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00:14 - - Anthropicite, hard coal, almost pure sulfur, the best coal, I can be found only

00:23 - in large, mineable quantities in Northeastern

00:26 - Pennsylvania, that 11-county area that corner up there.

00:30 - That is the first coal that was mined in the country.

00:33 - It fired the American Industrial Revolution of the 1820s and 30s and 40s

00:39 - because it was so near the Eastern Seaboard.

00:42 - And so those factories first used it and then of course the railroad took over.

00:46 - But by 1900, South Coal had sort of taken the lead

00:52 - because it was so much of it.

00:54 - It was coming in now from Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky and those states.

01:00 - So the hard coal region was settled

01:04 - by multi-ethnic groups, 26 different ethnic groups.

01:08 - It had a peak of about 165,000 workers in the 1920s.

01:14 - And that's a lot of workers.

01:17 - We've got a factory come in nowadays with 100 jobs and we're related.

01:22 - So we're talking about huge numbers of workers and that's just in mining,

01:28 - not counting trucking or allied industries like mining equipment or clothing.

01:35 - So there was a huge, huge industry with a lot of economic impact.

01:48 - It was extraordinarily dangerous.

01:52 - Anthracite experienced 35,000 deaths between approximately 1850 and 1950.

02:04 - That's about 3,500 deaths a year.

02:06 - And most of them were from not from major accidents

02:10 - although there were several major accidents.

02:13 - The largest accident, so to speak,

02:16 - an anthracite was the Avondale Mine disaster of 1869.

02:20 - Avondale Plymouth township who's there in County, were 110 men and boys,

02:27 - died two of them rescuers, but the 108 of them died from exphyxiation

02:34 - when a mine fire, a mine fire occurred in the breaker

02:39 - which sat over the shaft, sucked all the oxygen out and the 108 men mainly Welsh,

02:46 - one of the dominant immigrant groups at that time, mainly from Scranton, by the way.

02:51 - They were brought down on a regular basis, daily basis,

02:54 - on the train which could be between Hyde Park Scranton,

03:00 - the Welsh capital of America, and the end of the town of Avondale.

03:05 - But most of the deaths were caused by roof falls,

03:09 - two's and three's and four's kills a tremendous amount of men.

03:14 - Now, let me just add that you must add to that.

03:19 - The injury rate, there were many, many more than 35,000 at 100 year period

03:26 - who were injured from various kinds of accidents, from premature explosions

03:33 - because you had to blow the coal off the face

03:37 - with black powder at first and then dynamite.

03:41 - As my colleague Bill Hasty, who lived to 101 and died fairly recently,

03:48 - Bill said that a coal mine has a million ways to kill a man.

03:53 - From the cage, the elevator breaking and sending 15, 20 men

03:59 - to the bottom of the shaft at 150 miles an hour,

04:03 - wiped out, we had those kinds of accidents.

04:07 - So, and finally, you have the specter of black lung,

04:14 - the miners' asthma, if you escaped,

04:19 - you know, the major accidents and the minor accidents

04:23 - is a pretty good chance you're gonna get miners

04:25 - as, but my own father, who worked in the mines

04:30 - around Swoyerville in Loserne County before World War II,

04:34 - and after World War II worked in the Harry E.

04:38 - Breaker in Swear'sville,

04:40 - whose coal bank is just now being hauled away

04:46 - and used, you know, in the cogent plants,

04:51 - he had asthma, he didn't have the worst kind,

04:54 - he had the second stage because he wore a kurtchief,

04:58 - he wore a wet kurtchief and took a lot of heat

05:01 - from it, from men, a lot of heat from the men.

05:04 - They tease them, you know, unmercifully, but he stuck with that,

05:09 - and consequently, he only had second stage, rather than the third stage,

05:14 - but anthracite bottom line was a very hazardous occupation,

05:21 - getting that coal out of the ground exacted a tremendous human toll.

05:40 - Andrew Carnegie, famous Pennsylvania,

05:45 - a born and Scotland, was an immigrant to this country,

05:51 - came over and worked in the railroads

05:53 - and then built a steel empire based around Pittsburgh in that area.

06:00 - In 1904, Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Hero Awards

06:06 - because he believed that people who do extraordinary things,

06:12 - heroic acts needed to be recognized in the US and Canada.

06:18 - So he established this fund, he would give the people a medal,

06:22 - the awardees, a medal, a beautiful Carnegie Medal,

06:28 - about, about yea big, a good size thing,

06:31 - and he proceeded, there's over 10,000 Carnegie medalists since 1904.

06:38 - Up those over 10,000, 40 were anthracite miners

06:46 - from the 11 county anthracite area of Northeastern PIA.

06:51 - We hunted those down, I say we, it was the anthracite heritage foundation,

06:58 - which is based in Wilkesborough, and we found these 40 and we decided

07:05 - as with our mission for the anthracite heritage

07:09 - foundation to somehow acknowledge them.

07:12 - Our goal, one of our goals, has been to acknowledge the individual mine worker.

07:21 - These heroes for us too, not just Carnegie,

07:25 - but who spent their lives underground feeding their families

07:30 - building the community, working to make it in this country.

07:37 - About 12, 13 years ago, the anthracite heritage foundation,

07:42 - cooperated with King's College, because King's College has its mission.

07:48 - It's in its founding papers that it was established,

07:53 - excuse me, by the Diocese of Scranton,

07:56 - in cooperation with the Holy Cross fathers of Notre Dame,

08:00 - fame to come in and educate the sons in the second half

08:07 - of the 1940s, the sons of the coal miners.

08:11 - Especially the Catholic sons of the coal miners.

08:15 - By 1900, the majority of the anthracite work

08:18 - for us was Catholic, because these Eastern

08:21 - and Southern Europeans were mainly Catholic.

08:25 - King's College had this mission, so we cooperated with them.

08:29 - They gave us a piece of property on public square in Wilkesbury, prime place.

08:35 - Next to their Ali, A-L-L-E-Y building,

08:40 - which houses one of their medical programs at King's,

08:46 - and we established the miners' park in there,

08:50 - and we recruited, we advertised, we promoted,

08:55 - send in your miners' name on these forms or on our website,

09:02 - and then give us 40 bucks, and we'll put that miners' name on the wall of honor

09:07 - in raised lettering of these plaques we have up

09:12 - there with about maybe a 200 names on each black,

09:16 - and we put them up in stages, as the names came in,

09:21 - we have 1,600 names up there.

09:23 - That was our first project, and the miners' park is a very nice place.

09:28 - It's very serene, it's very contemplative.

09:32 - We have markers of pavers in the floor,

09:36 - indicating the major disasters, like Avondale,

09:40 - like Knox in 1959, with a sesquahana flooded the mines,

09:47 - and a corrupt coal company, and a 12-men died.

09:50 - They're still in the river somewhere,

09:53 - and twin shafts in the Pittsburgh Junction area,

09:58 - terrible mining disasters.

10:01 - So that was our project over the past 10 years,

10:06 - and then, when we decided to do the Carnegie Heroes,

10:10 - we put up another marble monument with the names

10:17 - of the 40 miners' heroes on it.

10:22 - It's a beautiful monument, it was carved in Scranton, but the marbles from India,

10:27 - and we, Father Looney, the president of King's College,

10:32 - unveiled it on June 27th, in the miners' park.

10:37 - We had a 120, 115 people there, many of them family members of the heroes,

10:45 - 'cause we contacted them and invited them, and many others, who had their loved ones

10:52 - on the wall of honor over the past 10 years.

10:56 - So it was a very good commemoration,

11:01 - celebration of life, a celebration of bravery, a celebration of heroism,

11:06 - acknowledgement from the Carnegie Commission,

11:10 - because their director of communications came.

11:14 - So it was a very nice event.

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11:24 - - If you're from Northeastern Pennsylvania,

11:27 - you were somehow touched by the anthracite industry,

11:31 - and I think it's important to document this.

11:35 - We've documented it also.

11:36 - I have documented it through my books.

11:40 - I'm not the only one who's done stuff like this by any means.

11:44 - There's a lot of scholarship and a lot of interest,

11:47 - but it's still an effort, because are there any mineworkers left?

11:51 - There are some, but there aren't many left.

11:54 - So we're trying to preserve as much as we can.

11:57 - The owner is the same thing.

11:58 - We need to talk more and more to the owners

12:00 - of the mines to see what they were thinking.

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