a seamstress while widowed and wholly responsible for a toddler and baby. When her mother died in 1914, she and a brother inherited the family duplex, a rare safety net that perhaps saved them. Florence grew up and married my grandfather, William Farrell, in 1937; by that time, men in northeastern Pennsylvania had started commuting to New Jersey to work at factories. My grandparents followed so William, a trained dental technician, could open a laboratory in East Orange and eventually raise four sons, including my late father, Thomas. A generation later, their nine grandchildren were on the way to achieving college degrees and white-collar jobs. By the time I graduated high school in 2000, however, fewer than 1,000 miners were working to extract 4 million tons of coal that year, and surveys on health and well-being from agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked northeast Pennsylvania at the bottom of American metropolitan areas. According to U.S. Census data, Luzerne County today still has a higher disability and poverty rate than the national average, with a median household income that is 18% below and a nine-point deficit in residents with at least a bachelor’s degree. That economic stagnation invited a political reckoning. --- **ORIGINALLY FROM THE** Dominican Republic, Annie Mendez was living in New Jersey 20 years ago with her two children and working as a paralegal when her boyfriend at the time wanted to open an auto repair business in Hazleton. *Paul Shackel speaks with Victor Perez — Anthropology Professor Paul Shackel, right, speaks with Victor Perez following an interview for the oral history project. Perez is president of the Dominican House of Hazleton, a social services agency in the city’s downtown. (Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle)* > “We are not a bunch of individual groups. We are one culture.” — Bode Morin, site administrator of Anthracite Heritage Museum and Eckley Miners’ Village **AS HE PUT IT** in his book, “[Remembering Lattimer](https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Lattimer-Migration-Pennsylvania-Anthracite/dp/0252083687),” Shackel’s scholarly goal is to show how immigrants across time and ethnicities have been animated by “universal values that we all want and desire—such as peace, good health, education and the ability to sustain oneself.” Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Shackel conducted excavations at Eckley Miner’s Village, a restored coal town, as well as in Lattimer and nearby Pardeesville. Joining with the Hazleton Integration Project, a nonprofit working to build local relationships across ethnic lines, Shackel also brought together Hazleton high schoolers of white and Hispanic backgrounds for the digs. One of them was Cesar Dadus, now a Bloomsbury University student who immigrated to Hazleton from the Dominican Republic with his family and participated in three of Shackel’s projects. *Signs in downtown Hazleton — Signs in downtown Hazleton for businesses and community events show the blend of immigrants. (Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle)* --- **ON A BLAZING JULY** morning, downtown Hazleton slowly awakens as Shackel and two graduate students, Aryn Neurock Schriner of UMD and Aubrey Edwards of the University of Wyoming, begin their first interview for the oral history project, which is funded by a seed grant from the UMD College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Dean’s Research Initiative and in-kind support from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. > “I would like to be alive to see Hazleton working together. That’s my dream.” — Amilcar Arroyo, Luzerne County resident and Spanish-language magazine publisher The city is now 57% Hispanic and 39% white, and the main drags of downtown resemble something more like New York City’s Washington Heights or East Harlem neighborhoods in the early 2000s than a stereotypical vision of an aging coal town. There is still an Italian restaurant called Vesuvio’s and a law office with partners named Ustynoski and Marusak but they are dwarfed by Dominican cuisine, professional services advertising in Spanish and even a Latino religious supply store known as a botánica. The cultures mingle more easily in the office of Amilcar Arroyo, who came to the United States from Peru in the 1980s and publishes a Spanish-language magazine in Hazleton. He used to pick tomatoes and work in a phone book factory; today, a painting (below, background) of long-ago coal miners hangs behind his desk as a reminder of the region’s history. “They are my inspiration ... This is the Latino, but 100 years ago,” he says. “I would like to be alive to see Hazleton working together. That’s my dream.” *Amilcar Arroyo — Amilcar Arroyo (Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle)* **Issue:** [Fall 2022](https://terp.umd.edu/editions/fall-2022) **Types:** [Features](https://terp.umd.edu/category/features)