CONYNGHAM - The success of anthracite coal mining is based on the hard labor and sacrifices of men, boys and their families, according to a history provided by John Stuart "Stu" Richards on Thursday at a special celebration in Luzerne County.
Richards was the guest speaker at the 100th anniversary dinner meeting of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Section of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, which is a member society of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers. The Anthracite Section was founded Feb. 17, 1914, and is a group serving counties in central and eastern Pennsylvania. The celebration was held at the Valley Country Club near Conyngham.
Section Chairman Michael C. Korb, P.E., introduced Richards, Orwigsburg, author of six books, including "Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region," a member of the Schuylkill County Historical Society and is a member of The Breaker Boys.
"I'm the first in my family never to work in the mines. I had a real good childhood because I would go down in the holes with my uncles and watch them fire off shots, which I thought I was really cool," Richards said. "That ended when my mom found out. I've had a lot of opportunities to go in mines and see the actual work."
Richards said his main interest in mining deals with those men and boys who did the work in extracting the coal from the mines.
"My main interest in all of this is the people themselves, what they did and how they did it," he said. "Whether you would be in Kentucky or West Virginia or Pennsylvania, coal miners are a unique breed of people, a breed of people who never complained, who never harped about anything other than a fair day's pay for a fair day's amount of work, which is not a lot to expect when you're wanting to make your life a little bit better."
During Richards' talk, "Life Cycle of a Coal Miner," he mentioned a phrase that he didn't explain until the end of a presentation.
"I don't know if any of you have heard the phrase, 'Once a man, twice a boy,' but this is the life cycle of the anthracite coal miner up in our area here," he said.
He read the opening paragraphs of an article published in the August 1894 edition of McClure's Magazine called "In the Depths of a Coal Mine," written by Steven Crane.
"The 'breakers' squatted upon the hillsides and in the valley like enormous preying monsters, eating of the sunshine, the grass, the green leaves. The smoke from their nostrils had ravaged the air of coolness and fragrance. All that remained of vegetation looked dark, miserable, half-strangled. Along the summit line of the mountain a few unhappy trees were etched upon the clouds. Overhead stretched a sky of imperial blue, incredibly far away from the somber land.
"We approached the colliery over paths of coal dust that wound among the switches. A 'breaker' loomed above us, a huge and towering frame of blackened wood. It ended in a little curious peak, and upon its sides there was a profusion of windows appearing at strange and unexpected points. Through occasional doors one could see the flash of whirring machinery. Men with wondrously blackened faces and garments came forth from it. The sole glitter upon their persons was at their hats, where the little tin lamps were carried. They went stolidly along, some swinging lunch pails carelessly; but the marks upon them of their forbidding and mystic calling fascinated our new eyes until they passed from sight. They were symbols of a grim, strange war that was being waged in the sunless depths of the earth."
After reading the excerpt, Richards said, "To me, that is probably the best analogy or the best vision that you could ever have of growing up in the coal region of northeast Pennsylvania and seeing the breakers."
Richards' family had come from Wales to the United States, with many having experience in mining from the old country. Immigrants from many countries came later.
"They all started out basically the same way. When you came to a town or a little patch town, you worked for a company," he said. "At one point, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company would send trains to Philadelphia and New York to pick up any prospective people who would want a job full-time."
He said some people worked for the coal companies as employees, while others were contract miners. Richards said it is a fallacy that children as young as six worked in the mines.
"You could start in the breaker at age 7 or 8, depending on how strong you were," Richards said. "The first cycle is becoming the young man who entered the breaker and become what we all know as 'slate pickers,' 'red-tips,' 'breaker boys,' and anything of that nature ... You worked your butt off at that point as a child. This was before the child labor laws, but when they came out, they (companies) were able to get around that and letting the kids get back in there."
After a few years, the boy was able to go into the mine as the "door boy," who would open the doors when the coal cars pulled by the mules approached to go outside. While they waited, the door boys would carve "sprags" from wood that would be used to slow down the cars. Richards said another job for boys 9 to 11 years old was a "runner" or "spragger," who would run aside the cars and use the sprag by putting it into the spokes of the wheel to slow the car.
"Many of these kids tripped and fell in the darkened mines and had their arms and legs cut off," Richards said. "Casualties were enormous on this kind of a job."
As the boys got older, they graduated to becoming "driver boys," which Richards said was "the most coveted job in the mines for a young man. He's anywhere from 12 to 13 to 14 years old. This kid could chew tobacco, smoke cigarettes, spit, curse. His job was to take care of the mules. The mine mule was one of God's greatest creations upon the face of the Earth in my estimation. There should be a memorial to the mine mule for all the mules who worked in the mines. Extremely intelligent. They make it look like a horse has no brain whatsoever. They were very strong and very cantankerous."
At age 18, the boy could become a laborer if he wanted to.
"What does a laborer mean? It means you're going to do all the work. You're going to do all the loading. You're going to be building the chutes and the manways," Richards said. "You'll be doing everything that the miner doesn't want to do."
There were certain requirements for someone to become a miner.
"Two things have to happen to become a miner. The first, you have to prove yourself. Even back to 1872, you still had to have papers that qualified you as a miner," he said. "In order to become a miner, you had to be able to read, speak and understand the English language. That's not bad if you're Irish or Welsh, but what happens when you have all the Polish miners, the Italian miners, the Lithuanian miners? That's one of the reasons why you have so much dislike for the language disabilities today because these people learned the language to maintain their jobs, and 90 percent did, believe it or not. And by the way, the Reading company at the time had schools for the foreign people who worked in the mines to help them learn English so they could take their test to become a miner."
Richards said it was about age 25 or so when a man became a miner and would work two to four decades if all went well.
"A lot of things can happen in a mine in 20, 30 years of hard years," Richards said. "You could be injured, you could be killed or you could quit."
Richards said that those who worked for the many mining companies lived in what are called company towns and were paid in coal mining script, which was only good in the company stores, and lived in a house owned by the company. If a man was injured too severely that he could no longer work and he had no sons working in the company, he could find himself evicted in a couple of months.
In some cases, when an injured miner or laborer could no longer do his job but was still able to work in a limited capacity, he would be assigned the job done by the breaker boys as a slate picker.
"So, here you are, 63 years old, you're crippled up, you're gnarled up, your hands are broken, and here you are sitting with 8-year-olds again on the chutes running the coal," Richards said. "Hence, 'Once a man, twice a boy' is where that came about. I marvel at these people who did this. They are the most amazing people that I've ever met in my life."